We live in an age of profound unsettlement. The architecture of the postwar international order, built on the twin pillars of multilateral consensus and liberal institutionalism, is visibly straining under the weight of a world it was never designed to accommodate. Power is no longer the exclusive preserve of the West. Sovereignty is being reasserted not merely over territory, but over technology, trade, and the very narratives through which nations understand themselves. In this moment of civilizational flux, the question that confronts scholars and statespeople alike is not simply who leads the world, but from what, from what values, what memories, and what accumulated wisdom does legitimate leadership emerge?

It is precisely this question that gives the Raisina Dialogue 2026 its intellectual depth and its cultural resonance. Held from 5 to 7 March 2026 in New Delhi, and organized by the Observer Research Foundation in partnership with India's Ministry of External Affairs, the Dialogue has, over the past decade, established itself as India's foremost platform for serious engagement with the geopolitics of a transforming world. What distinguishes the 2026 edition, however, is not merely the urgency of its agenda, though that urgency is considerable, but the conceptual framework through which it chooses to read that agenda.

The theme chosen for this year, Saṁskāra: Assertion, Accommodation, Advancement, was not incidental. From an Indian Knowledge Systems perspective, Saṁskāra carries a weight that no single English translation can fully render. It speaks to the rites of passage through which identity is formed and reformed; to the layered deposits of culture, memory, and meaning that a civilization carries forward even as it moves through time. It is not nostalgia, it is inheritance in motion. A nation, like an individual, is shaped by its Saṁskāras: by what it chooses to remember, what it is willing to revise, and what it carries forward as non-negotiable. In applying this framework to the global order, the Dialogue makes a subtle but significant philosophical intervention, suggesting that the crisis of our times is not merely structural or material, but civilizational in nature.

This lens proves remarkably illuminating when applied to the geopolitical landscape of 2026. Nations across the world are in a process of deep self-interrogation, reasserting sovereign identities long submerged beneath the universalist claims of globalization, seeking accommodation with a plurality of partners no single alliance can contain, and advancing, however haltingly, toward new forms of order that reflect the true diversity of human civilization. The old consensus is gone. What replaces it is not chaos, but a more complex, more contested, and in many ways more honest negotiation between civilizations that have each, in their own way, undergone their own Saṁskāras.

The Dialogue structured this negotiation across six thematic pillars, spanning the contested frontiers of power and security, the repair of fraying global institutions, the faltering pursuit of sustainable development, the gathering urgency of climate action, the governance of transformative technologies, and the reinvention of global trade. Taken together, these pillars do not merely map the problems of our time. They trace the outlines of a world in the midst of a civilizational transition, one in which the inherited forms of international order are being tested, refined, and in some cases transcended.

For scholars of geopolitics, the Raisina Dialogue 2026 offers more than a record of debates. It offers a vantage point from which to observe, in real time, how a rising civilizational power understands its own moment in history — not as a rupture from the past, but as its most consequential continuation.

If there is one thread that runs through every session, every debate, and every charged exchange at the Raisina Dialogue 2026, it is this: the world is not merely changing, it is being remade. The rules that governed international conduct for the better part of eight decades are no longer self-evidently legitimate. The institutions that enforced them are no longer self-evidently capable. And the powers that built them are no longer self-evidently dominant. What is emerging in their place is not yet a new order. It is, for now, a negotiation, turbulent, consequential, and deeply unfinished.

The sessions examined in this report offer a cross-section of that negotiation. From the Taiwan Strait to Tehran, from Lagos to Lima, from the defence factories of the liberal alliance to the ancient shipyards of India's maritime memory, the Dialogue surfaced the fault lines and the possibilities of a world undergoing civilizational recalibration.

The Taiwan Question: Deterrence Without a Guarantor

Few sessions at Raisina 2026 carried the weight of immediacy quite like the discussion on Beyond Strategic Ambiguity: Rethinking Deterrence in the Taiwan Strait. The panel bringing together voices from the United States, Europe, Taiwan, and the Indo-Pacific confronted what may be the single most consequential flashpoint of the emerging world order.

For decades, Washington's policy of strategic ambiguity, neither explicitly committing to Taiwan's defence nor abandoning it, served as the load-bearing pillar of cross-strait stability. That pillar is now visibly under stress. The increasingly ad-hoc character of American power and its growing scepticism toward long-standing commitments, combined with Beijing's increasingly vehement reassertion of its reunification agenda, have together eroded the architecture of deterrence that kept the strait from becoming a theatre of open conflict.

