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Italy’s quiet pivot to the Indo-Pacific: Towards an Italian Indo-Pacific strategy

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Published date01 November 2024
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/01925121231190093
AuthorGabriele Abbondanza
Date01 November 2024
https://doi.org/10.1177/01925121231190093
International Political Science Review
2024, Vol. 45(5) 669 –679
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/01925121231190093
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Italy’s quiet pivot to the Indo-Pacific:
Towards an Italian Indo-Pacific
strategy
Gabriele Abbondanza
University of Sydney, Australia
Complutense University of Madrid, Spain
Istituto Affari Internazionali (IAI), Italy
Abstract
Italy is the only ‘Big Four’ European country and ‘Quint’ North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
member ostensibly uninterested in the world’s geopolitical and geoeconomic epicentre. However, a
number of developments contradict the assumption that Rome overlooks the importance of the Indo-
Pacific. By analysing official policies, naval deployments, new partnerships and evolving trajectories, this
article reveals that Italy’s strategic engagement with the Indo-Pacific is already significant and unfolding
under three broad areas: (a) economy; (b) security; and (c) norms. It then assesses the benefits and risks
of this developing foreign policy, and argues that the former outweigh the latter, a condition which is
conducive to the establishment of an official Italian Indo-Pacific strategy. As the first scholarly work on the
Italian role in the Indo-Pacific, this research makes a novel contribution to the literature on both Italian
foreign policy and the Indo-Pacific security landscape, by investigating a complementary approach to that
of existing Indo-Pacific strategies.
Keywords
Asia-Pacific, cooperation, diplomacy, European foreign policy, Indo-Pacific, Italian foreign policy, Italian
Indo-Pacific strategy, Italy, norms, trade
Introduction
The international affairs of the 21st century are strongly characterised by the nexus between geo-
political and geoeconomic concerns, a condition that is effectively represented by the gradual shift
from the Asia-Pacific to the Indo-Pacific. In an increasingly multipolar system, where power strug-
gles, challenges to the international law and weaponised economic interdependence occur in this
macro-region more frequently than elsewhere, a number of states and institutions have focused on
the Indo-Pacific as the new epicentre of global affairs. Among the many, Italy’s own recent pivot
Corresponding author:
Gabriele Abbondanza, University of Sydney, Social Sciences Building (A02), Sydney, 2006, Australia.
Email: gabriele.abbondanza@sydney.edu.au
1190093IPS0010.1177/01925121231190093International Political Science ReviewAbbondanza
research-article2023
Symposium: Europe in the Indo-Pacific: Promoting values
and interests in a contested region

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