The Next Line of Defence: Building Data Embassies for Resilience

The Missing Layer in Twenty-First Century Continuity Strategy

Key Highlights

Data continuity is a strategic necessity, not an IT function. As governance, critical infrastructure, and economic activity become increasingly digital, resilience depends on preserving the systems that sustain the functioning of the state before crisis strikes.
Data embassies provide a strategic model for continuity before disruption occurs. Estonia institutionalised the concept after the 2007 cyberattacks, while Ukraine demonstrated under wartime conditions that preserving critical data is essential to maintaining the functioning of the state.
The next step is to treat trusted digital infrastructure as a strategic reserve. Reciprocal data embassies — and eventually shared computing capacity — would convert political trust into operational resilience, making digital continuity a cornerstone of twenty-first-century security.

The Imperative

Global trends and strategic foresight underscore the imperative of preparing for future crises. As states and societies become increasingly digital, resilience is no longer defined solely by the protection of territory or physical infrastructure, but by the ability to preserve the digital systems that sustain governance, critical infrastructure, and economic activity. Data embassies should therefore be understood not as an IT contingency measure but as a strategic instrument of national resilience, ensuring the continuity of governance, essential public services, and critical societal functions when domestic digital infrastructure is compromised.

From a Theoretical Consideration to a Real-World Threat

In 2007, Estonia became the first state to experience a large-scale cyber campaign against its digital infrastructure. Coordinated cyberattacks disrupted government, banking, and media services, exposing a new strategic vulnerability: in a digital society, attacks on information systems can threaten the functioning of the state as seriously as attacks on physical infrastructure.

Fifteen years later, Ukraine confronted that vulnerability under wartime conditions. Days before Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022, Ukraine passed emergency legislation allowing critical government data to be stored outside the country. More than 10 petabytes of government and public-sector data were migrated to secure cloud infrastructure in early 2022, involving multiple ministries and state agencies. The effort relied on encrypted transfers and portable storage systems to relocate critical datasets outside Ukraine as the Russian invasion began. This large-scale migration played a key role in supporting the continuity of essential government functions under conditions of severe wartime disruption.

These two cases mark a turning point in how resilience should be understood. The lesson is not that digital states are inherently fragile, but that digital dependence requires strategic preparation. Estonia institutionalised this insight through the concept of the data embassy: legally protected digital infrastructure hosted on allied territory to ensure the continuity of critical state functions even if domestic systems are compromised. Ukraine demonstrated the same principle under fire, relying on rapid data migration to preserve the operational core of government.

The lesson is not that digital states are inherently fragile, but that digital dependence requires strategic preparation. Estonia institutionalised this insight through the concept of the data embassy: legally protected digital infrastructure hosted on allied territory to ensure the continuity of critical state functions even if domestic systems are compromised.

Today, critical organisations all depend on digital infrastructure whose disruption can cascade across society. Data centres, cloud platforms, networks, and the software stack that connects them have become strategic assets – and strategic targets. Whether the disruption stems from armed conflict, cyberattacks, natural disasters, sabotage, or systemic infrastructure failure, the imperative is the same: resilience depends on ensuring data continuity before crisis strikes. Data embassies offer one strategic model for achieving that continuity – not only for governments, but increasingly for the critical sectors upon which modern societies depend. They constitute a significant extension of international law for the digital realm. The Estonian data embassy, for example, builds on a data centre in Luxembourg. Under Estonian control, it enjoys similar rights as physical diplomatic embassies.

The How: Three Architectures for Digital Continuity

Data embassies should not be understood as a single institutional model, but as a continuum of resilience architectures that can be adapted to different threat environments, trusted relationships, and operational requirements. Three models illustrate an incremental pathway from data protection to full digital continuity.

The first model is continuity mirroring. Operationally critical, but not highly sensitive, datasets are continuously replicated to trusted infrastructure abroad. If domestic systems become unavailable, the replicated data provides a rapid foundation for recovery. Like a military exercise, continuity mirroring builds the technical and organisational capabilities required for more advanced forms of resilience.

The second model is the data embassy. Critical government systems are hosted in a treaty-based, legally protected environment on the territory of a trusted partner, following the framework pioneered by Estonia and Luxembourg in 2017. Rather than transferring control, bilateral agreements establish legal guarantees over designated infrastructure and data to ensure the continuity of essential state functions even if domestic infrastructure is compromised. The objective is not secrecy, but availability: preserving access to the digital systems on which governance depends.

