By Sauradeep Bag
The central question is no longer whether sovereign digital money will emerge but what institutional form it will take, who will govern it, and whose economic interests it will serve.
Quantum Codebreaking Moves One Step Forward
By Prateek Tripathi
Though the field of quantum computing is not mature enough to provide remarkable practical applications at the moment, recent developments serve to exemplify the asymmetric nature of quantum technology development and how multiple incremental advancements can potentially lead to overall progress.
Power Up: How Spintronic Nanodevices Can Fuel the Future
By Amoha Basrur and Pranoy Jainendran
With applications already spanning the automotive, aerospace, and data-centre sectors, spintronics has become a strategic priority for countries with the manufacturing capacity to compete for it, driving targeted R&D funding, national roadmaps, and industry partnerships aimed at securing technological leadership and supply chain resilience.
Global AI: A Story of Fragmentation
By Siddharth Yadav
Global corporate AI investment reached US$581.7 billion in 2025, more than double the previous year’s total, with most of it flowing to the economies that already dominate research and hardware. Economies with nascent domestic digital infrastructure, investment vehicles, research ecosystems, and governance frameworks risk being marginalized by the AI-driven future.
Who Will Pay for Climate Action Now?
By Gopalika Arora
The retrenchment of finance is not merely a result of a temporary slowdown in climate finance commitments by the developed countries. It may also signal a deeper restructuring of the climate finance architecture driven by changing institutional priorities within the multilateral system that was expected to anchor the transition.
Choke Points: How Security and Politics are Impacting Supply Chains
Ten Fault Lines That Will Define the Global Energy Transition
Building AI into the Energy Future
By Andreas Kuehn and Cauvery Ganapathy
While the integration of AI offers benefits for the optimization of energy systems through grid management, renewable energy integration, predictive maintenance, and accurate forecasting of alternative forms of energy, its energy-intensive nature could also negatively impact the countries and ecosystems seeking to adopt it.
Building a Resilient Trade Architecture in the Global South
By Jhanvi Tripathi and Samriddhi Vij
Countries in the Global South are the fastest growing consumer markets with their growing and increasingly aspirational populations. Fulfilling this potential requires addressing deep connectivity gaps that have implications for the speed and cost of doing business.
Global South in the Crossfire: Strategic Competition and Managed Interdependence
By Soumya Bhowmick and Arya Roy Bardhan
For countries across Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the challenge is no longer simply how to engage Washington or Beijing diplomatically, but how to preserve developmental autonomy in an environment where great-power competition is restructuring markets, supply chains, and industrial choices.
Russia-China Defence and Security Partnership: Intensification Amid Constraints
By Aleksei Zakharov
China is carefully balancing its position on the war in Ukraine, offering Russia targeted support while avoiding direct military involvement in the form of supplying lethal weapons or deploying troops. Similarly, Moscow would like to avoid getting entangled in China’s conflicting relations with India, Japan, Vietnam, or the United States. This cautious approach on both sides imposes a clear ceiling on their engagement and leaves limited prospects for an alliance-like partnership in the future.
Latin America: Navigating the Turbulence
By Vasabjit Banerjee
China’s economic and military presence in Latin America is expanding, prompting the United States to pursue countermeasures. Other extra-regional actors, ranging from the European Union to countries such as India, are simultaneously deepening their engagement with the region. The United States could strategically leverage these relationships to reinforce its own position.
The Return of Nuclear Competition
Building in the Rupture: The World’s New Alignments
New Arenas of Great-Power Competition
Education, Skills, Labor, and Immigration: Turning Risks Into Opportunities
By Sunaina Kumar, Soumya Bhowmick, Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhury, Arpan Tulsyan, and Manish Vaidya
By 2033, the Global South is projected to account for 1.2 billion youths aged 15–24, yet only 480 million are projected to be enrolled in school, and about 420 million to secure employment, leaving nearly 300 million young people facing severely constrained opportunities. Equipping them with quality education and relevant skills is crucial.
Agriculture, Health, and Urbanization: Convergence of Transitions
By Nilanjan Ghosh, Ramanath Jha, Oommen C. Kurian, Soma Sarkar, and Shoba Suri
A distinctive feature of the year 2026 is the convergence of several transitions: food systems are being reshaped by regenerative practices and digital technologies, health governance is undergoing reform within a post-pandemic framework, and cities are simultaneously sites of vulnerability and centers of innovation.
Climate and Energy Transitions: Hanging in the Balance
By Mannat Jaspal, Parul Bakshi, Cauvery Ganapathy, Lydia Powell, and Piyush Verma
As we enter 2026, climate and energy policies are being shaped not only by decarbonization imperatives. Geopolitical upheaval, technological competition, economic transformation, supply chain resilience, and national security concerns are exerting influence over the future of energy and climate policies worldwide.
Technology: Brave New World
By Anirban Sarma with Sauradeep Bag, Anulekha Nandi, Prateek Tripathi, and Siddharth Yadav
The year 2025 saw several disruptive and emerging technologies advance from rhetoric, and experimentation, into ongoing expansion, to an accelerated phase of growth. At the same time, there emerged a rising sense of urgency about the need for digital sovereignty. Taken together, AI, quantum computing, digital currencies, and nanotechnology represent a frontier where technology, power, and the political economy increasingly converge.
Geoeconomics and Trade: A Year of Rebalancing
By Anit Mukherjee with Dhruba Purkayastha, Arya Roy Bardhan, Srijan Shukla, and Jhanvi Tripathi
The “reciprocal tariffs” announced by the United States in early April disrupted the global trade flows and unsettled the multilateral system built over several decades. As a result, global players are adjusting to this new reality and altering their behavior beyond tariff measures to safeguard their own interests.