This book analyses the competing power politics that exists between the three major Asian powers - China, India, and Japan - on infrastructural development across the Indo-Pacific. It examines the competing policies and perspectives of these Asian powers on infrastructure development initiatives and explores the commonalities and contradictions between them that shape their ideas and interests. In brief, the volume looks into the strategic contention that exists between China's "Belt and Road Initiative" (BRI; earlier officially known as "One Belt, One Road" - OBOR) and Japan's "Expanded Partnership for Quality Infrastructure" (PQI) and initiatives like the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC) and position India's geostrategic and geo-economic interests in between these two competing powers and their mammoth infrastructural initiatives.

A scan of recent conflicts indicates blurring lines between war and peace, state and non-state, regular and irregular and conventional and unconventional. The prevailing security environment is radically different from what it was even a decade ago. The probability of conventional conflict between states or groups of states has been steadily declining while, at the same time, sub-conventional conflict is gaining prominence. These small wars, or niggling wars as some have called it, have also been called hybrid, non-linear, gray zone, unrestricted and a plethora of such names. The ontological and epistemological enquiry of these terms is essential to understand if they allude to the same phenomenon through different frames. Are they the convention or an aberration? The book tries to fill this crucial research gap related to the changing character of conflicts in the strategic discourse in India.

This volume looks at the evolving gas market and the various players who influence it -- both as producers and consumers. However, some of the players, such as Australia and the new African producers, as well as Japan and South Korea, the two largest LNG consumers, have not been included as their approach tends to be more commercial than geopolitical in nature.