The third model extends the concept from data to computation. Rather than safeguarding information alone, trusted partners reserve secure computing capacity that can be activated to run essential government or critical infrastructure workloads when domestic capacity is degraded or destroyed. This “shadow compute” model is largely conceptual for now, but it reflects the next logical step in resilience planning. This model demands the highest level of strategic trust — not merely the agreement to store data, but the commitment to run another state’s critical workloads under crisis conditions. No publicly known treaty-based shadow compute arrangement exists between major economies, yet the logic of strategic reserves makes the gap conspicuous. As governments invest in digital autonomy and strategic digital infrastructure, reserving a fraction of that capacity for trusted partners would create a digital equivalent of a strategic reserve – not of energy or fuel, but of computational capability.

As governments invest in digital autonomy and strategic digital infrastructure, reserving a fraction of that capacity for trusted partners would create a digital equivalent of a strategic reserve – not of energy or fuel, but of computational capability.

Importantly, none of these models requires the routine sharing of highly classified information. However, a degree of alignment between the data protection regimes of states entering into these models is necessary. The focus is on continuity-critical data and services: population registers, tax systems, emergency communications, and other digital assets essential to maintaining governance and societal resilience. The objective is not to export a state’s most sensitive secrets, but to ensure that governments, critical infrastructure operators, and the societies they serve can continue to function when strategic disruption occurs.

The objective is not to export a state’s most sensitive secrets, but to ensure that governments, critical infrastructure operators, and the societies they serve can continue to function when strategic disruption occurs.

The Strategic Imperative for Governments and Critical Industries

The strategic case for data embassies rests on a simple principle: assets essential to national continuity should never depend on a single point of failure in the long run. States have long stockpiled strategic commodities, dispersed military capabilities, and secured overseas basing rights to ensure continuity under crisis conditions. As governance, critical infrastructure, and economic activity become increasingly digital, the same logic applies to data and the digital infrastructure that sustains it. The objective is not to protect data because it is digital, but because its continued availability has become indispensable to the resilience of modern societies.

Estonia and Ukraine illustrate the cost of waiting for crisis before building resilience. Estonia translated the lessons of the 2007 cyberattacks into a long-term strategy for digital continuity, culminating in the world’s first treaty-based data embassy. Ukraine demonstrated the same principle under wartime conditions through the rapid migration of critical government data to secure infrastructure. Both cases reveal the same strategic lesson: resilience cannot be improvised at the speed with which crises unfold.

For governments, this means identifying the digital assets whose loss would compromise constitutional authority, public administration, or the delivery of essential public services.

The geopolitical implications extend beyond resilience. Strategic reserves have long transformed political trust into shared infrastructure. In 2026, India and the United Arab Emirates expanded their cooperation on strategic petroleum reserves, including reciprocal storage arrangements that strengthen both countries’ energy security. The principle is directly applicable to digital infrastructure: trusted partners can designate protected storage and computing capacity as strategic digital reserves, converting political trust into operational resilience.

The first formalisation of a reciprocal data embassy arrangement will do more than secure the respective countries’ own resilience — it will set the template for how digital infrastructure is shared, protected, and governed in the century ahead. That is not an IT decision. It is a strategic one.

To date, no publicly known reciprocal data embassy arrangement exists between two major economies. Establishing such partnerships would move data embassies from a niche solution developed by digitally advanced smaller states to a foundational element of twenty-first-century resilience. The technology exists. The legal precedents exist. What remains is the political will to recognise data continuity as a strategic capability rather than an IT function. The first formalisation of a reciprocal data embassy arrangement will do more than secure the respective countries’ own resilience — it will set the template for how digital infrastructure is shared, protected, and governed in the century ahead. That is not an IT decision. It is a strategic one.

Originally Appeared here.

India-Indonesia Relations, Indo-pacific, Writing

PM Modi’s new arc of trust will hold Indo-Pacific together

It will be necessary, as well, for Prime Minister Modi and President Prabowo Subianto to move the relationship forward if the Indo-Pacific is to create a genuinely indigenous and independent security framework

Prime Minister Narendra Modi is travelling to Jakarta, Auckland and Melbourne, undertaking a sequence of visits that may define New Delhi’s approach to the Indo-Pacific in the coming decades. A bold and audacious redrawing of the map of this vast maritime region is underway. This effort will seek to recover autonomy for the powers that reside here, and it will recentre the region’s story on good growth and inclusive development, away from the whims of extractive superpower contestation. India envisions a new geometry of collaboration, one not dependent on axioms outlined in Washington or Beijing, but drawn up by those who live here and thus have the most to gain or lose.

The first stop, and the lynchpin of any plan for the Indo-Pacific, is Indonesia. The world’s third-most populous nation is the archetypal Indo-Pacific power. Indeed, it is the nation the term might almost have been coined to describe. The archipelago sits astride every crucial trade route between the two oceans, has abundant natural resources and, like India, is a civilisational state that has long been committed to a “free and active” foreign policy that secures its autonomy.