The panel was candid: the burden of deterrence can no longer be borne by the United States alone. Japan has responded with notable firmness, anchoring a new defence pact with the Philippines and signalling a strategic posture that marks a decisive break from its postwar reticence. But the calculus for Australia and South Korea remains considerably more complex, caught between alliance obligations and economic interdependencies that cannot be easily unwound. Europe, for its part, faces the uncomfortable question of whether a confrontation in the Indo-Pacific would be treated as a shared crisis or a distant emergency.

What the session made plain is that deterrence in the Taiwan Strait is no longer a bilateral American-Chinese problem. It has become a collective challenge — one that tests not just military capability but political will, alliance coherence, and the capacity of the international community to hold a line when the cost of doing so is genuinely high.

The Middle East on Fire: Iran's Perspective on an Escalating Conflict

The session titled New Middle East Mosaic took on particular urgency given the rapidly deteriorating security environment that has defined the region in early 2026. In a frank and at times combative exchange, Saeed Khatibzadeh, Iran's Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, offered Tehran's reading of a conflict that has brought Iran, Israel, and the United States into confrontation.

Khatibzadeh was unequivocal in rejecting the framing of Iranian aggression. The conflict, in his telling, is the product of a deliberate US-Israeli campaign aimed at establishing hegemony over the Middle East, a campaign launched even as Iran was engaged in diplomatic negotiations in Geneva over its nuclear programme. The timing, he argued, was not coincidental. It was a statement of intent.

Iran's response, he was careful to emphasize, has been calibrated rather than indiscriminate. Tehran's strikes have targeted US military assets, the Fifth Fleet in Bahrain, and other regional installations, not neighbouring states. The distinction matters to Iran, both strategically and in terms of regional perception. Khatibzadeh reached for a telling metaphor to describe the contrast in approaches: Iran and India play chess strategically, patiently, and deliberately. Its adversaries, he suggested, play American football relying on brute force and the expectation that sheer weight will overwhelm opposition.

And yet, even amid the rhetoric of resistance, Khatibzadeh held open the door to diplomacy. The conflict, he insisted, will ultimately be resolved at the negotiating table. What is needed, in Iran's view, is not just a ceasefire but an inclusive regional security architecture — one that addresses the structural insecurities that have made the Middle East a perpetual theatre of proxy conflict and great-power competition.

The Triangle of Power: Rewriting the Grammar of World Order

If any single session captured the intellectual ambition of Raisina 2026, it was the conversation around Finnish President Alexander Stubb's provocative new thesis, The Triangle of Power, featuring External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar, political theorist Vali Nasr, and German parliamentarian Wiebke Winter, moderated by ORF President Samir Saran.

Stubb's framework is a direct challenge to the binary Cold War imagination that continues to haunt Western strategic thinking. The world, he argues, has moved from a unipolar American moment to a chaotic, multipolar reality organized around three gravitational centres: the Global West, the Global East, and the Global South. The panel did not dispute the diagnosis. Where it pushed back, energetically and illuminatingly, was on what this new structure demands of those within it.

Jaishankar's contribution was, characteristically, the most arresting. His now-viral reminder that the last seventy years of Western-led order represent barely one percent of Indian civilizational history was not merely a rhetorical flourish. It was a statement of epistemological consequence, a quiet insistence that the frameworks through which the West reads the world are themselves a product of a particular, and relatively recent, historical moment. The Global South, he argued, is not simply a demographic category or a development bracket. It is an emotion, a shared historical experience of being spoken to rather than spoken with, of being the object of other people's designs rather than the author of one's own.

That era, Jaishankar made clear, is over. India and its peers in the emerging world are no longer seeking permission to shape global policy. They are shaping it. The question is whether the institutions of global governance will evolve quickly enough to reflect the demography, the economic weight, and the political agency of 2026 rather than remaining frozen in the power configurations of 1945.

Stubb, to his credit, acknowledged the challenge directly. The Global North, he argued, must abandon the moral high ground, the habit of arriving at multilateral forums as teachers rather than partners. What the moment demands is value-based realism: a pragmatic commitment to shared interests over sermonic posturing. The EU-India Free Trade Agreement, he offered, is one concrete expression of this new disposition, a partnership between equals. His most ambitious proposal was the idea of a New Delhi Moment, a convening of world leaders to define the architecture of the next global order, much as Bretton Woods defined the last one.

