Category Archives: International Diplomacy
Raisina Files 2026: Identities, Contests, and Concerts
Editors : Samir Saran and Vinia Mukherjee
Editors’ Note
In an age of assertion, states rediscover their identity; where there is rivalry, they navigate contests; and amidst uncertainty, they must rediscover the skill and art of concert. The challenge before us today is not to erase differences but to orchestrate them: turning frictions into a negotiable framework, and competition into sound and effective cooperation. The old certainties of the post-Cold War era have frayed. Power is diffusing, alliances are shifting, and the architecture that once underpinned stability is strained by wicked rivalries, technological disruptions, and societal fragmentation. Nations are rediscovering sovereignty—whether over borders or bandwidth alike. Societies are renegotiating belonging, memory, and aspiration. The grammar of the global order is being rewritten in real-time.
This edition of Raisina Files is framed by a simple proposition: The world we are entering will not be defined by power alone, but by how identity shapes power, how contestations discipline ambitions, and how cooperation is reconstructed under stress. We present this notion in three sections.
The first section, The World, examines the theatres where contests are most visible—geopolitics, security frameworks, and the evolving geometry of power. From great-power rivalry to emerging-power agency, from deterrence to diplomacy, these essays explore how states navigate turbulence without surrendering their autonomy. They ask: Who sets the rules when rules themselves are contested? What forms of alignment endure when alignment is no longer ideological but transactional? And how do emerging actors convert flux into leverage?
The section opens with a piece by Dhruva Jaishankar, where he writes about the questions that United States (US) allies, partners, and competitors alike need to ask themselves of how much and to what degree they will accommodate, or hedge against, the US’s new approach to the world. “Navigating the multiple layers of US policy at this juncture remains important, in large part because the United States continues to wield tremendous international power.”
The second essay, by Stefania Benaglia, weaves for us Europe’s “moment of clarity”: “The question is no longer whether the EU must take greater responsibility for its own security; it is how Europe should do so, and at what political, economic, and societal cost.”
Europe is also the pivot of Rachel Rizzo’s article, which concerns itself with how the continent can reshape its defence relationship with India outside of formal alliances. She outlines a framework beyond “building legacy systems like tanks, ships, or fighter jets and building a massive export-import market.”
Marites Dañguilan Vitug takes us to the South China Sea, and makes a case for two plausible pathways by which Manila could leverage its ASEAN chairmanship to steer the grouping towards resolving territorial disputes with China: arbitration, and reframing the conversation on the dispute as a test of the international legal order—“a concern of existential proportions for all states in the region.”
The fifth essay, by Mahdi Ghuloom, is an exposition of the role of civil defence infrastructures in limiting the consequences of conflict and war. Still, he writes, as in the case of Israel, even such an effective defence model is not a substitute for credible deterrence.
Stormy-Annika Mildner then asks an oft-repeated question, “Should the WTO be written off?” She emphasises that while a return to the “old” WTO system is unrealistic, a rules-based trade order remains essential to make sure that smaller nations “are not sidelined in a global trading environment that is increasingly being dominated by power politics rather than rules.”
It is also “rules” that Arta Moeini convinces us to rethink—but not just those of trade—rather, of the entire paradigm with which we view the emerging world. It is a world, he writes, where we are not just rearranging global power, but reshaping political life “around deeper and older units of human association: civilisations. It signals the reassertion of cultural sovereignty, the revival of regional orders centred on spheres of interest, and the restoration of multiplicity as the natural condition of humanity.”
Itonde A. Kakoma closes this section with an indisputable argument, amidst the turbulence, for peace-making. “The challenge that confronts the international community is to define what a credible ‘Agenda for Peace’ entails in an era defined by fragmentation, polarisation, transactionalism, and war.”
The second section, The People, turns inward to the social contract. Power, after all, is meaningful only when it delivers welfare and well-being. In an era of disruptions—technological, economic, demographic—citizens demand dignity as much as growth. Trust in institutions, the resilience of communities, and equity in opportunity become strategic variables. These chapters probe whether states can remain competitive externally while remaining cohesive internally.
The first two essays take aim at the need for a “human-centric” shift to tech and AI. Christine Hine, in a piece that tells us stories about the promise of AI in smart healthcare, warns against a simplistic appreciation of where the faults of AI may lie. “The consequences of AI are not inherent within the technology, but occur through the value-laden choices that decide how and where AI should be deployed and by whom.”