It is the relationship between India and Indonesia that will set the course for the broader maritime region. And what is often overlooked is that this partnership has already grown manifold. Objectively, Jakarta is one of New Delhi’s most important partners. If you look at goods alone, trade between the two nations, at just under $30 billion a year, is significant. It has overtaken trade between India and the United Kingdom, and runs neck and neck with Indo-German trade. Goods trade will only grow, stimulated by the upgradation of India’s free trade agreement with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), and so will services, under-represented and under-reported at present. With a focus on marine logistics, technology and financial services, and new supply chains, this partnership will form the foundation for a free and open trading architecture in the region.

And it will be necessary, as well, for Prime Minister Modi and President Prabowo Subianto to move the relationship forward if the Indo-Pacific is to create a genuinely indigenous and independent security framework. These two maritime powers are the only ones with the scale, capacity and presence required to manage the region’s most vital chokepoints. Together they are the only powers positioned to become net security providers of this ocean, not by invitation from Washington or deference to Beijing, but because the sea lanes are theirs to protect in the first place.

Australia, meanwhile, is India’s breakout partner. A new economic partnership, Australia-India Economic Cooperation and Trade Agreement (ECTA), was negotiated in 2022, signalling New Delhi’s new vision for trade. But it also built trust, a far scarcer commodity. That trust can serve to underpin the next stage of this relationship. That would require deeper integration: Our financial services, nuclear energy and resource processing industries must be integrated. These are areas where we both have great abilities, and our search is for autonomy, scale, and new technology. The strategic objective, once the habit of cooperation settles, must be defence co-production, where both could serve as trusted enablers of broader regional and global security.

New Zealand is a crucial key to the puzzle and not only because of its own strengths. The innovation island hosts advanced manufacturing capabilities, space and deep technology enterprises and agri-processing innovation, making it a vital component of India’s innovation sectors, food-security imperative and farm-income strategy. With the fourth largest exclusive economic zone (EEZ), the blue economy in its entirety is a natural domain of partnership with Aotearoa.

Alongside Canberra, Wellington will provide another crucial bridge to the Five Eyes security-intelligence ecosystem. This adds further resilience to a still new relationship.

Finally, together, India and the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) can become the delivery mechanism for development across the South Pacific and neighbouring parts of ASEAN. They will provide the financing, digital and physical infrastructure, and human capital the region badly needs, as well as a credible alternative to exploitative or unreliable partners. India is, after all, the largest theatre for discovering development solutions for the planet; once that innovative energy is paired with the capital and standing in the Pacific of the ANZAC nations, it offers a development pathway that does not force smaller nations to be burdened with perverse debt or lease a naval base to supposed benefactors.

Modi’s new arc of trust will hold the Indo-Pacific together in these disruptive times. With India at its centre, draw the arc east from India through Indonesia, Australia and New Zealand. Then draw it west through the United Arab Emirates and the Gulf and down the eastern seaboard of Africa.

This is the real story of the upcoming tour: The geographical centre of the Indo-Pacific resetting and redrawing an emerging order so that those who share this oceanic domain write the rules instead of just inheriting them.

Source : Indian Express, July 7, 2026

Geopolitics, India - U.S., international affairs, Writing

The fault line in India, US ties: America doesn’t understand ‘equal’

New Delhi must respond with open-eyed diplomacy, not open-hearted sentiment.

US President Donald Trump’s visit to China may not be remembered by posterity as much as Richard Nixon’s famous trip in 1972. But it has forced Indians to confront the parallels with what was hitherto considered the darkest chapter of the India-US relationship.

Nixon, like Trump, believed that resetting relations with China was in paramount American interest. Nixon, like Trump, led a White House and establishment that was instinctively unsympathetic to Indian concerns. And Nixon, like Trump, viewed the Pakistani military leadership through rose-tinted glasses. Nobody, not even ordinary Pakistanis, has ever celebrated a Pakistani military dictator more than Nixon or Trump.

But here is what matters: The relationship between India and the United States survived Nixon. It grew and flourished. The partnership is stronger than any one person, even an enormously consequential president. It is greater than any administration, any party, any geopolitical moment. It is beneficial for both and yet it is not definitional for either. We can live without it.

In the past, India navigated a hostile White House, a hostile establishment, and an indifferent American public. Today’s position is better, even if the Trump White House returns to overt hostility from its current passive-aggressive demeanor. Large sections of the Washington establishment continue to value the bilateral partnership. People-to-people connections have deepened. And the business-to-business ties of investment, innovation and trade have already demonstrated their capacity to ignore and outlast shifts in capital markets or political fashion.

