Sri Lanka between India and China: A Neoclassical Realist Analysis of President Rajapaksa's and President Sirisena's Contrasting Foreign Policies (2005-2019)

Abstract

The decline of United States (US) hegemony and the rise of China and other regional powers have caused a global geopolitical shift from unipolarity to multipolarity. This shift has amplified South Asian regional power competition and created strategic incentives for small powers to shift from bandwagoning to balancing in foreign policy. This thesis discusses the role of systemic and domestic factors during the presidencies of President Mahinda Rajapaksa (2005-2015) and President Maithripala Sirisena (2015-2019) in an attempt to understand the rationale behind Sri Lanka’s strategic foreign policy decisions. The thesis attempts to understand the interplay between international systemic influence and domestic variables by employing the Neoclassical Realism Type III model (hereafter Type III model) introduced by Ripsman, Taliaferro, and Lobell (2016). Their model is used to assess the causal links between dependent variables (foreign policy outcomes), intervening variables (domestic factors) and independent variables (international systemic stimuli) related to Sri Lanka’s decisions related to the use of land and port resources by India, China, and the US. The findings of the present study led to two main conclusions. In 2005-2015, systemic stimuli profoundly influenced President Rajapaksa’s perceptions. Rajapaksa’s perceptions were influenced by the shifting power balance and by Sri Lanka’s traditional non-aligned policy. Rajapaksa subsequently formed the strategic notion of shifting from a neighbourhood-centred policy to the so-called Wonder of Asia policy, a broader concept. President Rajapaksa advanced his grand strategic formation by endeavouring to strengthen Sri Lanka’s strategic posture in the South Asian power theatre by shifting diplomatic and economic emphasis from India to China from 2005 to 2015. During the President Sirisena era, Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe emerged as the key foreign policy decision-maker by sidestepping President Sirisena, despite the constitutional foreign policy-making supremacy of the presidency. Domestic variables, including Wickremesinghe’s perceptions, state strategic cultures (non-aligned policy and the Rebalancing Asia policy), social opposition, and domestic institutions mediated the international systemic stimuli. While attempting a balancing foreign policy strategy, President Sirisena’s regime inadvertently deepened dependence on China. Overall, the findings suggest that the respective leaders’ perceptions dominated the other three unit-level variables – strategic culture, state-society relations, and domestic institutions. This thesis also illustrates how a complex series of foreign and domestic policy decisions can be presented in a simplifying framework, in this case the Ripsman version of Neoclassical Realism.