Erin Watson then writes about how the digital shift has opened up opportunities for more women to take part in the economy. But does it also grant them dignity? Not automatically, she says; the need is for “governance choices that place women’s labour and social protection at the centre of the digital economy.”
Pavlina Pavlova sets her article in the backdrop of the societal benefits of technological advancement, and how digital transformation is a key to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. But the costs are plenty—among them loss of privacy, lack of safety, and fraud and exploitation. Securing digital ecosystems thus becomes, in itself, a value worth fighting for.
Amrita Narlikar writes about values, too—of both individuals (what we live by), and institutions (what diverse actors bring to the negotiating table). These values are just one of the multiple layers of Saṁskāra, a concept of Indic origin that can serve as both a theoretical lens and a compass for policymakers.
We close this section with an article by Arezo Kohistany, which zooms in on the imperative for BRICS+ countries to meet their basic growth needs. One answer, she proposes, is in the form of a development financing institution that can fill in where the typical development banks fall short.
The third section, The Commons, expands the lens to our shared spaces—planetary, digital, maritime, and financial. Climate change, biodiversity loss, fragile supply chains, and sustainability transitions expose the paradox of our time: sovereignty may be a national assertion, but survival is a collective task. The commons have never really been abstract ideals; they are battlegrounds of negotiation and, today, must become laboratories of cooperation. The question is not whether interdependence exists but how it can be governed.
Sara Roversi stuns us with some figures: Between 1961 and 2020, the total real value of global agricultural production increased nearly fourfold, outpacing world population growth—but in 2024, 8.2 percent of humanity were undernourished. The question therefore, she says, is not whether the world can grow enough calories, “but whether our institutions can redesign those systems fast enough to keep them viable, fair, and within planetary limits.”
Sustainability is also what Anusha Kesarkar Gavankar writes about in her essay on green ports. How can ports help economies achieve growth that benefits many? After all, nearly 40 percent of the global population live within 100 km of a coastline, and so it is the people who are central to sustainable port development.
Niven Winchester then writes about another endeavour to redefine infrastructure through sustainability. In his piece, he describes the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) as a regulatory tool to combat emissions leakage in global trade. In particular, he examines the potential impact on the countries of the Gulf region.
The last two essays transport us to the realm of our oceans—the vibrant ecosystems that feed billions of people, foster human development, generate economic growth and prosperity, secure energy supplies, and preserve ecological diversity. Liz Karan and Anindita Chakraborty remind us of the global scale and complexity of the challenges facing our oceans, and argue for continued trust in multilateral frameworks that can still give us pathways for international cooperation.
And Nancy Karigithu, in a piece that closes this volume, argues for targeted and sustained efforts to develop a more inclusive framework for sharing the benefits from ocean resources.
Together, these 18 essays that follow the three arcs of World, People, and Commons, reflect the tensions of our present day and what we can build for the future. Identities assert. Contests disrupt. Concerts must reconcile. The task before policymakers, scholars, and citizens alike is not to romanticise a vanished order nor retreat into insulated sovereignties. It is to craft frameworks where competition does not preclude cooperation, where welfare underwrites legitimacy, and where stewardship tempers ambition.
If the twentieth century was about constructing order, and the early-twenty-first tasked us to defend it, the coming decades will be about a massive reimagination. The future will not belong to those who deny contests, nor to those who weaponise identity without restraint. It will rightfully be claimed by those who can harmonise differences into durable arrangements—those who understand that stability is not inherited, but engineered.
This volume is an invitation to that engineering.
Read it here.
Raisina Files 2025 -The Reckoning: Regression or Renaissance?
Ed Samir Saran and Vinia Mukherjee
Editors’ Note
“later that night i held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt?
it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere.”
~ Warsan Shire
That there can be no peace without development is a universal truism. The two, perhaps the loftiest and noblest of human aspirations, are perpetually interdependent: Conflict impedes progress; and the lack of economic opportunity can contribute to conflict. Today, as humanity’s excesses wage a war on the planet—causing extreme weather events, food insecurity, threats to health, and massive displacements—both peace and development will be the casualties unless we turn around.