This is not to minimise divergences that are neither superficial nor personality-driven. A structural faultline has emerged in Indo-US relations. It cannot be papered over. There are, in fact, three faultlines, not one.

India’s energy security, its abiding concern in global affairs, is imperiled by American unilateralism and breathtaking double standards on sourcing fuel from Russia. Washington’s search for detente with China removes the relationship’s strategic ballast. And India has reforged its sense of self: It will, and it must, continue to refuse to play the compliant partner to a whimsical Washington. These are serious, structural disagreements. They deserve to be named as such.

But we must also recognise the institutional convergences that persist. Bilateral military-to-military cooperation. Strands of collaboration under the Quad’s umbrella that Trump dislikes and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Ambassador Sergio Gor seek to cleverly sustain. The INDUS-X defence ecosystem. The TRUST initiative for emergent technology and critical minerals and multiple supply chain partnerships. All of these receive undiminished official energy, and will continue to do so. And hard words and the 50 per cent tariffs notwithstanding, a trade deal was eventually arrived at. The glue holds. Barely, but it holds.

We should think of this moment as an opportunity. The US-India relationship has always been sold as an inevitable strategic convergence. But until recently, it was something else: Two very different civilisational world-views cohabiting uneasily. What Trump’s arrival did was strip away the diplomatic veneer.

New Delhi must respond with open-eyed diplomacy, not open-hearted sentiment. It must engage all strands of thought in the United States, a democracy almost as diverse and complex as ours. Trumpism may outlast Trump — both sides of the aisle asking, if in more polished terms, the same uncomfortable questions the current administration has posed.

The truth is that this president has done us a favour. We can now rework this relationship on more honest, durable terms.

This cohabitation was in many ways an arranged marriage. The two countries were joined together by a panchayat of wise elders: P V Narasimha Rao, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Bill Clinton, Manmohan Singh, George Bush, and their generations. The arranged-marriage mantra is: Ceremony first, compatibility later. For our two nations, the strategic relationship came first. Strategic convergence was supposed to follow.

It didn’t. Our worldviews did not converge the way matchmakers anticipated. A philosophical gap, one rooted in our respective democratic cultures, has persisted: India does not understand alliances; America does not understand autonomy.

In any marriage, both partners change, compromise and build a partnership of equals. A relationship between two civilisation-states is no different. The White House cannot write the rules of marriage without co-opting India’s distinctiveness. Until Washington accepts that India is an ancient nation with its own immutable timeline and unalterable threat calculus, and not a junior supplicant seeking admission to some charmed circle, this relationship will oscillate between promise and frustration. The fact is, America does not understand “equal”.

New Delhi is not holding its breath. As the old order dissipates, India is neither dismantling nor defending it. Foreign policy and strategic autonomy have visibly been very hard work and yet an imperative. To be fair, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his team are rearranging the pieces rather well. India has discovered a new and appropriate proximity and distance to the US, deeper strategic intimacy with the EU, recalibration with Beijing — while engaging Moscow in a dynamic world.

The India-US partnership will endure. It survived Nixon; it will survive Trump. But whether it matures is a different question entirely. The answer depends on one thing alone: America deciding it can accept India on mutually agreeable terms. The Trump White House doesn’t understand the question. Perhaps its successor will need to find the answer.

Originally Appeared in Indian Express. Read it here

Geopolitics, international affairs, International Diplomacy, Raisina Dialogue, Writing

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.

Geopolitics, international affairs, Writing

Six shades of leadership: A Davos barometer

As the traditional global order fractures, Davos 2026 reveals a new reality: The future no longer belongs to those with the most eloquent rhetoric, but to the leaders combining technical competence with the quiet confidence of actual delivery.

The World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, is not merely an assemblage of elites; it is a barometer of the zeitgeist. Each year, it reveals how leaders interpret power, responsibility and risk in a changing world. This year’s interventions presented six distinct shades of leadership, conveyed through four key perspectives and embodied by two central actors. Together, they present not consensus, but a sharp study in contrast.

The first shade was managerial stewardship, articulated by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. His address pointed to a moment of “rupture.” He argued that intensifying great-power rivalry has led countries to seek “greater strategic autonomy,” creating a “world of fortresses.”

Carney’s speech was rooted in institutional confidence. He framed the strengthening of domestic economies and collective investment in resilience as twin objectives, arguing for a world order that respects human rights, sustainable development and sovereignty. His Davos was a call to be “principled and pragmatic” rather than to re-architect the global order. This was leadership that trusts existing institutions and believes the world still has the patience to let them work.

