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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• 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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