Ever since China has formally joined the WHO-backed global COVID-19 vaccine initiative known as COVAX, there is a presumed notion that China's vaccine diplomacy will make a significant contribution to the international public good and thus uplift Beijing's role as the rule-maker of international order. To scrutinize this, the paper asks if China succeeded in proliferating its weaponized vaccine policy to obtain maximum diplomatic gains and soft power projection to intensify its international image, geopolitical power, and domestic politico legitimacy. The authors argue that despite its vaccine diplomacy demonstrated the robust governance capacity and responsibility to be a great power. Yet, Beijing's geopolitical influence and international image are significantly overrated and not enough to play a more prominent role in the global power fulcrum/equilibrium. On the contrary, China enjoys a leading position on the domestic political front. Its successful portrayal of China's vaccine provision in the global market and remarkable configuration to leverage a deep-rooted nationalism has fundamentally provided China with a powerful rationale to divert its public's attention from Beijing's earlier inadequate handling of the outbreak. The evaluation of the paper reveals that China's vaccine diplomacy's influence in promoting international image and geopolitics is limited but has successfully stabilized its domestic political environment and enhanced its domestic legitimacy.

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By looking at the institutional settings of SCO, it is believed that this organization has a huge potential to maximize cooperation and minimize conflicts among the member states. Founded under the leadership of Russia and China, SCO extended not only the opportunities and roadmaps for promoting bilateral trade and security collaborations of the mentioned countries but also helped promoted regional integration across Central and South Asian states. To further analyze the viability of this platform, this article seeks to evaluate the emergence of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization from a 'security institution to a multilateral organization' perspective. It will further examine SCO's role in promoting regional peace and stability and finally elucidate how far the inclusion of new members like Pakistan and India can utilize the magnitude of SCO to mitigate their tensions.

Despite having differing foreign policy objectives against the core Indo‐Pacific fundamentals, Prime Minister Modi is constructing a robust, proactive, and influential role of India in the Indo‐Pacific region without formally aligning with the United States or gesturing for any confrontational behavior against China. To unfold India's Indo‐Pacific positioning, this paper asks how India behaves between the United States and China in the Indo‐Pacific. The authors argue that to address this, Modi's Indo‐Pacific strategy revolves around Pragmatic Balancing between the United States and China in the Indo‐Pacific. The paper highlights Modi's Indo‐Pacific ambitions to explore this pragmatic balancing, keeping in view the US Indo‐Pacific strategy. To deal with the United States on the geostrategic front, ensuring maximum strategic autonomy and building India's maritime security order in the Indian Ocean region are Modi's crucial policy outlooks. On the other hand, to deal with China on the geo‐economics front, maintaining the maritime economy's flow, thereby preventing any confrontational behavior with China on multilateralism, is the critical component of Modi's Indo‐Pacific strategy. The evaluation demonstrates Modi's pragmatism by redefining India's balancing behavior with the United States and China to achieve the desired foreign policy outcomes, before presenting the article's final conclusion.