India and Europe: Autonomy as a Shared Ambition

The session on Essential Bilateral: Will India and Europe Redefine Autonomy Together? brought a different but deeply complementary perspective to the question of how the emerging order is being built, not through grand declarations but through the patient construction of institutional relationships.

Ambassador Sibi George offered a telling observation: the India-EU strategic partnership, now two decades old, has reached a level of maturity where it no longer requires third-party validation. The relationship, in other words, has found its own centre of gravity. His invocation of the Raisina theme was deliberate and apt; the time has come, he argued, to assert, accommodate, and advance.

Yet the session was equally clear-eyed about the structural complexities that remain. Europe, despite its considerable collective weight, still lacks a singular foreign policy. Individual member states bring their own histories, threat perceptions, and economic interests to every engagement, a reality that limits the EU's ability to act with the kind of strategic coherence that the moment demands. The answer, the panel suggested, lies not in waiting for a unified European voice to emerge but in building a web of trilateral partnerships, on technology, defence, and critical minerals, that complement the broader EU framework while allowing for more agile bilateral engagement.

The deeper philosophical convergence between India and Europe is on the question of strategic autonomy itself. Both are committed to it. But the session was careful to distinguish autonomy from isolation; it is not about withdrawing from the world but about the freedom to choose resilient partners on one's own terms, without coercion and without dependency. In that sense, the India-Europe partnership is not simply a bilateral arrangement. It is a shared statement of intent about the kind of world order both wish to inhabit.

Africa Rising: Youth, Technology, and the Imperative of Self-Financing

The session on Africa's strategic rise brought a different but equally important set of questions to the table. Africa's story in the coming decades will be shaped above all by its demographics, a young, rapidly urbanizing population that represents both an extraordinary opportunity and a formidable governance challenge.

The panel was clear-eyed about both dimensions. Countries like Kenya are already demonstrating how technology and artificial intelligence can be layered onto traditional economic structures to create new forms of productivity and inclusion. But technology alone cannot substitute for the structural reforms that Africa's development requires.

The session's most pointed argument was about financing. Africa's economic future must be financed by Africans. The continent needs its own robust banking systems, its own capital markets, and ultimately its own currency architecture — an African equivalent, in institutional ambition if not in immediate form, of what the Euro represented for European integration. Small and medium enterprises, the backbone of employment across the continent, need patient, accessible capital — not the extractive arrangements that have too often defined external investment in African economies.

Latin America: Minerals, Markets, and the Struggle for Strategic Sovereignty

Three structural shifts have propelled Latin America to the centre of global geoeconomic conversation. Washington has revived its hemispheric instincts with a renewed Monroe-style doctrine. China has become the dominant trading partner for most of the region's economies. And the accelerating AI race has placed Latin America's extraordinary reserves of critical minerals, lithium, copper, and rare earths, at the heart of global semiconductor and data center supply chains.

The Lithium Triangle of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile has become one of the most strategically significant geographical configurations on the planet. For India, the stakes are direct and growing; exports to Mexico alone have reached $5.75 billion, and the broader Indo-Latin American economic relationship is acquiring new urgency. Yet the session was candid about the structural obstacles: unsound tariff frameworks, serious logistical constraints, and the relentless expansion of Chinese commercial influence that complicates every other bilateral relationship.

The panel's consensus was that Latin America's path to genuine strategic sovereignty runs through industrial policy, regional integration, and human capital. Mineral wealth is a starting point, not a destination. Without investment in education and digital skills, abundance risks becoming, once again, a resource curse rather than a springboard for transformation.

Forging the Arsenal: Defence Industrial Capacity and the End of the Peace Dividend

The session on Forgers of Peace confronted one of the most uncomfortable revelations of the Russia-Ukraine conflict: that Russia, a $2 trillion economy, has managed to outpace NATO, with a combined GDP exceeding $50 trillion, in sustaining a war of attrition. Moscow has expanded artillery and missile production at a pace that the Western defence industrial base has been structurally unable to match, exposing deep institutional atrophy, fragile supply chains, workforce shortages, and a manufacturing base that decades of post-Cold War complacency had allowed to wither.

The message from the panel was unambiguous: the post-Cold War peace dividend is over. The liberal order needs an arsenal, and building it requires speed, scale, and frugality. QUAD and AUKUS capacities need meaningful augmentation. The Golden Dome initiative was cited as one model for thinking about layered, integrated defence architecture.

