India’s growing role in regional and global security is reshaping its relationship with the United States and raising new questions about security across the Indo-Pacific. 

At Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC), the India-U.S. Security Initiative is expanding research on Indian and regional security while building connections among scholars and policymakers in India and the United States. Funded by the Motwani Jadeja Foundation, the initiative examines questions surrounding India’s foreign and defense policy, regional security and the strategic relationship between India and the United States. It also enables India researchers to interact with a broader set of security researchers at CISAC and helps train a new generation of scholars working on Indian and US security issues. 

Among the scholars contributing to this research is Arzan Tarapore, a research scholar at CISAC, whose current book project examines India’s strategic behavior and its implications for regional security.

“US leaders and planners have made a concerted effort to develop a military partnership with India, for several decades, and even when political relations have been rocky, as in the past year,” said Tarapore. “But these same US planners still have major misconceptions and blind spots about India’s strategic preferences and behavior.”

Through his book project, Tarapore aims to address these gaps in understanding and provide insights for security professionals and analysts in both countries.

“My book project seeks to shed light on India’s strategic compulsions and behavior, so that both American and Indian security professionals and analysts can better understand the limits and opportunities for India’s strategic role in the region,” he said.

Supporting the next generation of scholars

The India-U.S. Security Studies Fellowships are another component of the initiative focuses on supporting early-career scholars whose research focuses on Indian and regional security. Oppen to predoctoral and postdoctoral scholars and junior faculty, the fellowships support research on topics including Indian foreign and defense policy, U.S.-India-China security relations, nontraditional and sub-conventional security threats affecting South Asia, security in the Indo-Pacific, and the India-U.S. strategic partnership.

Fellows from fields including engineering, science, history and the social sciences receive one year of support to conduct research at Stanford and engage with CISAC’s interdisciplinary academic community. The program also provides opportunities for collaborative research in the United States and India.

During the 2025-26 academic year, two fellows, Dipin Kaur and Emily Tallo, joined CISAC through the program, pursuing research on questions of security and foreign policy involving India and the broader region.

During her time at CISAC, Dipin Kaur, an Assistant Professor of Political Science and International Relations at Ashoka University, worked on her book project Coethnic Counterinsurgents: Explaining Security Force Ethnic Composition in Wartime, examining how states make decisions about the ethnic composition of their security forces during internal conflicts, including when they recruit personnel who share ethnic or religious identities with insurgent groups. 

Emily Tallo, now a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, worked on her project titled Unmaking the Establishment: Leaders, Bureaucracies, and the Reorientation of Foreign Policy, which focuses on leader relations with bureaucracies in the foreign policy domain in India, Pakistan, Turkey and the United States.

For the 2026-27 academic year, CISAC has welcomed two India-U.S. Security fellows for the 2026-27 academic year, Nivedita Jhunjhunwala and Marc Reyes. Ph.D. Candidate in Government at the University of Texas at Austin, Nivedita Jhunjhunwala will spend her time at CISAC working on a project that examines how wartime conduct and violations of international law are perceived by foreign audiences. In doing so, she examines how global swing states, like India, balance their material preferences and obligations towards international law. 

“This work helps understand India's foreign policy, and has implications for future US-India relations, as well as great power competition, " said Jhunjhunwala.

Marc Reyes will be working on his project titled In the Circle of Great Powers: India and the Postcolonial Atomic State, 1947- 1974, which positions atomic energy as central to understanding India during the Cold War to today.

“The study is a political, diplomatic, and intellectual history of India’s atomic energy program and subsequent nuclear weapons program,” said Reyes. “It is informed by arguments that the world is entering a new nuclear age, facing all the challenges of previous eras and emerging issues like regional instability and new nuclear powers.” 

Investing in long-term expertise

Beyond individual research projects, the U.S.-India Security Initiative aims to develop a broader community of scholars with expertise in India, the Indo-Pacific and the relationship between India and the United States.

By supporting scholars early in their careers and connecting them with researchers and practitioners across disciplines, the initiative, in partnership with the Motwani Jadeja Foundation, seeks to build sustained expertise that can contribute to future research, policy discussions and education surrounding India and regional security.