At the centre of my research are India's foreign policy, domestic politics, and political economy, including:

national and state elections, the evolution of the Indian party system and, within that, of the Hindu nationalist political family;the prospects and politics of India's economic reforms, industrial policies, growth trajectory, and demographic dividend;and India's foreign relations within the South Asian region and the Indo-Pacific, its role and interests regarding the Sino-U.S. great power competition, its desired role as a leading voice of the 'Global South', and its relations with the European Union and individual European states.  

My area of research includes great power dynamics and the balancing behaviour of secondary powers in the changing 21st century international system, with particular focus on how second-tier powers in the Asia/Indo-Pacific region (especially India) behave amidst the emerging Sino-U.S. systemic competition. On this research problem I generally apply a Neoclassical Realist theoretical framework that takes shifts in the relative distribution of power between nation states as the primary independent variable behind outcomes in international politics, but also employs intervening variables such as leader perceptions, strategic cultures, or domestic institutional arrangements, as factors that mediate how the independent variable affects state behaviour.