The second shade was transactional disruption, communicated by United States President Donald Trump. His rhetoric rejected multilateral restraint in favor of bilateral leverage, presenting economic gain as an overriding priority and alliances as instruments rather than obligations. The message was clear: prosperity follows power, not process. As Trump put it, “We’re a great power […] I think they found that out.” With a focus on tariffs and trade deficits, his Davos was interested only in outcomes, not rules, in immediacy, not institution-building.

The third shade was a desire for normative leadership, expressed by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. She sought to reaffirm Europe’s belief that values can still anchor power, citing climate leadership, rules-based trade and responsible digital cooperation as sources of strategic strength.

Yet, there lay an unresolved tension: Europe’s influence rests on standards, but its ability to enforce them is being tested by a world that respects speed, scale and leverage more than value-based persuasion. Von der Leyen’s was a Davos of aspiration, eloquent and principled, but also one of wistfulness: “The cooperative world order we imagined 25 years ago has not turned into reality.”

The fourth shade was a return to the principle of inclusion, articulated by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto. The conviction that “there will be no prosperity without peace” framed his speech. Prabowo highlighted Indonesia’s recognition as a “global bright spot,” a result of a legacy of “unity over fragmentation and collaboration over confrontation,” alongside a consistently unblemished record of debt repayment. His Davos was one of excellence at home and cooperation with the world on mutually beneficial terms, proving that sound domestic investment creates international gravity.

Together, these four perspectives revealed a fractured global conversation: stewardship without urgency, disruption without responsibility, values without sufficient power and peace over chaos.

The fifth shade emerged not through rhetoric but through technical confidence, embodied by Ashwini Vaishnaw, India’s electronics and IT minister. Speaking on India’s progress in manufacturing and its transformational digital public infrastructure, Vaishnaw carried a quiet authority. He presented India’s story as proof of capability rather than a plea for recognition. On the AI race, he observed that producing massive large language models (LLMs) did not necessarily grant an edge; rather, the creative deployment of AI did. His understated style reminded audiences that credibility flows from delivery, not declaration, setting the stage for the AI Impact Summit in India later this month.

The sixth shade was political presence, represented by Smriti Irani at the WEF Lead Pavilion. Her engagement focused on asserting India’s voice on women’s leadership, health and enterprise through the Alliance for Global Good.

Since its launch, the Alliance has significantly scaled its coalition-building. In 2026, the focus shifted to women’s health as an “economic and national imperative.” Irani’s message, placing women at the center of decision-making, resonated across governments and business movements alike.

Together, these six shades tell a story of a leadership landscape fragmenting across temperaments: managerial, transactional, normative, inclusive, technical and political. Davos remains the stage, but it no longer writes the script. The most consequential leadership today will be provided by those who combine competence with confidence, and ambition with delivery.

In that sense, the clarity of the Indian and Indonesian interventions signified that the future belongs not to those who speak most eloquently about the world, but to those who are steadily building it.

Originally Appeared in The JakartaPost

BRICS, Budapest Global Dialogue, Geopolitics, international affairs, Writing

The Budapest Dossier 2025: Choices In This New World

Ed Samir Saran | Gladden J Pappin

Editors’ Note

As the world begins a second quarter of the current century, there is a clear reshaping of the global balance of power. Yet, it is not only the diffusion of power that is shifting; so is the organising logic of the global system itself, moving toward security and resilience, and carrying implications for economic integration, strategic partnerships, and institutional cooperation. For Europe, this is a moment of strategic reflection; for emerging powers, a moment of assertive arrival.

The essays in this volume probe the tensions and opportunities of a world in transition—the struggle to rebuild credible multilateralism, the race for technological and economic sovereignty, and the search for forms of connectivity and cooperation that strengthen, rather than surrender, national agency. Together, these articles compel a rethinking of inherited assumptions and remind us that legitimacy today is earned through capability, credibility, and the courage to design new compacts. The future will be scripted less by legacy alliances, and more by a wider constellation of actors—from Europe to the emerging powers—with Hungary positioned as a critical bridge in these unfolding conversations.

The Budapest Dossier 2025 captures this moment of inflection, convening scholars across disciplines and geographies to illuminate how a world in flux is recasting its political, economic, and strategic foundations.

Kwame Owino argues that global economic fragmentation—through rising regionalism and stalled multilateral reform—creates new vulnerabilities for sub-Saharan Africa’s lower- and middle-income economies. In a multipolar world shaped by larger emerging powers, Africa’s strongest anchor remains a functioning multilateral system.

Philipp Siegert argues that Europe’s geopolitical comfort zone has collapsed as the global system and global order drift out of alignment. The European Union (EU), caught between globalisation, state agency, and democracy, now confronts an intensified version of Rodrik’s Trilemma that it can no longer evade. He contends that only a shift toward “sovereign internationalism” and adaptive connectivity can restore Europe’s strategic relevance.

