Editorial

The year 2024 has been a year of transitions. Fifty-four per cent of the world’s population, with 60% of the global GDP, have been or will go to the polls. The new leadership elected or appointed will shape an increasingly complex world environment. While most national elections are rarely fought on war and peace in distant parts, domestic concerns about the dignity of livelihood and work, economic stability, the impact of new technologies on individual lives and climate justice and sustainability are no longer just national issues but divide states along existential lines. Where the competition for resources in the neighbourhood creates a conflict over fair and just distribution, the effect of disruptive events elsewhere—recent wars which have led to rising prices of essential commodities from energy to food—also threatens to upend the best intentions of policymakers, holding domestic policies hostage to external decisions. In this intricate maze of domestic and foreign policies, national and institutional leaders face variable demands. Across the world, citizens are asking if the leaders they choose, and the institutions they create, are up to the task.

The drivers of the most significant transitions today hasten the fractures of the existing world order. As major powers focus their resources on retaining global leadership positions, we see the world order they seek to preserve disintegrating with middle powers claiming moral leadership and defining values and principles. Smaller powers are also beginning to shape their neighbourhoods through war, resource collaboration or new security policies. Popular challenges to state capture by political elites have emerged from Myanmar to South America, as has opposition to unregulated market capitalism and economic exclusion even in developed economies. Elsewhere, citizens have placed pressure on political representatives and governments to prevent the technologies of the future from being appropriated by powerful interests and raised significant questions about their ability to control the future of individuals and communities.

The transformations of the future likewise hinge on many factors, the constant being that no one state can deal with global existential crises alone, raising questions about transnational dialogue and cooperation and, most importantly, about the capacity of global institutions to speak for everyone. Many of these issues are on the agenda at the United Nations Summit of the Future 2024, which will have been held in September this year. The agenda documents for the summit rest hope on strengthened multilateralism, global cooperation and international law, all things at risk today.

Some of the articles in this issue of the India Quarterly point to the difficulties in upholding just such institutions and conventions, and the ability of national policies to secure states and populations. In part, they speak to the difficulty with applying international law to policy, especially where longstanding conflicts persist across borders. Or in applying humanitarian perspectives to cross-border migrations when violence between communities threatens stability. Or on the longstanding impact of conflict on border populations and on interstate borders as global institutions pay lip service to peace. But they also point, in some instances, to the possibility of shifting focus from notions of the securitisation of borders and populations to looking at how security interdependence may be achieved. Finally, two papers remind us that despite hopes placed on dialogue and cooperation, power transitions remain power transitions and, as new powers seek dominance, threat perceptions are only deepened.