South Asia
India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Nepal and the Himalayan frontier.
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Analysis · South Asia
India’s Agricultural Trade Is Not Just About Protection or Free Trade
India’s trade talks with the United States reveal a key challenge: protecting farmers while keeping animal feed affordable. Selective imports could help feed producers but may also increase competition for Indian crop farmers.
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Research report · South Asia
The Global Gen Z Protest Wave
Why young people mobilise, how digital platforms shape unrest, and who gains power. A global research report with detailed India, Europe and Nepal analysis.
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Analysis · South Asia
The Twenty-Year War That America Lost in Victory
Afghanistan: The Human, Economic, and Strategic Cost to America, Its Allies, Pakistan, and the Region
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Research report · South Asia
Will the US Switch On Its Waived 100% Russian-Oil Tariff, and Which Indian Exports Would Pay?
The full report. On 16 October Washington set a 100 per cent duty on the largest buyers of Russian oil and waived it in the same order. What the law and the order say, where India's Russian oil buying stands, how the waiver could end, and which Indian exports would pay if it does.
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Analysis · South Asia
Pakistan's Mineral Wealth: A Geological Fortune, A Governance Failure and A Geopolitical Contest
Why a Resource-Rich Nation Has Yet to Transform Its Underground Wealth into Broad-Based Prosperity
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Analysis · South Asia
The Bhagiratha Wager: Why India's AI Sovereignty Needs the River-Interlinking Idea
The two projects are not rivals for the same rupee. They are the same wager made at two scales: that a civilisation-state must be able to sense, model and steer the large systems on which its life depends.
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Analysis · Middle East & North Africa
Bangkok's Debt Test: Who Pays for the Iran War?
The IMF and World Bank arrive in Bangkok as the Iran war drives up fuel and fertilizer costs. The crisis is not only about supply. It is about which governments still have room to protect their people, and which are being forced to pass the bill on.
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Analysis · South Asia
Delhi’s Barricades and the ‘Vote Theft’ Claim: What the SIR Record Shows
The October 10 protest put two different questions on the same street: whether the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision has been conducted transparently, and whether a political slogan can turn a disputed roll exercise into proof that an election was stolen. The first deserves an answer. The second still lacks the evidence it claims.
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Research brief · Russia & Eurasia
Which Firms in India, the UAE, Türkiye and China Are the US, EU and UK Sanctioning Over Russia and Iran?
Since January 2024 the US, the EU and the UK have taken 1,674 measures under their Russia and Iran sanctions against firms and people with an address in India, the UAE, Türkiye, mainland China or Hong Kong. A new monitor records every one, links it to its official source, and sets it beside the rules and the trade at stake.
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Research brief · South Asia
Will the US Put a Tariff on Indian Goods Over Russian Oil, and Who Would Pay?
A new US law says the President must add a duty of up to 100 per cent to everything India sells to the United States because India buys Russian oil, unless he waives it. What the law says, how likely a duty is by 18 October, and which Indian exports would pay.
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Research brief · South Asia
Five Movements, One Template: What India's Big Protests Have in Common
Part 5 of The Protest Question. Put India's five largest movements since 2019 on the same twelve-line template and a pattern appears. Each had a domestic trigger a court or ministry can be named for. Each was met with a foreign-hand claim within days. Twenty such claims are on the record. A court has upheld none of them.
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Research brief · South Asia
The Verdict: Is India's Protest Wave Engineered?
Part 6 of The Protest Question. The series set out to test a hypothesis many Indians hold and officials repeat: that the country's rising protests are engineered from outside. This part makes the strongest case for it, the strongest case against it, and says what the evidence settles, what it cannot, and what follows for the state, for investors and for India's standing.
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Research brief · South Asia
Follow the Money: What the FCRA Record Shows About Who Pays for India's Protests
Part 3 of The Protest Question. The state's lever over foreign money is the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, and it has been pulled hard: half the licences gone in a decade, a new Bill that would seize lapsed NGOs' assets. What the orders, charge sheets and judgments do not yet contain is a single finding that foreign money paid for a protest of the last six years.
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Research brief · South Asia
The Foreign Hand, Measured: What Is Proven About the Amplification of India's Protests
Part 4 of The Protest Question. Coordinated amplification of Indian protest is plausible in every direction and documented in several. For the Cockroach Janta Party movement of 2026, the claims of a Pakistani network and a digital conspiracy rest, as of October, on nothing anyone can examine. This part separates what platforms, courts and researchers have shown from what officials have said.
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Opinion · South Asia
Three Myths the West Gets Wrong About CPEC
Beyond the headlines: why calling a $62 billion trade corridor a "debt trap" misses what is actually happening on the ground.
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Research brief · South Asia
What Indians Are Protesting About. It Isn't Prices.
Part 2 of The Protest Question. The grievance behind India's record protest count is the state's failing examination and hiring machine, not the cost of living. The data shows where the pain is, when it erupts, and what companies operating in India should read into it.
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Research brief · South Asia
Are Indians Protesting More? Yes. Here Is the Evidence.
Every count of protests that exists for India points the same way. The ACLED event record shows demonstrations nearly doubled since 2016 and at a record in 2024 to 2026. The police's own count of agitations was rising before that. A catalogue of 217 major protests since 2000 shows the rate doubling since the late 2010s. The protests are also more peaceful than a decade ago. What has fallen is rioting, which is a different thing.
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Analysis · South Asia
Afghanistan After NATO: When the Balloon Economy Lost Its Air
From the pre-9/11 battlefield to two decades of foreign-funded state-building — and now a search for economic survival
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Analysis · South Asia
Why AI Power Will Be Claimed in the Next Thirty Months, and by Whom
India and Russia cannot win the race for capacity. They can contest the race for standing, and standing has a shorter clock.
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Analysis · South Asia
The Cost of Partition: What the Subcontinent Lost in 1947
What was the economic, political and social price of dividing an integrated subcontinent?
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Opinion · South Asia
What If We Were Not Enemies?
Pakistan and India: two neighbours spending too much energy on each other, while poverty waits at the door
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Analysis · South Asia
Grid, Factory, and the Shared Sovereignty Problem: India-Israel Convergence in Electrical, Automation, and Robotics Technology
India's manufacturing scale without design-and-verification depth, and Israel's design-and-verification depth without manufacturing scale, are mirror-image versions of the same incomplete sovereignty position. Converging them is not merely good industrial policy.
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Briefing · South Asia
Pakistan, Afghanistan Trade: From a Historic Lifeline to an Economic Deadlock
When two neighbours close their doors, both sides pay the price.
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Analysis · South Asia
Bangladesh's BRICS Absence Was About More Than Protocol
Dhaka's no-show in New Delhi exposed a narrowing strategic space between BRICS-style financial autonomy and new U.S.-linked economic-security commitments.
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Analysis · Indo-Pacific
Why India and China Secretly Want the Dollar to Survive
The bloc's two biggest economies hold trillions in dollar assets, and their rivalry makes a shared alternative even less likely.
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Analysis · South Asia
China’s Water Bomb Has Exploded in Nepal — and the World Is Silent
Climate change broke the mountain, but China’s upstream secrecy and the world’s silence turned disaster into catastrophe.
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Analysis · South Asia
India-Pakistan: The Next Major War?
5 ways India can respond to the terrorist attack by Pakistan
