This article examines the geopolitical evolution of energy coercion, tracing its transformation from traditional oil embargoes to contemporary sanctions, financial restrictions and technological controls, illustrating a shift in strategic power from physical control over oil supplies and maritime chokepoints to network control over finance, logistics, digital infrastructure and critical mineral supply chains. Employing a comparative-historical political economy approach, this study demonstrates that embargoes and sanctions frequently produce outcomes divergent from their original objectives, reshaping trade routes, financial systems and geopolitical alliances rather than fully isolating target states. The analysis argues that as financialised sanctions reshape global trade, control over minerals, technology and data infrastructure is emerging as the primary arena of geopolitical competition. The study evaluates India’s strategies for ensuring energy security and economic stability, including diversifying suppliers, engaging with sanctioned states, developing alternative settlement mechanisms, expanding refining capacity and investing in renewables and critical minerals. The conclusion asserts the need for India to enhance resilience, institutional capacity and strategic flexibility in response to growing global fragmentation.
The historic insulation of cooperative hydro-diplomacy from geopolitical conflict in South Asia has decisively collapsed. For over six decades, the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT) of 1960 was a partitioned river-sharing arrangement. It survived wars, crises and sustained bilateral hostility. But India’s placement of the IWT in ‘abeyance’ following the April 2025 Pahalgam terrorist attack ruptures that paradigm. This article conceptualises ‘strategic abeyance’ as a novel framework of legal liminality. It is neither formal suspension under the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT), 1969, nor treaty termination, but a deliberate exercise in hydro-political leverage that subordinates cooperative water management to sovereign security imperatives. It draws on qualitative document analysis of government reports, policy documents and academic literature to examine the evolving strategic and legal dimensions of post-April 2025 treaty practice. It explores how abeyance affects the Kashmiri stakeholder’s perspective, the legal and strategic dimensions of abeyance and how counter-terrorism concerns have changed the treaty’s cooperative architecture with Pakistan, calling for a new re-negotiated treaty Indus–II. Comparative models like the United States–Mexico ‘minute’ arrangements, the Columbia River Treaty, the Rhine Basin and the Mekong Agreement are studied to assess their relevance for future adaptation to the Indus basin post-abeyance, highlighting the challenges of reconciling security, development and climate resilience in transboundary water governance.
The Strategic Mutual Defence Agreement (SMDA) between Pakistan and Saudi Arabia is the outcome of the complex interplay of changing balance of power, psychology of the ruling elite and institutional dynamics. Even though the defence pact came against the backdrop of Israel’s missile strikes in Doha against Hamas in September 2025, it must be situated in the context of the recent joint US–Israel military campaign against Iran and Tehran’s counter-strikes, which have transformed the regional security environment from indirect proxy competition to direct interstate conflict, subsequently drawing Pakistan into the role of a mediator to broker a fragile ceasefire. The article argues that the SMDA acts more as a pragmatic element of deterrence rather than a military alliance because of the constraints affecting both countries. For Saudi Arabia, the pact should be seen as a rational response considering an increasingly volatile security environment, which allows Riyadh to enhance its strategic leverage vis-à-vis Washington, notwithstanding its overall efforts to diversify its security partnerships beyond the USA. For Pakistan, this pact is mainly shaped against the backdrop of its anti-Indian approach, even as Pakistan’s manoeuvring space is itself limited due to the fear of getting entangled directly with Iran or Israel. Collectively, all these dynamics have ramifications for India’s strategic calculus, as well as for the emergence of a multipolar Middle East.
For the last three decades, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Rwanda have been at the centre of Africa’s most serious crises. In 1994, Hutus and Tutsis were part of probably the most horrific humanitarian crisis in the world. The Rwandan genocide claimed more than half a million people in Rwanda, mainly the Tutsis and some moderate Hutus. Today, after more than 30 years, another humanitarian crisis is simmering in the region, around critical mineral-rich areas in the DRC, involving several militias and armed groups, besides the neighbouring states. While critical minerals have further complicated the peace processes and sparked geopolitical tensions between the DRC and Rwanda, they may also resurface the three-decade-old ethnic rivalry between Hutu and Tutsi. In this backdrop, the article analyses how critical minerals act as both enablers of peace and drivers of conflict. It also examines the China factor and India’s interests in the region, particularly regarding critical minerals and rare earths. The article concludes with recommendations and a summary.
