PSIR Optional Paper II practice questions for UPSC Mains 2026.

• 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.

Open full model answer →

• 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.

Open full model answer →

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

Open full model answer →

• 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.

Open full model answer →

• 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.

Open full model answer →

• 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.

Open full model answer →

• Security provision. Operation Cactus in 1988, when Indian forces reversed a coup attempt within hours, remains the founding act of trust and is still cited in both capitals.
• First responder. The 2004 tsunami, the 2014 Male water crisis when India airlifted drinking water, and pandemic vaccine supply.
• Development and capacity. The Greater Male Connectivity Project, housing, the Indira Gandhi Memorial Hospital, and the largest share of Maldivian training slots in Indian institutions.
• Location. The archipelago sits astride the sea lanes carrying the bulk of India's energy imports, which makes maritime domain awareness there a direct Indian interest.
• Domestic politics. The relationship has become an electoral issue, with the India Out campaign in 2023 turning the small Indian military presence — helicopters and a Dornier aircraft for medical evacuation and surveillance — into a sovereignty question. Indian personnel were replaced by civilian technical staff in 2024.
• The China factor. The free trade agreement and infrastructure lending give Male an alternative, and debt sustainability has become a live concern.
• Asymmetry management. The chief Maldivian complaint is not Indian assistance but the perception of Indian oversight, which small states resent structurally.

Open full model answer →

• Maritime security. Coordination in the Indian Ocean, joint naval exercises, and cooperation between the Indian Navy and Operation Atalanta on anti-piracy in the Gulf of Aden, together with the wider Coordinated Maritime Presences approach.
• Cyber security and hybrid threats. Cooperation on critical infrastructure, disinformation and standards, building on the earlier cyber dialogue.
• Defence industrial cooperation. European access to India's defence manufacturing push and Indian access to European technology, which matters most as India diversifies away from a single supplier.
• Counter-terrorism and space, including cooperation on situational awareness.
• Connectivity as security. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor announced at the 2023 G-20 links the trade and security agendas.

Open full model answer →

• The real dispute is fishing, not sovereignty. The Palk Bay is shallow, narrow and over-fished, and Indian trawlers from Tamil Nadu cross into Sri Lankan waters. Bottom trawling is banned in Sri Lanka and destroys the seabed that northern Sri Lankan fishermen, themselves rebuilding after the civil war, depend on. Their grievance is legitimate and independent of politics.
• Domestic politics in Tamil Nadu. The Assembly has repeatedly resolved for retrieval, and the issue recurs at every election; a writ petition challenging the cession has been pending in the Supreme Court since 2008. No Indian government can concede finality.
• Sri Lanka's position is legally settled and politically immovable. Retrocession would require a treaty, and no Colombo government could survive proposing it.
• The arrests continue — Indian fishermen are detained regularly, which keeps the issue emotionally live even in years when nothing legal changes.

Open full model answer →

• With the United States and its partners in the Quad, the 2+2 ministerial dialogue, and the foundational defence agreements.
• With Russia and China in BRICS, the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation and RIC, while continuing large-scale Russian defence procurement and discounted crude purchases after 2022.
• With the global South through the Voice of Global South Summit and the admission of the African Union to the G-20 during India's presidency in 2023.
• With West Asia through I2U2 and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor, while maintaining ties with Iran through Chabahar.
• In climate and energy through the International Solar Alliance, an institution India itself created.

Open full model answer →

• Israel and the Arab states, where the Abraham Accords of 2020 normalised relations with the UAE and Bahrain, while Gaza has since made further normalisation politically costly.
• Saudi Arabia and Iran, a rivalry with sectarian, strategic and oil dimensions, which the Beijing-brokered restoration of ties in 2023 softened without resolving.
• Within the Gulf, the blockade of Qatar from 2017 to 2021 showed that the Gulf Cooperation Council is not a bloc.
• Turkey and the Arab states, over the Muslim Brotherhood, Libya and eastern Mediterranean gas.
• Proxy theatres in Yemen, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq, where the same actors appear in different combinations.
• External powers, with American commitment perceived as declining, Chinese economic penetration deepening and Russia present through Syria and OPEC+ coordination.
• With Israel — defence technology and counter-terrorism.

Open full model answer →

• Trade and investment. South Africa is among India's largest African trading partners, with Indian imports of gold, coal and minerals and exports of vehicles, pharmaceuticals and engineering goods. Indian firms have a substantial presence, and the Indian-origin community of over a million people is a standing link.
• Defence. Naval cooperation, the IBSAMAR trilateral exercise, and defence industrial contact.
• Health and technology. Generic medicines, and cooperation in space and information technology.
• IBSA — the India-Brazil-South Africa Dialogue Forum of 2003, three democracies of the South with a development fund of their own.
• BRICS, in which South Africa is the African anchor and which India supported expanding.
• The G-20, where India handed over to a South African presidency and both pressed the case for the African Union's inclusion and for debt relief.
• The WTO, where the two jointly proposed the TRIPS waiver on COVID-19 vaccines in 2020, the clearest instance of coordinated Southern leadership in recent years.

Open full model answer →