41Received 24.12.2025. Revised 13.02.2026. Accepted 21.04.2026.
Abstract. The article examines the role of India’s expert and academic community in the national foreign policy formulation towards Central Asia. To determine the transformation of the relations between state institutions and intellectual community the authors apply neoinstitutional approach. The bibliometric method based on social network analysis (SNA) was used to identify the groups of influence, knowledge hubs and schools of thought. It helped to analyze the structure of socio-political discussions – to determine intellectual elites, the sources of mainstream discourse and counter-discourse, theoretical paradigms as well as marginalized academic communities. The main structural and conceptual limitations influencing the nature of Indian policy implementation were also identified. For these purposes a dataset of 356 academic publications written by Indian authors from 1991 till 2024, was compiled. Since the 1990s, the weight of the expert community in foreign policy formulations has increased. However, the political and economic elites showed no interest in developing relations with Central Asia, as India has faced a shortage of specialists in area studies. The increase in academic interest was largely driven by foreign policy factors, in particular the region’s growing importance in terms of international security, followed by the Indian government’s attempts to enhance its economic and political clout. The discourse during each of the main periods of India’s foreign policy was dominated by a certain research organization. In the early 2000s the center of narrative production was IDSA, then followed by JNU in the 2010s. Delhi remains the main center of scientific knowledge, but the role of regional institutions is driven primarily by the University of Kashmir. It forms the cluster of “Muslim universities” which study alternative topics, different from mainstream discussions. However, à number of conceptual limitations associated with a deficit of methodological and theoretical approaches is evident. Indian authors disregard the works of Pakistani and Chinese authors and tend to use realism as the main prism for analysis. Think tanks that receive political and financial support from the government do not pay attention to Central Asia, which is an important reason for the country’s lack of interest towards the region.
Keywords: India, Central Asia, social network analysis, academic and expert community, think tanks, bibliometric analysis
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