Márton Ugrósdy casts Hungary’s worldview as a sovereignty-first doctrine that rejects supranational presumption and globalist orthodoxy, insisting that power and legitimacy rise from the people. Everything else—EU cooperation, global partnerships, foreign policy—follows from that foundational conviction.

Péter Siklósi shows that Europe’s call for autonomy rings hollow in a moment when only NATO underwrites its security. Caught between renewed threats and insufficient capabilities, Europe remains reactive, and not a shaper of the emerging order.

Kimlong Chheng argues that Europe is caught in a crisis of identity and cohesion, where fraying values and sovereignty battles unsettle its political core. These tensions weaken Europe’s regulatory ambition and strategic confidence. Its relevance in a multipolar world, he contends, hinges on restoring trust and a coherent values-driven compass.

Philip Pilkington argues that Europe’s competitiveness crisis is being fundamentally misread: the real rupture is not technological lag but the loss of cheap energy after the eruption of the war in Ukraine. He shows that protectionism, industrial policy, and the Draghi Report all skirt the core issue, leaving Europe to drift toward de-industrialisation. Until the energy question is confronted head-on, Europe cannot reclaim economic strength nor strategic agency.

Victoria V. Panova presents BRICS as a non-Western coalition pushing for an inclusive, law-based global order grounded in equality and respect. As Western structures retreat into coercion, she argues, BRICS offers a more constructive model for a plural world.

Sunaina Kumar casts the Indo-Pacific as the heat engine of global geopolitics—an arena where great-power rivalry collides with the region’s central role in trade, growth, and climate stability. She argues that the challenge for regional actors is to balance security imperatives with deeply interdependent economic futures, using flexible coalitions and minilaterals to navigate an increasingly fractured order. The Indo-Pacific’s ability to shape the emerging system, she observes, depends on inclusive cooperation, resilient connectivity, and a shared commitment to sustainable development.

Lydia Kostopoulos argues that the fusion of AI, data, and converging technologies has turned geopolitics into technogeopolitics, forcing states to reclaim sovereignty in a domain increasingly dominated by private actors. She underscores the need for nations to invest in resilient energy and digital infrastructure, craft trustworthy regulation, and deploy agile policy tools like sandboxes to stay competitive. The future of statecraft, she writes, will belong to countries that wield technology as a deliberate instrument of national power.

Boglárka Ballester-Bólya argues that Europe’s slide in competitiveness is largely self-inflicted—driven by regulatory excess, ideological policymaking, and an energy regime that undermines industry. Hungary’s call for “less red tape, more innovation” is framed as a strategic course correction, restoring productivity, affordability, and ambition. She warns that unless Brussels embraces pragmatism over performative governance, Europe will watch the global race from the sidelines.

Matthias Bauer’s essay portrays a Europe tangled in its own rules — overregulated, under-scaled, and falling behind while others accelerate. He insists that only bold, continent-wide legal harmonisation can restore Europe’s ability to innovate, attract investment, and compete at the technological frontier. Fragmentation, Bauer warns, is not just inefficient—it is a quiet erosion of Europe’s global standing.

Stephen R. Nagy casts infrastructure as the new battleground of sovereignty, where small and medium-sized states craft manoeuvrability through diversified partnerships. Nagy argues that ASEAN and Hungary hedge through connectivity—engaging China, Japan, the United States, and others without surrendering choice or autonomy. In a divided world, he writes, infrastructure is not dependency but agency in physical form.

Jagannath Panda describes the Indo-Pacific as moving from a United States-led hierarchy to a diffuse, coalition-driven order shaped by strategic autonomy, hedging, and competing connectivity visions. As the United States’ centrality wavers and China advances its architectural ambitions, India emerges as the region’s stabilising anchor—democratic, autonomous, and increasingly central to the strategic calculations of major powers. The future, he says, will be written not by hegemonies but by networks of states unwilling to be bound by any single pole.

Szabolcs Pásztor argues that ‘slowbalisation’ has not fully fractured the world into rival blocs but propelled it into a new era of networked connectivity, where emerging economies have become hubs rather than peripheries. South–South trade, digital flows, and value-chain linkages now drive global growth, making decoupling both costly and illusory. He contends that the future belongs to bridges—open standards, cross-regional infrastructure, and cooperative institutions that keep the global system resilient and open.

These essays converge on a simple truth: the international system is being rebuilt in real time. Those who combine resilience, capability, and cooperative ambition will not only endure this transition but help define its architecture.

Read the monograph here.

