Introduction

This is the defining feature of geopolitical tension in the 21st century: it is never merely regional. The interconnectedness of the modern world, through trade, finance, energy, digital infrastructure, and nuclear deterrence, ensures that tensions in one region generate tremors felt across the globe. A territorial dispute in the South China Sea affects shipping insurance rates in Mumbai. A coup in Niger disrupts uranium supply chains in France and Germany. A blockade of the Strait of Hormuz would within weeks reduce fuel availability across South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Africa simultaneously. The regional and the global are no longer separable categories of analysis.

And yet, for all this interconnectedness, geopolitical tension is ultimately rooted in the oldest dynamics of human political organisation: competition for territory, resources, influence, and security between political communities that lack any overarching authority capable of adjudicating their disputes. The 21st century has added new weapons, new arenas, and new economic dimensions to this ancient competition. It has not changed its fundamental logic. The task of statecraft, now as in Kautilya's time, is to navigate that logic with clarity, without illusion, and without sacrificing what actually matters for the people a state exists to protect.

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION — ALTERNATIVE OPENINGS

ALTERNATIVE OPENING 1 — QUOTE-BASED S. JAISHANKAR, INDIA'S EXTERNAL AFFAIRS MINISTER, WROTE IN THE INDIA WAY (2020) THAT THE WORLD WILL NOT BE THE SAME AFTER THE CHANGES NOW UNDERWAY AND THAT IT CALLS FOR A VERY DIFFERENT WAY OF THINKING SHAPED BY A CANDID ASSESSMENT OF NATIONAL INTEREST. HE WAS WRITING BEFORE THE UKRAINE WAR, BEFORE THE TAIWAN STRAIT TENSIONS OF 2022, AND BEFORE THE GAZA CONFLICT OF 2023 TRIGGERED THE MOST SERIOUS MIDDLE EAST REGIONAL DESTABILISATION IN A GENERATION. HE WAS ALREADY RIGHT. TODAY, HIS OBSERVATION CARRIES THE WEIGHT OF EVENTS HE COULD NOT HAVE FORESEEN: A WORLD IN WHICH GEOPOLITICAL TENSION HAS MOVED FROM THE MARGINS OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS TO ITS ABSOLUTE CENTRE, RESHAPING ALLIANCES, SUPPLY CHAINS, DEVELOPMENT FINANCE, AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF EVERY REGIONAL SECURITY ORDER SIMULTANEOUSLY. Alternative Opening 2 — Book-Based In The Clash of Civilisations (1996), Samuel Huntington predicted that the post-Cold War world's primary conflicts would not be ideological but civilisational: organised around cultural, religious, and historical fault lines rather than ideological ones. His thesis was disputed, refined, and partially refuted for three decades. Then the 21st century provided its own evidence: the Russia-Ukraine war framed as a conflict between Russian Orthodox civilisation and the Western liberal order; the Gaza conflict activating civilisational solidarities across the Muslim world; the India-China border tensions invoking ancient civilisational claims alongside modern strategic competition. Huntington was not entirely right. But he was not entirely wrong either. Today's geopolitical tensions draw energy from both the timeless competition for power and the deeply rooted cultural and historical grievances that civilisational memory sustains.

