These are the working tools of the paper. Each is contested, and the contest is usually between a narrow military definition and a broader one that includes what actually kills people.
This is chapter 40 of the PSIR Optional Notes, from the part on International Relations in the Paper II syllabus. The complete book is a free download.
UPSC syllabus
Key concepts in International Relations: National interest, Security and power; Balance of power and deterrence; Transnational actors and collective security; World capitalist economy and globalisation.
In one page
- National interest is the state’s conception of its own good. Morgenthau treats it as objective and power-defined; constructivists treat it as constructed by identity; the practical distinction is between vital and secondary interests.
- Power in IR is relational and contextual, not a possession. Its elements are tangible and intangible, and Nye‘s soft power and smart power are the necessary additions to a material inventory.
- Security has moved from the state and the military to comprehensive and human security: the UNDP’s 1994 formulation of freedom from fear and freedom from want, with seven components.
- Non-traditional security threats, asked in 2025, include food, water, energy, health, climate, migration, cyber and terrorism. They are transnational, non-military in origin and cannot be addressed by defence alone.
- Balance of power is a description, a policy and an outcome. Its mechanisms are internal balancing (armament) and external balancing (alliance); bandwagoning is the alternative behaviour.
- Deterrence is dissuasion by threat of unacceptable cost. It requires capability, credibility and communication, and divides into deterrence by punishment and by denial.
- Transnational actors, multinational corporations, international NGOs, transnational advocacy networks, terrorist and criminal organisations, and now platform companies, operate across borders without state authorisation.
- Collective security is universal and directed against any aggressor from within; collective defence is an alliance against an external threat. Conflating them is the commonest error in this chapter.
National interest
Morgenthau‘s position: the national interest is objective, defined in terms of power, and discoverable by rational analysis; statesmen who substitute ideology or morality for it endanger their states. The category gives realism its normative content, since acting on interest is the statesman’s duty.
The critiques. Ambiguity: the term justifies almost any policy, and Arnold Wolfers called it an ambiguous symbol. Constructivist: interests derive from identity, so what a state wants depends on how it understands itself, which is why Canada and Cuba read the same geography differently. Pluralist and Marxist: what is presented as the national interest is the interest of the coalition or class that controls policy.
The usable distinctions: vital interests, for which a state will use force, chiefly survival, territorial integrity and regime security, against secondary interests, which are negotiable; permanent against variable; and identical, complementary and conflicting interests as between states.
Power
Power is the ability to make others do what they would not otherwise do, which is Dahl’s formulation from Chapter 7 applied internationally. Three points follow. Power is relational: it exists in a relationship, not as a possession. It is contextual: capabilities useful in one domain are useless in another. And it is not simply convertible: military superiority does not translate automatically into political outcomes, as Vietnam and Afghanistan demonstrate.
Elements. Tangible: geography, population, natural resources, economic and industrial capacity, military capability, technology. Intangible: national morale, quality of leadership and diplomacy, quality of government, ideology and reputation.
Joseph Nye‘s trio is the analytical core.
- Hard power: coercion and payment. Military force and economic inducement.
- Soft power: getting others to want what you want, through the attractiveness of culture, political values and foreign policy when they are seen as legitimate. Its resources are not owned by governments, which limits their ability to deploy it.
- Smart power: combining the two according to context.
Related terms: structural power, in Strange’s account, is the power to shape the frameworks within which others operate, in security, production, finance and knowledge, which she argued matters more than relational power. Sharp power names authoritarian influence operations that use openness against open societies, and is distinguished from soft power by its manipulative intent.
Security
From national to human security
Traditional security is state-centric and military: the referent object is the state, the threat is external military attack, and the instrument is defence, alliance and deterrence.
Comprehensive security widens the agenda to economic, environmental, societal and political sectors. The Copenhagen School, Buzan and Wæver, adds the concept of securitisation: an issue becomes a security issue when an actor successfully presents it as an existential threat requiring emergency measures, so security is a speech act, and desecuritisation is often preferable.
Human security, from the UNDP Human Development Report 1994, shifts the referent object from the state to the individual and defines it as freedom from fear and freedom from want. Its seven components are economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political security. The 2005 World Summit added the related principle of Responsibility to Protect, treated in Chapter 45.