Energy, Global Energy Transition, Viksit Bharat, Writing

India’s Cheapest Power Needs New Buyers

Nikit Abhyankar | Samir Saran

Manufacturing clusters, export-oriented industries, and data centres can procure clean electricity through open access or captive routes, gaining long-term cost certainty while absorbing large volumes of new capacity

For decades, India’s power sector grappled with scarcity and affordability issues even as it undertook complex and ambitious power-sector reforms. Today, we add 40 GW of renewable capacity every year, far more than in most developed economies and cheaper than in most geographies. The task is to organise markets, institutions, and demand. Absorption is becoming a constraint with nearly 42 GW of renewable capacity awarded through auctions yet to find buyer utilities. Distribution companies are cautious about additional clean energy commitments. To sustain clean-energy momentum, the pool of buyers must expand. Two structural shifts make this possible.

The first is the fall in clean-energy prices. Recent reverse auctions have closed at around Rs 3 per unit for solar power paired with storage — with prices remaining flat in nominal terms for 12 to 25 years. These projects can deliver near round-the-clock supply at the same prices. The second factor is a product of institutional reform. Open access and captive procurement allow large industrial and commercial consumers to buy power from anywhere in the country by paying network charges. Roughly a quarter of India’s renewable capacity addition is now driven by this. This transition will allow utilities to evolve into strong grid and reliability platforms while new demand absorbs low-cost clean power. Where will new demand come from?

The second factor is a product of institutional reform. Open access and captive procurement allow large industrial and commercial consumers to buy power from anywhere in the country by paying network charges.

First, manufacturing clusters, export-oriented industries, and data centres can procure clean electricity through open access or captive routes, gaining long-term cost certainty while absorbing large volumes of new capacity. Such clusters, offering Indian exports an edge under carbon border measures such as the EU’s CBAM, could unlock FDI and green finance, accelerating industrial growth and clean-power deployment. Second, nearly half of India’s industrial energy demand is to process heat, with a large portion supplied by imported oil and gas. Electric heat pumps and high-temperature heat batteries allow this demand to shift towards clean electricity.

Third, fertiliser and steel are important sectors, yet depend on imported gas and coking coal. Recent green ammonia auctions reveal fertiliser production using clean electricity is competitive. With continued cost declines, green steel could follow a similar path. Fourth, electrifying buses, commercial fleets, and freight corridors can create a large and flexible demand source for domestic clean power. When charging is aligned with daytime solar output, electricity demand rises when clean power is most abundant. Fifth, distributed rooftop solar across commercial buildings, MSMEs, and homes lowers bills and improves resilience. For utilities, it reduces peak demand, losses, and subsidy burdens.

Large buyers could transition faster if long-term clean-energy contracts were aggregated and securitised through dedicated finance platforms. Smaller consumers will need India Stack–connected fintech products to reduce transaction friction. Expanding demand for clean electricity is also the most effective way to absorb India’s excess solar panel manufacturing capacity. One concern is that key components, particularly batteries, are often imported. India has shown through solar manufacturing that such dependencies can be reduced with scale and policy certainty. Batteries can follow a similar trajectory, supported through partnerships with allied economies to secure critical minerals.

Robust domestic demand has always been the Indian economy’s greatest strength. It can now also work for its energy transition. India’s cheapest power has arrived. Building the markets, institutions, and end-use pathways will define the journey to Viksit Bharat.

Originally Appeared in Indian Express.

Artificial Intelligence, Cyber and Internet Governance, Cyber and Technology, Cyber Security, Writing

Swords and Shields: Navigating the Modern Intelligence Landscape

SAMIR SARAN | ARCHISHMAN RAY GOSWAMI

As key custodians of a nation’s strategic intent, national intelligence services must account for and adapt to the wider socio-cultural and political factors shaping their operational environment. Today, shifting geopolitical tides in the form of accelerated multipolarity, scientific progress, and the erosion of accountability in global technological governance have converged to reshape national intelligence strategies. This paper seeks to make sense of these changes by discussing key features of the shifting global intelligence landscape. These include factors such as the role of ‘geotechnography’ in blurring distinctions between offline and online experiences, the consequences of growing inter-state competition over rare-earth elements and supply chains, the evolving character of human intelligence (HUMINT) amid ubiquitous technical surveillance (UTS), and the role of private sector intelligence and Big Tech in a data-infused geostrategic terrain. The aim is to foster a discussion on how nations think about and use intelligence in changing times. It closes with an exploration of the implications of these changes for India’s national security.

