Globalisation and market reforms have made foreign policymaking a more inclusive and multilayered process. Para-diplomacy and emergence of empowered federating/component units engaging in international interaction call for recalibration of theories and understating of International Relations. The debate over central control versus unit autonomy raised the concern: whether para-diplomacy will turn out to be an asset or a threat for the sovereign state. While state may reap benefits of economic development, para-diplomacy may yet lead to regional imbalance, ethnic mobilisation and separatism. With the focus being shifted to Asia with respect to expanding market and sphere of influence, this article analyses the experience of para-diplomacy between India and China as well as of both with the USA. In doing so, reference is drawn to the past experiences of the West to understand how para-diplomacy took root and how is it practised in different contexts. Considering the economic, political and social implications of para-diplomatic practices in specific contexts, the article concludes with an attempt to find out the institutional space it may tread and the policy options it may hold out especially for India.

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China has been investing considerable financial as well as intellectual resources for strengthening, improving, and maintaining its defense establishment. The Chinese military establishment continues to constantly keep itself abreast of advances in both technology and tactics. However, China’s race for arms and the urgency with which it wants to acquire competence in weapons technology are matters of serious concern for its big and small neighbors, not only those with many of whom it has territorial and maritime disputes but also countries of the Asia-Pacific region like Australia and the USA. It remains to be seen how far China, despite its race for arms and competence, is able to convince its neighbors and the world that its rise would indeed continue to be peaceful. In this backdrop, this article tracks the evolution of Chinese military policy in the recent years in terms of strategies, structures, finances, and development, and identifies the weaknesses of the military establishment. It attempts to understand China’s race for arms in the light of the significance of realist thought in understanding world politics.

This article offers a concise, though not exhaustive, intellectual history of International Relations (IR) as a formal academic discipline. It begins with the backdrop of the discipline's emergence in the aftermath of World War I, and a critical account of the 'first wave' of theoretical activity, that is, idealism. This entailed a sharp onslaught in the form of the rise of realism which arguably transformed IR into an 'American' discipline which, the author feels, was good for neither realism nor IR as a discipline. This brings us to the methodological debate-known as the second great debate in IR-between the traditionalists and the behavioralists, and the author asks if it was only a 'phoney war'. The period between the 1960s and early 1990s witnessed a bewildering multiplicity of theoretical developments and analytical concerns which ranged from game theory and decision-making models; through integration theory and 'world society' approaches; to the birth of neo-or structural realism. Meanwhile, the Marxist school of IR focused on the vital issue of the relations between the weak and strong in international politics-left unaddressed by the 'American discipline'-and stimulated the literature on dependency and world system. The final sections of the article deal with the post-positivist tradition in IR (which sparked off the 'third debate') and the level-ofanalysis problem (which highlighted the issue of macro-and micro perspectives in the study of IR). It concludes with the observation that this phenomenal diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches poses a major obstacle to agreeing on any grand definition of discipline of IR.

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