Publication

The Saudi-Pakistan Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SMDA), signed on September 17,2025, is a dramatic development amidst a rapidly changing geopolitical landscape in West and South Asia. Pakistan’s strategic elite has once again shown itself adept at geopolitical rent-seeking by leveraging the country’s nuclear status, religious identity, and geographical proximity to the Arab World to cultivate partnerships that can bail out its crisis-ridden economy. However, Pakistan’s primary objective is to counter India’s new assertive deterrence posture in ‘Operation Sindoor’, which established new rules of engagement, challenging Pakistan’s policy of using terrorist groups to secure its geopolitical goals under its nuclear umbrella. Saudi Arabia, for its part, seeks to shore up flailing deterrence against Iran and Israel. By asserting an outsized security role in the Gulf region, Pakistan is also holding out the promise of burden-sharing to the United States, increasingly viewed as an unreliable security guarantor despite its longstanding military preponderance in the region.

• Deepika Saraswat |
• September-October 2025 |
• Strategic Analysis

Given the continuing expansion of India’s multilateral experiments and engagements, now is an opportune time to ponder over how India reconciles its cosmopolitan moral principles with strategic pragmatism in multilateral forums often dominated by other great powers. To appreciate the above issue, this commentary focuses on India’s CT (counter-terrorism) diplomacy and strategy against the 25th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) Summit at Tianjin in China from August 31 to September 1, 2025.

• Manish , Gayatri Rajpurohit |
• September-October 2025 |
• Strategic Analysis

In a recent escalation, Pakistan conducted air strikes inside Afghanistan against what it claimed were terrorist hideouts on October 9, 2025. The attack marked a remarkable escalation in the souring relationship between the two neighbouring countries. Following this there was a heated exchange of fire along the Durand Line with the Afghan-Taliban forces attacking border outposts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan. The retaliation from Pakistan, on the intervening night of October 11–12, was predictably disproportionate as its army claimed to have neutralised over 200 Taliban fighters and destroyed about 21 hostile positions including Afghan border check posts.

• Shakoor Ahmad Wani |
• September-October 2025 |
• Strategic Analysis

On September 19, 1960, in Karachi, the bustling port city and economic hub of Pakistan, two political leaders and a distinguished international banker convened to sign a document that would define the political and hydrological landscape of the Indian subcontinent. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s Prime Minister; Field Marshal Ayub Khan, Pakistan’s military ruler; and William Illif, Vice President of the World Bank, affixed their signatures to what became the Indus Waters Treaty. The World Bank (International Bank for Reconstruction and Development) was no mere bystander; it was the architect behind the scenes, lending its institutional weight to broker a deal that neither nation could have achieved alone.

• Uttam Kumar Sinha |
• September-October 2025 |
• Strategic Analysis

The youth uprising in Nepal in September 2025 must be understood not as an isolated incident but as a striking manifestation of a global trend of increasing visibility and influence of Generation Z (Gen Z; born between 1997 and 2012) in political and social discourse. Keeping the cases of Sri Lanka (2022) and Bangladesh (2024) aside in the South Asian region, there have been such youth-led movements in Indonesia (‘Peringatan Darurat’ in 2024 and ‘Indonesia Gelap’ or Dark Indonesia in 2025) and Madagascar (2025). Similar movements have also emerged elsewhere, such as in Morocco, where young people used TikTok, Instagram, and Discord to demand better education and healthcare, as well as in the Philippines, where student-led campaigns have increasingly challenged corruption and called for greater political accountability.

• Sneha M |
• September-October 2025 |
• Strategic Analysis

Over the last few years India has been progressively attempting to establish itself as a ‘preferred security partner’ in the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). This transformation represents a fundamental shift from India’s historically passive maritime posture described by strategic thinkers as a manifestation of its ‘sea blindness’ to a robust maritime-oriented outlook characterised by proactive regional leadership, enhanced naval capabilities, multilateral security arrangements and comprehensive engagement with littoral states. This essay examines the evolution, mechanisms and implications of India’s emergence as a preferred security partner in the IOR.

• Abhay Kumar Singh , R. Vignesh |
• September-October 2025 |
• Strategic Analysis

Originating in the wake of cold war bipolarity, non-alignment became the dominant approach under Nehru, until the early 1960s to navigate India’s engagement with the international system. Faced with volatility of superpower contestation, the policy of non-alignment described as ‘leading ourselves’Footnote1 served as the basis for India’s diplomatic interventions in addressing cold war politics around decolonisation, regional conflicts, disarmament and nuclear arms control. The military rout in the 1962 Sino-Indian war which knocked India out of the ‘world of its own making’, marked a major rupture point in the Indian strategic outlook. A re-evaluation of India’s foreign policy objectives and strategies in the aftermath of the conflict led to reduced enthusiasm for non-alignment as New Delhi engineered an insular foreign policy approach, with more focus towards its immediate periphery and regional interests and recalibrating ties with major powers like the United States (US), the United Kingdom (UK) and the Soviet Union (SU).

• Mayuri Banerjee |
• September-October 2025 |
• Strategic Analysis

Joshy M. Paul’s China’s Air Power and Maritime Strategies Towards the Indian Ocean Region offers a detailed account of Beijing’s evolving air and naval posture towards the wider Indo-Pacific region, with a keen focus on the Indian Ocean Region (IOR). As a distinguished researcher with immense experience in airpower and maritime security of the Indo-Pacific, Paul uses a comprehensive set of data, starting from the onset of China’s shift towards air and maritime power, to unpack the dynamics of the strategies Beijing formulated to address the Indian Ocean Region.

• V Krishna Kumar |
• September-October 2025 |
• Strategic Analysis

The post-second World War period has seen rapid development of new strategic doctrines, consequent on major technological breakthroughs in weapons systems, transport and communication capabilities. These doctrines in turn have had a profound impact on the decision- making processes, command and control apparatus and civil-military relationships in different countries, which maintain sizeable military establishments. The new strategic doctrines emphasise deterrence through an arms race, both quantitative and qualitative, readiness to react with forces in being and strategic mobility, watching all other nations continuously and long-range as well as short-term planning. Though a number of doctrines have been categorised, they are all derived from one basic doctrine- deterrence through preparedness.

• K. Subrahmanyam |
• September-October 2025 |
• Strategic Analysis

Pakistan’s attempt to mediate in the 2026 West Asia crisis should be understood primarily as a strategy of geopolitical survival through diplomatic utility.

• Lauren Dagan Amoss |
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• Issue Brief