The Reckoning: Regression or Renaissance? confronts the many obstacles that come in the way of our pursuit of peace, progress, and sustainable development, and offers insights into our choices. It is indeed a moment of reckoning, and this collection of essays engages with the debates that are crucial to the decisions that we will have to make.
As if climate change has not been enough to bring the world to its precarious state, there is more. There is still no end in sight to either the war in Ukraine or the conflict in Yemen, and tensions continue to simmer in the Middle East and Indo-Pacific. The COVID-19 pandemic caused the biggest setback in poverty reduction in decades, economic inequities persist in many places, and demographic shifts and ageing populations are giving birth to even newer challenges.
Genevieve Donnellon-May sets her sights on the Pacific, which is facing the dual challenge of navigating great-power competition and addressing pressing domestic concerns. Ensuring economic development, security cooperation, and environmental sustainability will be keys to peacebuilding in the region.
If peace is the aim, one region that has long been haunted by its absence is Africa. Davis Makori reminds us not just of this fact—that, following a brief period of optimism, armed conflict continues to be the scourge of the continent—but more importantly, that it is the civilians who bear the brunt of the constant state of war. The imperatives for Africa are early-warning systems, community-focused protection mechanisms, and UN reform to address the fundamental imbalance in the global peace and security architecture.
Europe is another theatre of conflict, and the domestic nostalgia for a glorious era of peace and prosperity, now lost, has become more intense. Velina Tchakarova lists a litany of challenges impeding Europe’s rediscovering of its old self: declining birth rates and an ageing population; dependency on other countries for energy supply; and growing security threats.
Agatha Kratz tackles the subject of Europe too, this time in the context of its relationship with China. Brussels and other member state capitals are showing a “newfound activism” against China, including launching trade defence cases and tightening investment rules. In the coming days, while EU-China relations could stabilise, there will still be no meaningful change in bilateral ties.
Kate O’Shaughnessy, in her piece, writes about the Indian Ocean region and how it looks much more unstable than it did only a decade ago. For the international community to engage meaningfully in the region and create an impact, it must include the voices of island states and address the issues that matter most to them—climate change, maritime domain awareness, regional economic integration, and human capacity building.
Listening to what small and developing states have to say will be critical, because in many ways, the Global South will be the fulcrum of change.
In global governance of healthcare, for example, the year opened with pivotal shifts as the United States withdrew from the World Health Organization, provoking uncertainty about global health security, disease control efforts, climate resilience programmes, and pandemic preparedness. Ayoade Alakija, however, in her essay, sees the opportunity: the disproportionate power the US is ceding may now be re-distributed, and emerging economies of the Global South should increase their agency and autonomy.
The Global South will also need to step up in the area of international trade, where South-South cooperation can help these countries compete on equal footing with the Global North. For Kekeli Ahiable, expanding access to markets will create growth that in turn can pull over 700 million people in developing economies out of extreme poverty.
Part of the trade imperative for the Global South is to gain access to low-carbon technologies to accelerate the energy transition—a task that is complex, as Lydia Powell writes. Efforts to nurture a low-carbon future must balance the emphasis on mitigation with the adaptation needs of the Global South, while considering their right to human well-being, often neglected in North-led prescriptions for climate change.
Mannat Jaspal also examines themes around energy transitions, and writes that, while the proportion of fossil fuels in the energy mix will decline, they will not disappear entirely even in net-zero scenarios. A key to decarbonising is technology—and there’s the rub: The gap between the required deployment of low-carbon technologies and current patterns is significant, and of the technologies that need to be deployed by 2050, the best results so far are primarily in less complex and more commercially viable applications.
Technology is also key in the domain of quantum research, the subject of a contribution by Linda Nhon and Andreas Kuehn, written in the context of the race between the United States and China. As the new Trump administration prepares to define policies that will shape the US science and technology leadership trajectory in the next four years and beyond, it needs a clear vision of how the country can reach quantum superiority.
Technological imperatives are similarly present in the domain of Artificial Intelligence (AI), the subject of an exposition by Trisha Ray. She notes that building and deploying AI at scale requires capital, infrastructure, and manpower that right now, only highly centralised entities like tech giants and rich governments can marshal. She gives us four models for how states will likely nurture ‘sovereign AI’, or AI that uses a country’s own resources.
