PSIR Optional Paper II practice questions for UPSC Mains 2026.

• The old institutional approach studied constitutions, legislatures, executives and courts through legal-formal and historical-descriptive methods.
• First wave — behaviouralism (1950s-60s).
• Second wave — the developing world and systems theory.
• Third wave — political economy and the state.

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• Classical extractivism — mining, oil, timber and plantation economies, historically organised through colonial rule and continuing as commodity dependence in the global South.
• Neo-extractivism — the Latin American pattern in which even left governments funded social spending from commodity exports, and so stayed locked into the same model.
• Financial extraction — value stripped through debt, asset sales and shareholder payouts rather than investment.
• Data extraction — Shoshana Zuboff's surveillance capitalism, where behavioural surplus is taken from users without compensation and sold as prediction.

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• Divide and rule — keeping potential rivals weak by keeping them separated, as France did towards the German states for centuries.
• Compensations — territorial or colonial compensation to preserve relative shares, as in the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland and the African partition at the Berlin Conference.
• Armaments — building military strength, which produces the security dilemma and arms races.
• Alliances — the most important method, in which a state adds another's capabilities to its own.
• The balancer or holder of the balance — a state outside the contending groups, throwing its weight against whichever side threatens to dominate, the classic British role.

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• From programmatic politics, where benefits follow published rules and reach recipients whether or not they voted for the government.
• From corruption, which is private appropriation; clientelism redistributes to a constituency, which is why it can be electorally popular.
• From pork-barrel politics, which targets districts rather than identified individuals.

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• Defensive realism holds that the international system rewards moderation: states seek an appropriate amount of power, not the maximum, because excessive expansion provokes balancing and is self-defeating.
• Technology enters through the offence-defence balance.
• Identity enters through perceived intent.

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• Globalisation of production and finance. Capital mobility constrains tax and regulatory choices, and value chains cut across borders, so the territorial fit between economy and state has broken.
• The neoliberal turn. From the 1980s the state moved from producer to regulator — privatisation, independent central banks and regulatory agencies, and contracted-out delivery.
• Supranational and sub-national transfer. Powers moved up to bodies like the European Union and the WTO, and down through devolution and decentralisation, producing Rosenau's fragmegration.
• Technology and the platform. Private firms now govern speech, payments and data infrastructure that were once public or unregulated.
• Post-industrial social change. Ageing populations, service employment and the fiscal crisis of the welfare state described by O'Connor.
• New security demands. Terrorism, pandemics and climate have expanded the state's surveillance and emergency functions.
• Hollowing out, not withering away. Jessop's argument is that the Keynesian welfare national state has been replaced by a Schumpeterian competition state, whose purpose is to make the territory attractive to investment rather than to insure citizens.

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• Enforcement runs through the Security Council, where five permanent members hold the veto, so referral and intervention depend on whether a great power's client is implicated. Syria has been repeatedly shielded; other situations were referred quickly.
• Selective membership and ratification. Major powers ratify with reservations or stay out — the United States has not ratified the covenant on economic and social rights or joined the ICC; India has signed but not ratified the Convention against Torture.
• The Human Rights Council's composition regularly includes states with poor records, and its resolutions correlate with bloc voting rather than with the gravity of violations.
• Conditionality is applied unevenly, waived for strategic partners and enforced against the weak, which is the standard charge of double standards.
• The Responsibility to Protect was invoked in Libya in 2011 and the mandate widened into regime change, which discredited the doctrine and hardened Russian and Chinese resistance to later use.
• Human rights language has changed what states must justify. No government today defends torture as policy; it denies it.
• Regional systems with compulsory jurisdiction, notably the European Court of Human Rights, do bind states.

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• Craft without memory produces improvisation that contradicts settled positions and cannot be defended later; leader-level summitry without institutional preparation regularly yields communiqués that officials must then walk back.
• Memory without craft produces rigidity — the file dictates the position and the opportunity passes.

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• Transactional continuity — the alliance survives as a paid service, with credibility permanently reduced.
• European strategic autonomy — the EU builds a defence pillar with real command, industrial and nuclear dimensions; slow, expensive and resisted by members who prefer the American guarantee.
• Coalitions of the willing — Article 5 formally intact but security delivered through bilateral and regional arrangements such as the Nordic and Baltic groupings.

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• Robert Cox's formulation is the point of departure: theory is always for someone and for some purpose.

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• The trajectory is textbook: China's share of world output rose steeply from 1979, and it is now the dominant trading partner of most of the world.
• Dissatisfaction is visible in revisionist behaviour on the terms rather than the existence of the order — the Belt and Road Initiative, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the New Development Bank, insistence on quota reform at the IMF, and the rejection of the 2016 South China Sea arbitration.
• The American response matches the theory: tariffs, export controls on advanced semiconductors, and alliance tightening through AUKUS and the Quad.
• Nuclear weapons make general war between the two irrational in a way none of Organski's cases faced.
• Economic interdependence is unprecedented; the challenger and the incumbent are each other's major trading partners, so decoupling is costly rather than free.
• Partial satisfaction. China is a permanent member of the Security Council and the largest beneficiary of the WTO trading order; it seeks a larger share within the order more than its replacement.
• Power is multidimensional. China leads in manufacturing and increasingly in some technologies, but the dollar, alliance networks and force projection remain American.