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION — ALTERNATIVE OPENINGS

ALTERNATIVE OPENING 3 — ANECDOTE-BASED IN JUNE 2020, INDIAN AND CHINESE SOLDIERS CLASHED WITHOUT FIREARMS IN THE GALWAN VALLEY OF EASTERN LADAKH, AT OVER 4,000 METRES ALTITUDE, IN THE MOST VIOLENT BORDER CONFRONTATION BETWEEN THE TWO NATIONS SINCE THE 1967 NATHU LA CLASHES. TWENTY INDIAN SOLDIERS AND AN UNSPECIFIED NUMBER OF CHINESE SOLDIERS DIED IN HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT. THE INCIDENT DID NOT BEGIN WITH A STRATEGIC PLAN. IT BEGAN WITH A DISPUTED PATROL POINT ON A HIGH-ALTITUDE RIDGELINE. WITHIN WEEKS, INDIA HAD CANCELLED CHINESE FDI APPROVALS, BANNED 59 CHINESE MOBILE APPLICATIONS INCLUDING TIKTOK, ACCELERATED INFRASTRUCTURE DEVELOPMENT ON BORDER ROADS, AND RECONFIGURED ITS DEFENCE PROCUREMENT POLICY. A CLASH ON A REMOTE HIMALAYAN GLACIER HAD, WITHIN MONTHS, RESHAPED INDIA'S ECONOMIC POLICY, ITS STRATEGIC DOCTRINE, AND ITS POSITIONING IN THE BROADER US-CHINA COMPETITION. THIS IS HOW REGIONAL GEOPOLITICAL TENSIONS OPERATE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: LOCALLY IGNITED, GLOBALLY CONSEQUENTIAL, AND IMPOSSIBLE TO CONTAIN ONCE LIT. THESIS Geopolitical tensions in the contemporary world operate across five interconnected dimensions, each generating distinct implications for regional stability. The competition between great powers for technological and economic supremacy is restructuring the global order. The revival of territorial contestation in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East is destroying the post-1945 norm of border inviolability. The weaponisation of economic interdependence through sanctions, supply chain disruption, and technology denial is creating new instruments of coercion. The proliferation of non-state actors and hybrid warfare is making the state's monopoly on organised violence increasingly fictional. And India's strategic positioning in this turbulent environment, anchored in its doctrine of Strategic Autonomy, is being tested as never before. This essay examines each dimension in turn, drawing on regional and global evidence, and closes with a framework for managing geopolitical tension without sacrificing the regional stability that development requires.

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Dimension 1

China's GDP in purchasing power parity terms surpassed that of the United States in 2017, according to the IMF. Its military spending has grown at double-digit rates for three consecutive decades. Its Belt and Road Initiative has built infrastructure in over 140 countries, creating economic dependencies that translate into diplomatic influence. Its BeiDou satellite navigation system is now global. Its J-20 stealth fighter, Type 003 aircraft carrier, and DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missiles have fundamentally altered the military balance in the Indo-Pacific. And its explicit goal, stated in the Communist Party's centenary declarations, is to achieve "complete national rejuvenation" by 2049, which Chinese strategic thinking consistently links to the reunification of Taiwan and the establishment of Chinese primacy across the Western Pacific.

The American response has been equally structural. The CHIPS and Science Act (2022), the Inflation Reduction Act (2022), and the National Security Strategy (2022) represent the most comprehensive mobilisation of US industrial policy since the Second World War, explicitly directed at maintaining technological and economic superiority over China. The AUKUS security pact transfers nuclear submarine technology to Australia. The QUAD (US, Japan, Australia, India) builds a security architecture in the Indo-Pacific designed to constrain Chinese maritime expansion. Export controls on advanced semiconductors to China, coordinated with the Netherlands (ASML) and Japan, are designed to slow China's AI and military technology development by denying it the most advanced chips.

For regional stability, this great power competition has multiple destabilising consequences. Every smaller nation in Asia is being pressed to choose sides in a competition it cannot itself influence. Myanmar, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, and Pakistan have moved toward China; Vietnam, Philippines, and India have strengthened security ties with the United States. This alignment pressure destroys the diplomatic space for regional multilateralism. ASEAN's neutrality, the foundation of Southeast Asian regional stability for fifty years, is under unprecedented strain. The SAARC framework for South Asian regional cooperation is functionally paralysed by the India-Pakistan-China triangle's strategic incompatibilities.

DIMENSION II: TERRITORIAL CONTESTATION — WHEN MAPS BECOME WEAPONS

Borders were supposed to be settled by the post-1945 international order. The UN Charter's prohibition on the use of force to alter boundaries, the Helsinki Final Act's (1975) principle of territorial integrity, and the subsequent body of international law built on these foundations represented humanity's attempt to make territorial conquest a relic of the pre-modern world. The 21st century has systematically dismantled this norm.

Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014 was the first forcible change of European borders since 1945. Its 2022 invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent annexation of four Ukrainian oblasts extended this precedent to the largest territorial seizure in Europe since Hitler's eastward expansion. The legal and normative consequences are global: if a permanent UN Security Council member can seize territory by force, the entire architecture of the international territorial order is open to revision. China's construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea, claiming maritime territory contested by Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, and Brunei, is the Pacific expression of the same norm-breaking. The Permanent Court of Arbitration's 2016 ruling against China's nine-dash line claim was simply rejected by Beijing, demonstrating that international legal mechanisms lack enforcement against states with sufficient power.

The India-China border dispute is the most consequential territorial tension for South Asian regional stability. The Line of Actual Control (LAC), stretching 3,488 kilometres across Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim, and Arunachal Pradesh, has never been formally demarcated. The 1962 war, the 1967 Nathu La clash, the 2017 Doklam standoff, and the 2020 Galwan Valley clash are points along a continuous arc of unresolved territorial competition. Post-Galwan, India has invested over Rs 75,000 crore in border infrastructure across the LAC, building roads, tunnels, bridges, and airstrips at altitudes and in timelines previously considered impossible. The Atal Tunnel (Rohtang), the Sela Tunnel, and the Umlingla Pass road are not merely engineering achievements. They are strategic assets that reduce China's military access advantage on the northern frontier.

The Israel-Palestine conflict, reactivated with devastating intensity by the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 and Israel's subsequent military response in Gaza, has generated the most severe humanitarian crisis and the most destabilising regional contagion in the Middle East in decades. The conflict has activated Hezbollah in Lebanon, drawn in Houthi forces in Yemen attacking Red Sea shipping, triggered drone and missile exchanges between Iran and Israel, and tested the cohesion of every Arab state government between the political pressure of their populations' solidarity with Palestinians and the strategic pressure of their security relationships with Washington. India's response, simultaneously maintaining its historical position of supporting Palestinian statehood while deepening its strategic partnership with Israel and maintaining Gulf relationships, is a masterclass in Strategic Autonomy applied to a conflict where every clear position carries a significant diplomatic cost.

DIMENSION III: ECONOMIC WARFARE — WHEN TRADE BECOMES A WEAPON

Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, in Underground Empire (2023), document how the United States used its control of dollar-denominated financial infrastructure and semiconductor supply chains to build what they call an "underground empire": a system of economic coercion that operates through commercial relationships rather than military force. When the US Treasury designates an entity under OFAC sanctions, it cannot use the dollar. When it places an entity on the Entity List, it cannot buy American technology. When it coordinates with allies to restrict ASML lithography machines from China, it cannot manufacture advanced chips. None of these require military action. All of them can be as economically devastating as a naval blockade.

The Russia sanctions regime applied after February 2022 is the most comprehensive economic warfare package in history. Coordinated by the US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan, it has removed Russia from the SWIFT banking system, frozen approximately USD 300 billion in Russian central bank reserves, restricted technology exports, and imposed price caps on Russian oil. The consequences for Russia have been significant: the ruble collapsed initially, inflation surged, technology-dependent industries stalled, and economic growth contracted. But the consequences for global stability have been equally significant: Russia redirected its energy exports to China, India, and Turkey, accelerating the fragmentation of the global energy market into geopolitical blocs. Food prices spiked globally as Ukrainian and Russian grain exports were disrupted, triggering political instability in import-dependent nations across Africa and the Middle East.

China's economic coercion of its neighbours is a different but equally significant form of economic geopolitical tension. China imposed trade restrictions on Australian barley, wine, and coal after Australia called for an investigation into COVID-19's origins. It restricted rare earth exports to Japan during a 2010 territorial dispute. It has used its control of critical mineral supply chains to create structural dependencies that translate into diplomatic leverage. The "debt trap diplomacy" narrative, illustrated by Sri Lanka's Hambantota port and Pakistan's CPEC-linked debt accumulation, describes the conversion of infrastructure investment into strategic influence when recipient nations cannot service their obligations.