Indian Navy Chief Admiral Tripathi's contribution captured India's strategic imperative with directness: upgrade while producing. For India, operating in a volatile neighbourhood, operational readiness is non-negotiable. The strategic direction is clear: reducing dependence on legacy Western systems, building indigenous capability, and contributing meaningfully to the collective security architecture of the Indo-Pacific.

Reclaiming the Sea: India's Maritime Heritage and Strategic Future

One of the Dialogue's most evocative conversations took place around the INSV Kaundinya project, a vessel built using 1,400 to 1,600-year-old technology, stitching planks together with rope, that sailed from Porbandar to Oman to recreate a 4th-century AD voyage. Sanjeev Sanyal, member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister, used this remarkable act of civilizational reclamation as a lens through which to examine India's maritime future.

The historical argument was striking. India was a dominant maritime civilization for millennia; its trade networks, temple-financed voyage guilds, and seafaring traditions shaped the Indian Ocean world long before European powers arrived. That tradition went into decline after the 12th century, and its recovery is not merely a matter of historical sentiment. It is a strategic imperative.

The contemporary vulnerability is stark. India's maritime exclusive economic zone is 70% larger than its landmass, and yet 90 to 95% of its goods trade is carried by foreign ships. In an era of intensifying maritime competition, that dependency is not merely an economic inefficiency. It is a geopolitical exposure.

Sanyal's prescription was concrete: India needs to invest not just in ship ownership but in ship construction. The steel is available. The design capability exists, demonstrated by India's submarine and carrier programmes. What is missing is engine manufacturing technology and the broader ecosystem of shipbuilding that countries like Germany, Japan, and South Korea have built over generations. The goal, ambitious but credible given India's trajectory, is to become a serious fourth player in global shipbuilding within a decade, anchored by new port infrastructure at Vadhavan and the expanding strategic footprint of the Nicobar project.

The Indian Ocean session reinforced these themes from a regional security perspective. External Affairs Minister Jaishankar was clear that India's rise in the maritime domain is driven by its own strength and development, not by the retreat or failure of others. India's Information Fusion Centre, its rapid humanitarian responses to crises in Sri Lanka and Mauritius, and its engagement with frameworks like the Indian Ocean Rim Association and the Colombo Security Conclave all speak to a country that is building regional architecture, not merely reacting to others' designs. Jaishankar also raised a pointed human dimension — the safety of merchant mariners, many of them Indian, who have found themselves in the crossfire of recent maritime conflicts. It was a reminder that geopolitics, at its most consequential, is never simply about states

India's Trade Agenda: Confidence, Selectivity, and the Art of the Deal

Union Minister Piyush Goyal's conversation with Samir Saran offered a revealing portrait of India's evolving trade philosophy, one that has moved decisively from defensive hesitation to strategic self-confidence.

The headline numbers tell part of the story. Nine Free Trade Agreements have been concluded with prosperous, complementary economies. A landmark $100 billion FDI commitment was secured from the four-nation EFTA bloc, Switzerland, Norway, Liechtenstein, and Iceland, with a legally binding commitment to create at least one million direct jobs. And the near-conclusion of the long-negotiated EU-India FTA, driven, Goyal argued, by mutual trust and a shared interest in removing barriers rather than erecting them.

The decision to exit RCEP,  the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, was defended not as protectionism but as principled selectivity: a refusal to expose Indian farmers, fishermen, and MSMEs to unfair competition before the domestic ecosystem was ready to absorb it. India, Goyal made clear, will integrate into global value chains on its own terms, as a confident participant, not a supplicant.

Some of the session's most memorable moments were personal. The Australia deal was kicked off over a four-and-a-half-hour conversation between two ministers in a small hotel room, bypassing bureaucratic channels entirely. The New Zealand agreement was sealed with a handshake at the top of a volcano in Rotorua. The final hurdles of the UK deal were resolved over an ice cream and a coffee during a walk around Hyde Park. Behind the anecdotes is a serious point: at a certain level of political trust, trade negotiations are ultimately human conversations, and India has found, in this period, a generation of interlocutors willing to have them.

Nandan Nilekani: AI as Public Infrastructure

The conversation with Nandan Nilekani offered a notably different register — not geopolitical anxiety but civilizational confidence, grounded in India's remarkable decade of digital public infrastructure.