The critique of the widened agenda: if everything is security, the concept loses analytical purchase and militarised responses may be applied to social problems. The reply is that the narrow definition excluded the causes of most deaths.
Non-traditional security threats
- Food. Insecurity arises from production shocks, price volatility, conflict and export restriction rather than from global scarcity. The 2007–08 and 2022 price spikes showed how quickly export bans cascade. Its security consequences are documented: price shocks contributed to unrest across North Africa and West Asia in 2010–11.
- Water. Shared river basins under stress: the Nile and the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, the Mekong, the Indus and the Brahmaputra. Water scarcity is more often a driver of internal displacement and local conflict than of interstate war, which the evidence supports better than the water-wars thesis.
- Climate. A threat multiplier: sea-level rise threatens the territorial existence of small island states, which is a security question in the most literal sense; extreme events displace populations; and warming changes the viability of agriculture in already fragile regions.
- Health. COVID-19 demonstrated that a pathogen can do more damage to economies and to mobility than any conventional threat, and that health capacity is a security asset.
- Energy, migration, cyber and terrorism complete the standard list. Cyber is the most rapidly changing, since attacks on critical infrastructure blur the line between war and crime and attribution is difficult.
The common features to state in any answer: they are transnational, so no state can address them alone; non-military in origin, so defence spending does not answer them; asymmetric, since they fall hardest on the poorest; and they are interlinked, as climate change drives food insecurity which drives migration.
Balance of power and deterrence
Balance of power
The term carries several meanings and distinguishing them is worth a mark: a description of a distribution in which no state predominates; a policy pursued deliberately; and an outcome that recurs whether or not anyone intends it, which is Waltz’s claim.
Mechanisms: internal balancing through armament and economic development; external balancing through alliance; and, in the classical European system, the balancer role played by Britain. Bandwagoning, joining the stronger side, is the alternative, and Stephen Walt‘s refinement is that states balance against threat, which combines aggregate power, proximity, offensive capability and perceived intentions, rather than against power alone, which explains why weaker states allied with the far stronger United States against the nearer Soviet Union.
Contemporary forms: soft balancing through diplomatic coordination, institutions and economic statecraft short of alliance, which describes much of the behaviour around China’s rise; and hedging, which is the characteristic strategy of middle powers including India.
Deterrence
Deterrence is persuading an adversary that the costs of an action will exceed its benefits. Its three requirements are capability, credibility and communication.
Types: deterrence by punishment threatens unacceptable retaliation; deterrence by denial threatens to make the objective unattainable. Extended deterrence covers allies, and is harder to make credible than deterrence of attack on oneself. Immediate deterrence addresses a specific crisis; general deterrence operates continuously.
Nuclear concepts: second-strike capability, the ability to retaliate after absorbing a first strike, which is what makes deterrence stable; mutual assured destruction when both sides possess it; the stability-instability paradox, that stability at the nuclear level may permit more conflict at lower levels, which is the standard frame for reading India and Pakistan; and credible minimum deterrence with no first use, which is India’s declared posture, treated in Chapter 50.
The critiques: deterrence assumes rational, unitary, well-informed actors; it fails against non-state actors with no territory to hold at risk; and it requires the constant maintenance of a threat one hopes never to execute.
Transnational actors and collective security
Transnational actors
Actors operating across borders without acting as agents of a state: multinational corporations, whose revenues exceed the GDP of most states and whose investment decisions constrain governments, per Lindblom in Chapter 2; international NGOs and transnational advocacy networks, whose boomerang pattern, in Keck and Sikkink’s account, lets domestic groups blocked at home mobilise external pressure on their own government; epistemic communities of experts who shape agendas, as in ozone and climate policy; terrorist and criminal networks; diasporas; and platform and technology companies, which now exercise quasi-regulatory power over speech and data.
Their significance for theory: they falsify the strict state-centric assumption without displacing states, which is why complex interdependence, in Keohane and Nye, describes multiple channels of contact, an absence of hierarchy among issues, and a diminished role for military force among interdependent states.