India's response to economic geopolitical pressure has been strategically sophisticated. The Atmanirbhar Bharat initiative (2020) is explicitly a strategic autonomy project: reducing dependence on single-country supply chains, particularly from China, in sectors from APIs (active pharmaceutical ingredients) to electronics to solar panels. The Production Linked Incentive (PLI) schemes across 14 sectors are designed to build domestic manufacturing capacity that reduces import vulnerability. India's decision to continue purchasing discounted Russian crude oil after 2022, refining it at Jamnagar and Paradip and re-exporting refined products to Europe, demonstrated the economic returns available to a nation that maintains strategic flexibility rather than aligning unconditionally with any bloc's sanctions regime.

DIMENSION IV: HYBRID WARFARE AND NON-STATE ACTORS — THE NEW BATTLEFIELD

Frank Hoffman, the US military strategist who coined the term "hybrid warfare" in 2007, described it as the simultaneous use of conventional military force, irregular tactics, terrorism, criminal activity, and information operations by state or non-state actors to achieve political objectives. Since 2007, hybrid warfare has become the dominant mode of geopolitical competition short of full conventional war, precisely because it offers the advantages of military pressure while maintaining plausible deniability and avoiding the escalatory risks of open interstate conflict.

Russia's hybrid warfare toolkit was fully displayed in Ukraine before the 2022 conventional invasion: cyberattacks on Ukrainian power grids and government networks, disinformation campaigns through social media and Russian-language media ecosystems, political infiltration of Ukrainian institutions, and support for separatist forces in Donetsk and Luhansk that created a frozen conflict serving Russian strategic interests. The 2016 US election interference, the 2007 cyberattack on Estonia, and the 2008 Georgia war were earlier iterations of the same doctrine.

Pakistan's use of non-state actors as instruments of strategic pressure against India is the most direct manifestation of hybrid warfare in South Asia. The 2001 Indian Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai attacks, the 2016 Uri attack, and the 2019 Pulwama attack were all executed by Pakistan-based terrorist organisations with varying degrees of state linkage. Each created a crisis that tested India's capacity to respond proportionately, maintain domestic stability, and preserve international legitimacy simultaneously. India's 2016 surgical strikes across the LoC and the 2019 Balakot airstrike represented a doctrinal evolution: the acceptance that non-state actor attacks sponsored by a nuclear-armed neighbour required military responses calibrated below the nuclear threshold.

Cyber warfare has expanded the battlefield into every networked system in every nation. The 2021 cyberattack on Mumbai's power grid, attributed to Chinese state-linked actors, demonstrated the vulnerability of critical infrastructure to geopolitical coercion. India's AIIMS cyberattack (2022) paralysed the nation's premier medical institution for two weeks. The NSO Group's Pegasus spyware, used by multiple governments to surveil journalists, opposition leaders, and civil society, demonstrates that surveillance technology itself has become a geopolitical instrument. India's National Cyber Security Policy and the Computer Emergency Response Team India (CERT-In) are defensive responses to a threat that grows faster than any defensive architecture can match.

In the Indian Ocean Region, the proliferation of armed non-state actors across the arc from Yemen to Somalia to the Malabar Coast creates a permanent low-intensity instability that threatens the sea lanes through which nearly 80 percent of India's trade passes. The Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping from late 2023 have already added between USD 500 and 1,000 per container to shipping costs on the Europe-Asia route, with direct consequences for Indian export competitiveness.

DIMENSION V: INDIA'S STRATEGIC POSITIONING — NAVIGATING WITHOUT ALIGNMENT

India's foreign policy doctrine, as articulated by S. Jaishankar and operationalised across the Modi government's tenure, represents the most sophisticated expression of Strategic Autonomy since Nehru's Non-Alignment: a deliberate refusal to anchor Indian foreign policy to any single great power relationship while simultaneously building deep and specific partnerships with multiple powers for mutual benefit.

The architecture of this positioning is deliberately multi-vectored. India is a member of the QUAD (security cooperation with US, Japan, Australia), the SCO (security and political engagement with China, Russia, Pakistan, Central Asia), BRICS (economic multipolar forum with China, Russia, Brazil, South Africa), the G20 (2023 Presidency that produced the New Delhi Declaration), the I2U2 (India, Israel, UAE, US for technology and food security), and the India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) announced at the G20 Summit. No other major power maintains membership across this range of partially contradictory institutional affiliations simultaneously. This is not diplomatic inconsistency. It is strategic optionality: the deliberate maintenance of relationships across every major geopolitical bloc that gives India the ability to play different roles in different contexts without being locked into any single framework's constraints.