Originally appeared here

Global South, Green Technology, international affairs, Sustainable Development, Writing

Issue Brief : The Green Development Compact: Atlantic Ambition, Southern Scale

Amitabh Kant | Samir Saran

The United States (US) and the European Union (EU) have shifted beyond market-led climate action toward state-backed green industrial policy, driven by competitiveness, economic security, and technological leadership concerns. Despite differences in approach, Atlantic strategies share an inward focus that positions the Global South primarily as a consumer market or supplier of intermediate inputs. Such models are politically unsustainable for developing economies and economically inefficient for achieving the scale required for the global energy transition. This brief argues for moving from competition-driven industrial policy toward co-development and shared prosperity across regions. It proposes a Green Development Compact that integrates Northern capital, innovation, and corporate capacity with Southern scale, speed, and renewable endowments. It outlines practical instruments to operationalise this framework, including long-term offtake guarantees, shared innovation commons, and financial mechanisms that reduce risk for Southern projects.

Read more here.

Source: ORF Website, January 3, 2026

India, Writing

Growth story powered by indigenous engines

In the 1980s, a young India was being excited against older nation-states. In the 2020s, an ancient civilisation is leading the way in forging a new consensus

The year 2025 might well go down in Indian economic history alongside 1991 as a year that marks a decisive break with the past. These were both years that accelerated our intent, ambition, and execution as a nation. But, if in 1991, the initial burst of economic reform was driven by recognition of a balance of payments crisis, the 2025 reforms have been driven by understanding a balance of power opportunity. And this burst of reform, even more than those before, reflects how India’s leadership at the highest level — particularly Prime Minister Narendra Modi himself — understands the way that growth is nurtured in this evolving, fragmented world.

By creating a political and geo-economic challenge, Donald Trump invited the Modi of the past to reappear: The political and economic revolutionary who thrives by confronting stale orthodoxy and refuses to outsource national destiny. By revealing international relationships as nakedly transactional, the US president reminded New Delhi of one basic truth: Nobody is going to celebrate India’s rise. In a progress-starved global economy, growth is not shared. Instead, growth is competed for, hoarded, weaponised. We might have been lulled into thinking, for a time, that growth would emerge from partnerships. But Modi has correctly identified that growth is DIY: We must do it for ourselves — and keep doing it. It must be incubated, nourished, and sustained domestically, like a household plant that needs constant watering, or a steel plant that can never be shut down. Global relationships matter, but the West is neither enemy nor saviour. It is simply a partner whose errant ways must be moderated through calm engagement.

In the 1980s, a young India was being excited against older nation-states. But, in the 2020s, an ancient civilisation is leading the way in forging a new consensus, through example rather than exhortation. This is what it means to be Bharat. Growth is the greatest, best example we can set for the world. And that is what Modi has given us in this year of reform on steroids: The building blocks of decades of growth.

Perhaps, the most consequential of these is the pushing through of the four labour codes. This is the biggest factor-market structural reset since the 1990s. Today’s India has finally understood the support businesses need to help us become a developed nation. Rules have been cut by three-quarters, reporting forms by 60%, and registers for returns by 90%. More than 60 million enterprises will benefit — five times the footprint even of GST.

But GST itself has been reshaped: Two slabs eliminated, compliance simplified. Lower tax enabled quarters of euphoric growth — but, even more importantly, the fatigue felt by small businesses was addressed. Reform is not just a one-off event, an initial investment; it requires maintenance, continual recalibration in response to lived reality, and attentive leadership.

Tax cuts are, in fact, stimulus by stealth. When Union Budget 2025 raised the cut-off for income tax exemption to ₹1,00,000 a month, Modi showed that the creation of an Indian middle class requires its protection from government — not just from extortionary taxes but from unnecessary harassment and criminalisation. The Unified Securities Market Code, the Jan Vishwas 2.0 Bill, and the new Income Tax Act show that clarity rather than coercion is the cornerstone of India’s emerging State.

Finally, in December, three reforms signal the strategic confidence that Bharat now has. In the past, a divided polity twisted itself into knots about foreign participation in sectors such as insurance and nuclear energy. Those days are gone. Without fuss or fanfare, nuclear power and insurance were opened to private participation, their legal framework modernised and brought into line with global norms, and our clean energy ambitions restated.

Each of these reforms is individually significant. Taken together, they are revolutionary. Modi is doing nationally what he once did in Gujarat, what he did later with Digital India and the GST — taking big bets and forcing an ossified state machinery into movement through sheer willpower. No longer will anyone pretend that external benevolence can carry India forward. The engines and energy that propel us will be indigenous.

Throughout 2025, unforeseen challenges arose abroad. But Modi’s response was domestic energy, domestic focus, domestic reform. Before restructuring its partnership with the world, India must rewrite its contract with itself. This is the time to write India’s future, and Indians will do it.

Source: Originally appeared in Hindustan Times