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• Electoral hostage. Four democracies means four election cycles; a summit missed or downgraded is read across the region as a signal of decline, and the grouping's credibility rides on the personal commitment of whoever holds office.
• No secretariat, no budget, no treaty. Announcements are not obligations, so implementation depends on each capital's bureaucracy finding its own resources.
• Deliverables outrun delivery. The vaccine partnership announced ambitious production targets that were not met, which is precisely the reputational cost an informal body cannot absorb.
• Strategic ambiguity cuts both ways. Refusing to define the Quad as a security arrangement lowers the entry cost for India but leaves partners unsure what it would actually do in a crisis.
• A permanent secretariat with a modest budget and a rotating chair, so continuity does not depend on leaders.
• Institutionalised officials' machinery below the leaders — regular senior officials' meetings with published work plans and a public scorecard against previous commitments.
• Functional agreements with legal force in the areas where the Quad is genuinely distinctive: semiconductor and critical mineral supply chains, undersea cables, maritime domain awareness data-sharing, and disaster response with pre-positioned assets.

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• Socialist international division of labour, formalised in 1962, assigned specialisations to members — machine tools to Czechoslovakia and East Germany, agriculture to Bulgaria and Romania — which bound them to Soviet planning decisions.
• Bilateral clearing in transferable roubles, a unit that was not convertible, so trade could not escape the bloc.
• Soviet energy supply at below-world prices after the 1973 oil shock, which was the material basis of the bloc's cohesion and of its dependence.
• Joint infrastructure such as the Druzhba oil pipeline and shared electricity grids.

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• Internal waters — landward of the baseline, full sovereignty.
• Territorial sea — up to 12 nautical miles, sovereignty subject to the right of innocent passage for foreign ships.
• Contiguous zone — to 24 nautical miles, where the coastal state may enforce customs, fiscal, immigration and sanitary laws.
• Exclusive Economic Zone — to 200 nautical miles, giving sovereign rights over living and non-living resources and jurisdiction over artificial islands, marine scientific research and environmental protection, while others retain freedoms of navigation, overflight and cable-laying. The EEZ is the convention's central innovation.
• Continental shelf — to 200 nautical miles, extendable to 350 on submissions to the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf.
• The high seas, open to all, and the Area — the seabed beyond national jurisdiction, declared the common heritage of mankind and administered by the International Seabed Authority.

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• A reference price frozen in the past. Domestic support is measured against an external reference price fixed at 1986-88 levels with no inflation adjustment, so support stable in real terms appears to breach limits simply because prices have since risen.
• Asymmetric entitlements. The de minimis allowance is 10 per cent of production value for developing countries and 5 per cent for developed ones, but the latter also hold large historical Aggregate Measurement of Support entitlements India never had.
• The Green Box loophole. Support classified as minimally trade-distorting is unlimited, and developed countries simply reclassified their support into it as direct payments.
• Public stockholding. Procurement at minimum support prices for the public distribution system is counted as trade-distorting. The Bali decision of 2013 gave an interim peace clause; the permanent solution India seeks is still not agreed.
• No Special Safeguard Mechanism against import surges and price collapses.

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• Calibrated engagement without recognition. India reopened a technical mission in Kabul in 2022; engagement preserves access and intelligence without conferring legitimacy.
• Humanitarian and development leverage. Wheat, medicines and vaccines, and the goodwill of completed projects — the Afghan-India Friendship Dam, the Zaranj-Delaram highway and the parliament building.
• Connectivity that bypasses Pakistan. Chabahar port and the International North-South Transport Corridor make trade with Afghanistan and Central Asia independent of Pakistani transit — the most durable structural response.
• Counter-terrorism vigilance, since anti-India groups have historically used Afghan territory.
• Regional coordination with Iran, Russia and the Central Asian states.

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• Air defence: the Barak-8 medium-range surface-to-air missile, co-developed by Israel Aerospace Industries with the DRDO, and its naval and army variants.
• Airborne surveillance: Phalcon airborne early warning radars mounted on Il-76 platforms.
• Unmanned systems: Searcher and Heron series drones, now supplemented by domestic assembly.
• Precision munitions and anti-tank capability, including Spike missiles.
• Manufacturing partnerships under Make in India, including joint ventures for missile subsystems and a drone production facility in Hyderabad.

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• Exchange of enclaves — islands of one country's territory entirely surrounded by the other, a legacy of pre-colonial princely arrangements. India transferred 111 enclaves of about 17,160 acres to Bangladesh and received 51 enclaves of about 7,110 acres, ceding more than it gained.
• Adverse possessions — areas administered by one country but legally belonging to the other, regularised in line with actual occupation.
• Demarcation of the remaining undemarcated stretches in three sectors, completing a boundary of about 4,096 kilometres.

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• Energy and biofuels. Brazil's sugarcane ethanol programme is the world's oldest at scale and India's blending drive among the fastest growing; the Global Biofuel Alliance launched at the Delhi G-20 in 2023 institutionalises this.
• Agriculture. Brazil supplies soyabean oil and pulses, but the two compete in sugar, so cooperation must be negotiated rather than assumed.
• Pharmaceuticals. Indian generics have a large Brazilian market, and both defended intellectual property flexibilities during the pandemic.
• Defence, where Embraer's presence in India gives a base for co-production.
• Trade architecture. The India-Mercosur preferential agreement covers a narrow list; widening it is the largest available gain.

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• Pakistan — the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, running through territory India claims, converts an adversary into a structurally supported one.
• Sri Lanka — the Hambantota port lease of 2017 after debt distress, and the recurring controversy over Chinese research vessels docking, became the standard illustration of strategic exposure through debt.
• Nepal — transit and connectivity agreements after 2015, and Chinese engagement with Nepali party politics, have reduced India's former monopoly on access.
• Bangladesh — major Chinese defence supplier and infrastructure financier, even while economic ties with India deepen.
• Maldives — the free trade agreement and the India Out campaign showed how domestic politics can be leveraged.
• Myanmar and Afghanistan — pipelines, Kyaukphyu port and mineral interests.

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