While the subjects of quantum computing and AI may be relatively new, what we have been tackling for some years now are the challenges posed by the proliferation of social media and its use for malicious activities. Anulekha Nandi and Anirban Sarma discuss the perpetual dilemma in the governance of social media—once not too long ago heralded as the ‘public sphere’ ideal: finding the sweet spot between free speech and security.
This same dilemma finds its place in the gargantuan task of counterterrorism. Naureen Chowdhury Fink, in her essay, explores the intersection of technology, gender, and counterterrorism. She uses the case of ISIS and how it used gendered narratives in its search for legitimacy during the years of building its ‘caliphate’, and underlines the importance of considering this nexus when crafting sustainable and effective prevention and response strategies.
Two other geographies that we cover in this volume are Latin America and the Arctic. Dawisson Belém Lopes writes that even as China’s economic footprint may be expanding across Latin America, US hegemony remains palpable. More importantly, however, countries in the region are navigating the US-China power struggle “with pragmatic ambivalence” while maintaining their diplomatic approach.
And what of the so-called “great game” in the Arctic—home to vast reserves of energy sources and rare-earth minerals as well as important trade routes? Alexander Sergunin and Valery Konyshev surmise that the Arctic players, motivated by their common interests, will likely work to resolve their tensions not by force but through negotiations and arbitration.
We close the journal with the question of how we can have meaningful reforms in current international financial institutions. Karim El Aynaoui, Hinh T. Dinh, and Akram Zaoui argue that what is needed is a “paradigm shift” in the relationship between these institutions and developing countries. Rather than relying primarily on international assistance, developing nations should leverage technical expertise to mobilise private capital—both foreign and domestic—for development. In turn, IFIs must prioritise technical assistance, institution-building, and private capital mobilisation to help countries achieve sustainable and resilient growth.
Each of the 16 essays in this volume gives us enough to mull on where we want to head next. The reckoning will not just be about who gets to mine the Terbium in the Kvanefjeld plateau of Greenland, or whether or not China succeeds in claiming the Scarborough Shoal. It is about entire island states that will disappear; the millions in Africa who have been dependent on UN humanitarian assistance for 20 years. Our sound judgement is being called upon not just for the ‘great games’ but for the every single day: Do we keep hurting and wither, or do we create a new era?
Read the journal here.
Technology: Taming – and unleashing – technology together
Innovative approaches will require regulatory processes to include all stakeholders.
Technology has long shaped the contours of geopolitical relations – parties competed to outinnovate their opponents in order to build more competitive economies, societies and militaries. Today is different. With breakthroughs in frontier technologies manifesting at rapid rates, the question is not who will capture their benefits first but how parties can work together to promote their beneficial use and limit their risks.
The challenge: benefits of frontier technologies may be compromised by inequities and risks
The prolific pace of advancement of frontier technologies – artificial intelligence (AI), quantum science, blockchain, 3D printing, gene editing and nanotechnology, to name a few – and its pursuit by a multitude of state and non-state actors, with varied motivations, has opened a new chapter in contemporary geopolitics. For state actors, these technologies offer a chance to gain strategic and competitive advantage, while for malicious nonstate actors, these technologies present another avenue to persist with their destabilizing activities.
Therefore, emerging technologies have added another layer to a fragmented and contested global political landscape. Besides shaping geopolitical dynamics, they are also transforming commonly held notions of power – by going beyond the traditional parameters of military and economic heft to focus on states’ ability to control data and information or attain a tech breakthrough as the primary determinant of a state’s geopolitical influence.
These technologies also have significant socioeconomic implications. By some estimates, generative AI could add the equivalent of $2.6 trillion to $4.4 trillion to the global economy and boost labour productivity by 0.6% annually through 2040.14 Yet, simultaneously, the rapid deployment of these technologies has sparked concerns about job displacement and social disruption. These dynamics are triggering new geopolitical alignments as states seek to cooperate or compete in developing and using new technologies.
As frontier technologies take centre stage in global politics, they present a new challenge for international diplomacy.
As frontier technologies take centre stage in global politics, they present a new challenge for international diplomacy. What can states do to stem the proliferation of frontier dual-use technologies in the hands of malicious actors who intend to cause harm? Can states look beyond their rivalries to conceive out-of-the-box solutions, or will they always be playing a catch-up game with tech advancements? What role behoves the United Nations-led multilateral frameworks regarding the global governance of these technologies, or will plurilateralism and club-lateralism trump it?
