The thesis focuses on non-alignment in the context of the Indian state in the years when Jawaharlal Nehru was Prime Minister (1947-1964). The central argument of the thesis is that non-alignment can be theorized and studied as an approach to security, particularly the critique, discourse and practice of it. The opening chapters discuss this argument in detail – the first chapter is a review of the literature and the second chapter is an extensive discussion of the critique of the nation-state and the idea of the international within the conceptualization of non-alignment. These ideas are further investigated by discussing the Indian response to four international events – the Korean War, the Suez Canal Crisis, the Hungarian Revolution and the Congo Crisis. These events are studied in three chapters. The thesis is bookended by an introduction and a concluding chapter. The narrative uses material from six different archives in India, the UK and the US. As the events studied all took place in the 50s and 60s, the thesis has relied very heavily on historical analysis. The use of rare archival material aims to contribute to the writing of India’s diplomatic history (for instance, correspondence between Budapest and Delhi on the Hungarian Revolution, or the memoirs of India’s first Ambassador to the Congo and reports of the Indian representatives of the UN commissions during the Korean War). As all the chosen case studies are international events, the thesis contributes to the writing of India’s international history, India’s international relations and International Relations per se. The theoretical framework of the thesis has borrowed heavily from Critical Security Studies and also aims to contribute to that literature by bringing a non-Eurocentric viewpoint to it. The wider debates in the thesis also help redefine points of view on Indian foreign policy, particularly in respect to the significance and continued relevance of non-alignment to modern India.