Balancing, Bandwagoning or Hedging? Independent Ceylon’s Reaction to Regional Hegemony

Shakthi De Silva

South Asian Survey, 2015, vol. 22, issue 2, 189-209

Abstract: The foreign policy of Ceylon under the premiership of D.S. Senanayake maintained a distinct alignment with its former coloniser Great Britain. The zenith of this relationship was the defence agreement which came into effect upon independence in 1948. Utilising the existing scholarship on neorealism and the concept of security dilemma, analysis of the reasons behind this strategic alignment exposes the threat perception Ceylon faced from its regional hegemon, India. This study surveys such threat perceptions faced by the island at the time of independence and argues that this led to a balancing strategy with Britain. It first locates Ceylon’s foreign policy employing the taxonomies of balancing, bandwagoning and hedging and then examines how Ceylon’s extra-regional alignment with the UK enabled her to eschew from a security dilemma with India.

Keywords: Balancing; bandwagoning; hedging; Ceylon; small states; Sri Lanka; foreign policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0971523117753929 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:soasur:v:22:y:2015:i:2:p:189-209

DOI: 10.1177/0971523117753929

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in South Asian Survey
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().