The India-Pakistan axis remains the most destabilising bilateral tension in South Asia. Pakistan's nuclear doctrine of first use, its support for cross-border terrorism, and the structural incompatibility between its military-dominated strategic culture and Indian democratic norms have made normalisation of relations structurally very difficult. The 2019 revocation of Article 370 in Jammu and Kashmir, the de-operationalisation of the Indus Waters Treaty framework, and the suspension of bilateral trade and people-to-people contact have moved the relationship to its most frozen point since Partition. The implications for South Asian regional stability are direct: SAARC is non-functional, the regional connectivity that could unlock South Asia's economic potential is blocked, and the security resources that both nations divert to their mutual confrontation are unavailable for development.

India's relationship with China is simultaneously its most complex and most consequential bilateral. The framework of "three mutuals" proposed by India (mutual respect, mutual sensitivity, mutual interest) and the concept of "competitive coexistence" describe a relationship that will involve both deepening economic interdependence (bilateral trade reached USD 136 billion in 2023 despite political tensions) and persistent strategic competition along the LAC, in the Indian Ocean, and through competing infrastructure and influence agendas across Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. India's Neighbourhood First Policy, reinvigorated under the current government, is partly a response to China's BRI penetration of India's immediate neighbourhood: the Colombo Port City, Hambantota Port in Sri Lanka, the Gwadar Port in Pakistan, and the proposed Ream Naval Base in Cambodia form an arc of Chinese strategic presence that encircles India's maritime neighbourhood.

India's G20 Presidency in 2023 was its most significant diplomatic achievement of the current decade: bringing the African Union into G20 membership, achieving a New Delhi Declaration that balanced Western positions on the Ukraine war with the Global South's concerns about development finance and food security, and positioning India as the indispensable bridge between the competing poles of the emerging multipolar order. This is Strategic Autonomy expressed at its highest level: not non-involvement but active mediation, not alignment but convening power.

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Penultimate Analysis

Regional stability is not the natural condition of a world of sovereign states competing for power and security in the absence of any overarching authority. It is an achievement, built and maintained through deliberate institutional design, diplomatic investment, and the willingness of powerful states to accept constraints on their behaviour in exchange for the predictability that rules-based order provides. Five pathways can build and preserve regional stability in the current environment of intensifying geopolitical tension. First, reinvest in multilateral institutions with reformed governance. The UN Security Council's veto structure, which allows the permanent members to block action against their own conduct or that of their allies, has made the Council functionally paralysed on the most urgent geopolitical crises: Ukraine, Gaza, and Myanmar. India's demand for UNSC expansion to include permanent seats for India, Brazil, Germany, Japan, and an African nation is the minimum reform necessary to make the Council representative of actual global power distribution. Without this reform, the Council's decisions will continue to reflect the 1945 power balance rather than the 2024 reality, and its legitimacy will continue to erode.

Second, build economic interdependence architectures that create genuine mutual interest in stability. The most stable regional environments in the world (Western Europe after 1945, ASEAN after 1967) were built by embedding rival nations in economic relationships deep enough to make conflict prohibitively costly. The India-Middle East-Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework (IPEF), and India's Act East Policy are attempts to build this kind of stabilising interdependence in South Asia and the Indo-Pacific. They require sustained diplomatic investment and infrastructure commitment that outlasts electoral cycles.

Third, develop credible regional security architectures for South Asia. South Asia is the only region among the world's major regions without a functioning security dialogue mechanism. SAARC's paralysis by India-Pakistan tensions has left the region without any institutional framework for managing the security implications of geopolitical tension. A South Asian Security Dialogue mechanism, even if initially limited to non-traditional security threats (climate, terrorism, cyber, pandemic preparedness), could rebuild the habits of multilateral cooperation that bilateral tensions have destroyed.