Nilekani's argument was both simple and profound. Indians have not experienced technology as an abstraction or a disruption. They have experienced it as Aadhaar and UPI, platforms that have tangibly transformed access to financial services, welfare delivery, and economic participation for hundreds of millions of people. That lived experience has created something unusual: a population genuinely and positively disposed toward AI, because it has already seen what technology, properly designed and publicly anchored, can do.

This, Nilekani argued, is India's strategic contribution to the global AI debate. Not just a large market or a talented workforce, but a demonstrated model for how AI diffusion can be oriented toward public good rather than private capture. The challenge now is to identify a hundred pathways through which this model can scale, within India and across the Global South. The prerequisites are not exotic: trusted data, data sovereignty, and genuine institutional collaboration. But assembling them at scale, and then exporting that model as a global template, is the real and consequential work ahead.

Closing Plenary: Middle Powers, Transactionalism, and the Rules Nobody Follows

The closing session of Raisina 2026 brought together a panel of unusual candour — India's Foreign Secretary Vikram Misri, former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, International Crisis Group's Comfort Ero, Leslie Vinjamuri of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and Philippe Varin of the International Chamber of Commerce, to take stock of a world in which the rules-based order is increasingly observed more in its breach than in its practice.

The session's central tension was sharp and unresolved: how do middle powers and multilateral institutions maintain the architecture of rules when the major powers — including those who wrote the rules — are increasingly behaving as rule-breakers? Harper was characteristically blunt. The deliberate, unapologetic strategies of both the United States and China cannot be wished away through appeals to norms. Canada and countries like it must diversify their partnerships, build redundancies into their supply chains, and engage major powers on the basis of interests rather than lectures about values.

Misri offered the Indian perspective with measured authority. The convening power of a forum like Raisina — its ability to hold serious conversation across deep disagreements- is itself a form of resilience. But beyond that, he returned to a theme that has run through India's diplomatic posture for a generation: the global order must be reformed to give a genuine voice to the Global South, and particularly to Africa, in the institutions that govern it. Reform, not retreat, is the answer.

The panel's collective advice to global leaders was revealing in its pragmatism. Vinjamuri urged investment in AI and a serious reckoning with China policy. Ero called for pragmatic leadership on migration and conflict. Varin made the case for WTO reform as the only credible path to preserving trade as a positive-sum enterprise. Harper counseled the reduction of dependencies and the building of resilient supply chains. And Misri returned, in his closing remarks, to the imperative of reforming global development finance, ensuring that the institutions meant to support the world's most vulnerable are actually structured to do so.

What Raisina 2026 makes visible, across the full range of its sessions, is a world in which the old certainties have dissolved, and the new ones are still being forged. The Taiwan Strait tests the limits of deterrence without a guarantor. The Middle East burns at the intersection of imperial ambition and civilizational resistance. The global order is being renegotiated in real time, with the Global South no longer a passive audience but an active co-author. India and Europe are discovering in each other partners worthy of their respective ambitions for autonomy. Africa and Latin America are asserting their right to shape their own economic destinies. The liberal order is reckoning with the cost of its own strategic atrophy. India is rediscovering its maritime identity and the civilizational confidence that underwrites it. And technology, in the hands of the right institutional imagination, retains the power to serve the many rather than the few.

Beneath all of it runs the quiet logic of Saṁskāra: that civilizations do not reinvent themselves from nothing. They carry forward what they know, accommodate what the moment demands, and advance through the disciplined refinement of what they have always, at their best, been. And here is what geopolitics today is quietly rediscovering: that the most durable strategic frameworks are not inventions of the modern academy but inheritances of civilizational memory. The ancient concept of the Vijigīṣu, the sovereign who seeks not mere survival but the rightful expansion of influence, guided by strategic clarity over brute ambition, was never merely a historical curiosity. It was Kauṭilya's instruction to a civilization that knew how to lose an era without losing itself. India at Raisina 2026 embodied precisely that posture: authoring trade partnerships on its own terms, asserting maritime identity rooted in five millennia of seafaring memory, building digital public infrastructure as a civilizational offering to the Global South, and standing at the high table of world order not as a supplicant but as a co-author. As India marches toward 2047, the centenary of its independence and the horizon of its most conscious national ambition, the deepest resource it carries into that future is not its GDP or its arsenal. It is the unbroken thread of a civilization that has always known, in the end, how to return, not in imitation of others, but entirely, and unapologetically, as itself.

The world of 2026, for all its turbulence, is not without direction. It is a world in the process, sometimes painful, sometimes exhilarating, of remembering itself.