Brahma Chellaney

Why organisations work with Brahma Chellaney

• He named the concept boards and ministries now use to discuss Chinese lending. Debt-trap diplomacy entered the policy lexicon through his January 2017 Project Syndicate column and is now cited by three successive US administrations.
• He wrote the canonical book on Asian water security. Water: Asia’s New Battleground won the Asia Society’s Bernard Schwartz Award in 2012, ahead of nearly 90 other titles. For organisations with manufacturing, agricultural or infrastructure exposure across South and Southeast Asia, he treats water as a hard strategic variable, not a sustainability slide.
• He helped draft India’s nuclear doctrine in 1999 as convener of the National Security Advisory Board’s External Security Group. When directors ask what New Delhi is actually thinking on Pakistan, China or the Quad, they are getting analysis from someone who has sat in the room.
• His distribution is institutional. Project Syndicate, Nikkei Asia, The Japan Times, The Hill, with op-eds in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde and the South China Morning Post. The same readers who set strategy on Asia are reading him in primary sources.

Biography highlights

• Professor of Strategic Studies, Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi.
• Richard von Weizsacker Fellow, Robert Bosch Academy, Berlin; affiliate, International Centre for the Study of Radicalization, King’s College London.
• Former adviser to India’s National Security Council and convener of the External Security Group of the National Security Advisory Board.
• Author of nine books on strategic affairs, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press), Asian Juggernaut (HarperCollins) and Water, Peace, and War (Rowman and Littlefield).
• Winner of the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.
• Columnist for Project Syndicate, The Hill, Nikkei Asia and The Japan Times; visiting appointments at Harvard, Brookings, the Nobel Institute in Oslo, Johns Hopkins SAIS and the Australian National University.

Biography

Debt-trap diplomacy entered the language of Western policy in a single Project Syndicate column in January 2017. The author was Brahma Chellaney, writing on China’s Belt and Road lending. Within five years the phrase was being used by three successive US administrations, congressional committees and finance ministries across Asia and Africa.

That trajectory is the clue to what he offers. Chellaney works on the structural fault lines of Asia, Chinese statecraft, India’s strategic posture, and the contest over rivers that sustain nearly half the world’s population, and gives them names that policymakers can act on. The work is grounded in primary sources and in years inside India’s own strategic apparatus, where he served as adviser to the National Security Council and convened the External Security Group of the National Security Advisory Board that drafted India’s nuclear doctrine in 1999.

His books have set the terms of two distinct debates. Asian Juggernaut, published in the United States by HarperCollins in 2010, became a reference point for how China, India and Japan compete economically and militarily. Water: Asia’s New Battleground, published by Georgetown University Press, won the Asia Society’s Bernard Schwartz Book Award in 2012, beating nearly 90 other titles, and remains the canonical treatment of transboundary water risk in Asia. A follow-up, Water, Peace, and War, broadened the analysis to the global water crisis.

His current platform is institutional and global. He holds the Richard von Weizsacker Fellowship at Berlin’s Robert Bosch Academy, is affiliated with King’s College London’s International Centre for the Study of Radicalization, and has held visiting appointments at Harvard, Brookings, the Nobel Institute in Oslo, Johns Hopkins SAIS and the Australian National University. His columns run in Project Syndicate, Nikkei Asia, The Japan Times and The Hill, with op-eds in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde and the South China Morning Post. For boards wrestling with China exposure, water-stressed supply chains, or the strategic logic of the Indo-Pacific, he is one of the very few analysts whose framing tends to be cited back to them by their own regulators.

Key speaking topics

• China’s strategic statecraft and debt diplomacy
• The Indo-Pacific power balance and the rise of Asia
• India’s foreign and security policy
• Transboundary water risk and resource geopolitics
• Asian supply chain and infrastructure exposure
• Nuclear and security dynamics in South Asia
• Great-power competition and the fracturing global order

Ideal for

• Boards and executive committees with material exposure to China, India or the wider Indo-Pacific
• CEOs, CSOs and government affairs leads reassessing political risk and country exposure
• Infrastructure, utilities, agriculture and manufacturing leaders facing water-related operational risk in Asia
• Investor and policy forums focused on geopolitical risk and capital allocation

Audience outcomes

• A working vocabulary for Chinese economic statecraft, including the original mechanics of debt-trap diplomacy
• A sharper read on how Beijing, New Delhi and Tokyo each calculate strategic risk, and where their interests collide
• A defensible view of where transboundary water disputes are likely to disrupt supply chains, agriculture and infrastructure
• A clearer sense of what India’s foreign and security policy is, beyond Western reporting of it
• Frames for board-level conversations on Asia exposure that hold up under scrutiny from policy and regulatory readers