Fourth, establish norms and agreements on hybrid warfare, cyber conflict, and space. The absence of agreed norms for cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, for the use of AI in weapons systems, and for the militarisation of space creates escalation risks that traditional arms control frameworks cannot address. India's leadership in the Global Digital Compact process at the UN, its co-sponsorship of the Cybersecurity Resolution at the UN General Assembly, and its participation in MTCR and Wassenaar Arrangement frameworks are contributions to this norm-building project. They need to be deepened into binding agreements with verification mechanisms.

Fifth, anchor India's strategic autonomy in the delivery of development as diplomacy. India's most durable geopolitical asset is not its military capacity or its economic size alone. It is its credibility as a development partner that asks no political conditions, transfers technology rather than dependency, and shares its own development experience through platforms like India-Africa Forum Summits, Voice of Global South Summits, and the International Solar Alliance. UPI's expansion to 10 countries, CoWIN's transfer to 100 nations, and RRTS technology export to Sri Lanka are the instruments of this development diplomacy. In a world where every great power is competing for influence through the instruments of fear or financial dependency, India's offer of genuine partnership is its most distinctive and most durable geopolitical contribution.

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Conclusion

On 9 September 2023, at the conclusion of the G20 Summit in New Delhi, leaders of the world's twenty largest economies signed a declaration that, against considerable odds and enormous diplomatic pressure from both the Western bloc and Russia's allies, found common language on the Ukraine war without alienating either side. It was not a perfect text. It was not a solution to the war. But it was proof that a world of intensifying geopolitical tension is not a world in which diplomacy has become impossible. It is a world in which diplomacy has become harder, more consequential, and more necessary than at any point since the Cuban Missile Crisis. The five dimensions of geopolitical tension traced in this essay, great power competition, territorial contestation, economic warfare, hybrid conflict, and India's strategic navigation, reveal a world that is more dangerous than the one that existed in 1991 when the Cold War ended and more complex than the one that existed in 2001 when the War on Terror began. The comfortable certainties of American unipolarity have dissolved. The norms of the post-1945 order are under deliberate assault by revisionist powers. The instruments of conflict have multiplied from the conventional military to the cyber, the economic, the informational, and the hybrid.

Yet this is also a world of extraordinary opportunity for nations that navigate it with intelligence and without illusion. India's size, its democratic legitimacy, its civilisational depth, its growing economic weight, and its doctrine of Strategic Autonomy position it as the indispensable power in the emerging multipolar order: the nation that China cannot ignore, that America cannot replace, that Russia must engage, that the Global South looks to for leadership, and that Europe increasingly recognises as a partner for the long term.

Kautilya understood that in a world without an overarching authority, every state must act in its own interest while simultaneously recognising that its interest is ultimately served by a stable regional and global environment in which it can prosper, grow, and realise its potential. The wise state, he wrote, is the one that navigates without illusion. India's task in the current geopolitical moment is exactly this: to navigate the tensions of the emerging world order without the illusion that any single alliance will protect it, without the illusion that any single rivalry will define it, and without the illusion that the instability around it can be managed by anything other than the patient, principled, and perpetual work of statecraft.

Tagore called on India to assert the rights of man over the instincts of patriotism and the dignity of civilisation over the ambitions of nations. In a world where geopolitical tension is rising, where the instruments of violence are proliferating, and where the institutions designed to manage conflict are weakening, this call is not merely philosophical. It is the most practical foreign policy prescription available: that India's greatest contribution to regional stability is to be, consistently and visibly, the civilisation that chose dignity over domination, partnership over patronage, and wisdom over the intoxication of power.

The world is watching. And what India does with this moment will echo across the century.

"In the middle of every difficulty lies opportunity." — Albert Einstein

The difficulty is geopolitical tension. The opportunity is regional leadership. India stands, as it has stood before at civilisational inflection points, at exactly this threshold.

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This essay addresses the RPSC Mains Essay Paper (GS Paper — Essay), Year 2023. Relevant to: UPSC, RPSC, UPPSC, UKPSC, and all State Services Essay Papers. Dimensions covered: Geopolitics, Regional Security, Sanctions, Cyber Warfare, Strategic Autonomy. Estimated length: 10 to 11 pages.