Collective security
The distinction to make first, and it is the one candidates most often miss:
| Collective security | Collective defence | |
|---|---|---|
| Membership | Universal or near-universal | Selective alliance |
| Threat | From within the system: any member that commits aggression | From outside the alliance |
| Obligation | All against the aggressor, whoever it is | All against an external attacker |
| Prior identification of the enemy | None; the aggressor is identified when aggression occurs | Yes, in practice |
| Examples | League of Nations Articles 10 and 16; UN Chapter VII | NATO Article 5; the former Warsaw Pact |
Requirements for collective security to work: near-universal membership; agreement on what constitutes aggression; commitment to act against any aggressor including a friend; and overwhelming preponderance of the collectivity over any single state.
Why it has largely failed: great powers exempted themselves, which the veto formalises; identifying the aggressor is a political act; states subordinate the general obligation to their particular interests; and the requirement to act against a friend is rarely honoured. The League’s failures over Manchuria and Abyssinia, and the UN’s paralysis whenever a permanent member is a party, are the standing evidence. The Korean action of 1950 succeeded only because of a Soviet boycott, and the Gulf War of 1990–91 is the clearest genuine instance.
Where answers lose marks
- Treating national interest as self-evident. Wolfers’s ambiguous symbol and the constructivist objection that interests follow identity both belong in any answer.
- Listing power’s elements without the qualification that power is relational, contextual and not readily convertible.
- Confusing collective security with collective defence, or calling NATO a collective security organisation. It is an alliance.
- Giving human security as a list of seven. The referent-object shift from state to individual is the conceptual move, and the securitisation critique should be noted.
- Treating deterrence as automatic. Capability, credibility and communication are all required, and none is guaranteed.
- Presenting non-traditional threats as a list. Mechanism, transnationality and interlinkage are what make the answer analytical.
Asked before
- Explain the non-traditional security threats in the context of food and environmental crises. (2025, Paper II, 10 marks)
- Emerging technologies are posing a serious threat to human security. Illustrate your answer with suitable examples. (2023, Paper II, 15 marks)
Answer skeleton
Explain the non-traditional security threats in the context of food and environmental crises. (10 marks, 150 words)
Frame. Define by contrast: traditional security takes the state as referent and military attack as the threat; non-traditional security takes the individual and community as referent, following the UNDP’s 1994 human security formulation of freedom from fear and freedom from want.
Food. Insecurity arises from price volatility, conflict, and export restriction rather than from absolute scarcity. The 2007–08 and 2022 spikes showed export bans cascading; price shocks contributed to unrest across North Africa and West Asia in 2010–11.
Environment and climate. Climate as a threat multiplier: sea-level rise threatens the territorial existence of small island states; extreme events displace populations; warming undermines agriculture in already fragile regions; and shared river basins under stress, the Nile, Mekong, Indus and Brahmaputra, raise interstate friction.
The linkage. Climate reduces yields, which raises prices, which drives displacement, which produces political instability. The threats are not separate items but a chain.
Distinctive features. Transnational, so unaddressable by one state; non-military in origin, so defence budgets do not answer them; asymmetric, falling hardest on the poorest; and interlinked.
Close on the caution. The securitisation critique, from Buzan and Wæver: presenting an issue as an existential threat licenses emergency measures, and a militarised response to a developmental problem can make it worse.
Last-mile revision
- National interest: Morgenthau objective and power-defined; Wolfers’s ambiguous symbol; vital against secondary; constructivist and class critiques.
- Power: relational, contextual, not convertible; tangible and intangible elements; Nye’s hard, soft and smart; Strange’s structural power; sharp power.
- Security: traditional, comprehensive, human (UNDP 1994, freedom from fear and want, seven components); Copenhagen School securitisation and desecuritisation.
- Non-traditional threats: food, water, climate as threat multiplier, health, energy, migration, cyber, terrorism; transnational, non-military, asymmetric, interlinked.
- Balance of power: description, policy, outcome; internal and external balancing; balancer; bandwagoning; Walt’s balance of threat; soft balancing and hedging.
- Deterrence: capability, credibility, communication; punishment and denial; extended, immediate and general; second strike, MAD, stability-instability paradox, credible minimum deterrence with no first use.
- Transnational actors: MNCs, INGOs, Keck and Sikkink’s boomerang pattern, epistemic communities, criminal and terrorist networks, diasporas, platforms; complex interdependence.
- Collective security against collective defence; requirements and reasons for failure; Korea 1950 and the Gulf War 1990–91.
Read the rest. This chapter is one of 58 in the complete PSIR Optional Notes, covering Paper I and Paper II in full — free to download.
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