Abstract

India’s accelerating international influence underscores the need for an indigenous theoretical architecture in international relations that is conceptually rigorous and empirically tractable. This paper synthesizes civilizational foundations, strategic multi-alignment, developmental realpolitik, and societal-networked power into a unified paradigm that explains India’s behaviour in a multiplex world order. First, it theorizes civilizational strategic culture rooted in plural constitutionalism, dharmic ethics, and long-run political economy as a source of legitimacy, restraint, and preference formation. Second, it formalizes multi-alignment as a rational equilibrium for hedging and issue-specific coalitioning, specifying conditions for minilateralism, forum shifting, and variable-geometry partnerships across security, technology, climate, and trade regimes. Third, it endogenizes domestic transformation, industrial policy, digital public infrastructure, energy transition, and human-capital upgrading as drivers of external bargaining power and standards-shaping capacity. Fourth, it conceptualizes societal power as a distributed capability encompassing diaspora networks, multilingual cultural industries, standards entrepreneurship, and platformed state capacity, with measurable effects on agenda-setting and norm diffusion. Fifth, it advances normative pluralism as a rule-making stance that prioritizes interoperable standards, equity in access to growth corridors, and contextual universals over rigid harmonization. The framework yields falsifiable implications for coalition patterns, supply-chain repositioning, and standards diplomacy, and proposes a mixed-methods research design process tracing, network analysis, input–output/GVC analytics, and text-as-data to evaluate scope conditions and external validity. By integrating civilizational continuities with contemporary geoeconomic and security statecraft, the paper offers a portable, Indigenous paradigm capable of guiding both scholarly inquiry and policy design across the Global South.

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