In a paper titled Major Power Rivalry and Domestic Politics in South Asia, published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on 14 July 2025, Professor Paul Staniland argues that major power rivalry has returned to South Asia, making the region a central arena for geopolitical competition primarily involving China, India, and the US. The paper places particular emphasis on ‘swing states’ — states such as Nepal and Bangladesh, which have not explicitly aligned with any one significant power — and explores how major power competitions play out within these states.
Prof. Staniland highlights how the internal political divisions in swing states often do not align with the interests of major powers. In many cases, local leaders focus more on the domestic than the external, ignoring geopolitical competition.
The author develops a typology to understand how major power competition aligns with domestic political competition, arguing that swing states can exhibit insulation, consolidation, contestation, polarisation, or fragmentation vis-à-vis major powers. For example, contestation is when the government and the opposition in these states engage with major power rivalry; however, with changing and uncertain positions. The author provides multiple examples to illustrate these trajectories.
After laying out the above typology, Prof. Staniland provides three mechanisms to understand the drivers of close or loose alignment of external rivalries with domestic political competition. He calls these mechanisms ideological, embedding, and distributional. An ideological mechanism, for instance, is when domestic ideological divisions align with the competing ideologies of major power rivals. On the other hand, embedding is when local players use geopolitical competition for domestic political gains, even when the ideological link is unclear.
The paper brings the above framework to life through case studies, taking examples of states like Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka to show trajectories like contestation and consolidation in practice.
Towards the end, Prof. Staniland outlines the implications of his work for US foreign policy. He underlines that major power rivalry does not automatically become a central domestic issue, and policymakers should understand when and why foreign policy matters in domestic politics.
More importantly, the author says US policymakers should understand the unique political dynamics of these swing states and not treat bilateral relations with them as an extension of the US’s India policy. The US should carefully navigate its relations with these states, so as to neither alienate India nor appear to be merely echoing New Delhi’s positions in the region.
Finally, the author says the US’s physical distance from the region allows it to position itself as a friendly outsider — something it can capitalise on, given these states’ sensitivities to interference by their overbearing neighbours.