A new approach for governing frontier technologies
The historical evolution of global tech regimes offers important lessons for the challenges posed by frontier technologies today. During the Cold War, industrialized nations established export control regimes, such as the Nuclear Suppliers Group and the Missile Technology Control Regime, that sought to exclude certain countries by denying them several dual-use technologies. Those control regimes proved successful in curbing tech proliferation. However, with changing geopolitical realities, the same regimes began extending membership to previously excluded countries. This approach offers a vital lesson: shedding the initial exclusivist approach in favour of extending membership helped to retain the regimes’ legitimacy.
Secondly, while the multilateral export control regimes succeeded, the nuclear non-proliferation regimes performed sub-optimally as they amplified the gap between nuclear haves and have-nots. This triggered resentment from the nuclear have-nots, who sought to chip away at the legitimacy of the regimes.
The key lesson for today is that the success of any tech-related proliferation control efforts is contingent on not accentuating existing technology divisions between the Global North and South.
The UN-led multilateral framework has focused on enhancing global tech cooperation through initiatives like the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation. However, while there has been little substantive progress at the global, multilateral level, bilateral and minilateral tech cooperation has thrived. Groupings such as the Quad, AUKUS and I2U2 that focus on niche tech cooperation present a possible model pathway forward.15 They have demonstrated the value of like-minded partners coming together to realise a common vision and ambition. These arrangements also suggest that even as the UN-led multilateral frameworks attempt to grapple with frontier technologies, minilaterals may provide the starting point for collaboration to address frontier technologies’ advancement.
To ensure that efforts at tech regulation succeed, countries will be required to undertake innovation in policy-making, where governments take on board all the stakeholders – tech corporations, civil society, academia and the research community. The challenge posed in recent months by generative AI through tools like deep fakes and natural language processing models like ChatGPT has shown that unless these stakeholders are
integrated into policy design, regulations will always be afterthoughts.
How to strengthen tech cooperation
The following are four proposals for strengthening global cooperation on frontier technologies:
– Develop the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) framework for emerging technologies: Similar to the R2P framework developed by the UN for protecting civilians from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity, the international community must create a regulatory R2P obligation for states to protect civilians from the harms of emerging technologies. This obligation would entail three pillars: 1) the responsibility of each state to protect its populations from the emerging technologies’ misuse, 2) the responsibility of the international community to assist states in protecting their populations from the emerging technologies’ misuse, and 3) the responsibility of the international community to take collective action to protect populations when a state is manifestly failing to protect its own people from the emerging technologies’ misuse. The specific measures that are needed will vary depending on the specific technologies involved and the risks that they pose.
– Design a three-tier “innovation to market” roadmap: States must ensure responsible commercial application and dispersion of new technologies. One critical step towards this is for states to design a three-tiered tech absorption framework comprising a regulatory sandbox (pilot tested in a controlled regulatory environment for assessing collateral impact), city-scale testing and commercial application.
– Convene a standing Conference of the Parties for future tech: The Global South must convene a standing Conference of the Parties (COP) for future technologies along the lines of COP for climate change negotiations. This body would meet on an annual basis where the multistakeholder community – national governments, international organizations and tech community – will deliberate on new tech developments, present new innovations and reflect on related aspects of the dynamic tech ecosystem and its engagement with the society and communities.
– Link domestic innovation ecosystems: Inter-connected national innovation ecosystems will ensure that like-minded countries can pool their finite financial, scientific and technological human resources to develop technologies. For instance, in the field of quantum science, the European Commission’s research initiative, the Quantum Flagship, has partnered with the United States, Canada and Japan through the InCoQFlag project. Likewise, the Quad has the Quad Center of Excellence in Quantum Information Sciences. This underlines the importance of prioritizing one of the frontier technologies and networking domestic innovation ecosystems to focus on its development, as no country alone can harness the deep potential of frontier technologies and mitigate the associated risks.
Technology as a tool of trust
Throughout history, technology has been the currency of geopolitics. New innovations have bolstered economies and armies, strengthening power and influence. Yet, technology has also served as an opportunity to bind parties closer together. Today, at a time of heightened geopolitical risks, it is incumbent on leaders to pursue frameworks and ecosystems that foster trust and cooperation rather than division.
This essay is a part of the report Shaping Cooperation in a Fragmenting World.
Samir Saran 