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Despite having differing foreign policy objectives against the core Indo‐Pacific fundamentals, Prime Minister Modi is constructing a robust, proactive, and influential role of India in the Indo‐Pacific region without formally aligning with the United States or gesturing for any confrontational behavior against China. To unfold India's Indo‐Pacific positioning, this paper asks how India behaves between the United States and China in the Indo‐Pacific. The authors argue that to address this, Modi's Indo‐Pacific strategy revolves around Pragmatic Balancing between the United States and China in the Indo‐Pacific. The paper highlights Modi's Indo‐Pacific ambitions to explore this pragmatic balancing, keeping in view the US Indo‐Pacific strategy. To deal with the United States on the geostrategic front, ensuring maximum strategic autonomy and building India's maritime security order in the Indian Ocean region are Modi's crucial policy outlooks. On the other hand, to deal with China on the geo‐economics front, maintaining the maritime economy's flow, thereby preventing any confrontational behavior with China on multilateralism, is the critical component of Modi's Indo‐Pacific strategy. The evaluation demonstrates Modi's pragmatism by redefining India's balancing behavior with the United States and China to achieve the desired foreign policy outcomes, before presenting the article's final conclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focusing on the resilience of distinctive local consumption cultures, this paper challenges some of the more sweeping claims that have been advanced in the name of ‘globalization’. Thinking about a ‘globalizing’ rather than a fully ‘globalized’ world encourages us to examine the deeply contested nature of the concept and to explore the geographically uneven nature of recent economic, political and cultural transformations. This paper approaches globalization as a site of struggle rather than as an established fact, emphasizing the need for empirically grounded studies of the impact of ‘globalization’ on consumer cultures in different geographical contexts. The paper examines the way that producers have ‘customized’ their products for different markets (drawing on evidence from China and South Africa). It then reviews case study evidence from three contrasting consumption cultures: consumption and ‘public culture’ in India, ‘consumer nationalism’ in China, and ‘artful consumption’ in Russia. The paper concludes by identifying some current debates and outlining some directions for future research, including a re-emphasis on consumption and material culture; an exploration of consumption as social practice; the delineation of commodity-specific consumption cultures; and some reflections on the political, ethical and methodological issues that are being raised in contemporary consumption research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]