Raisina Down Under

Raisina Down Under serves as a premier platform for exploring emerging geostrategic trends and strengthening regional partnerships across the Indo-Pacific. The forum highlights critical themes such as economic security, sustainable development, and innovation-driven growth, with a strong emphasis on the green economy transition. It also underscores the transformative role of infrastructure in enabling inclusive development and resilience. Positioned at the crossroads of global trade and maritime activity, the Indo-Pacific is recognized as the epicentre of blue economy growth, unlocking new opportunities in ocean resources, connectivity, and sustainable prosperity.

Raisina Conference Report 2025

Conference Booklet 2025

Agenda

Messages

CONFERENCE BOOKLET

Thematic Pillars

Contested Frontiers: Power Polarity and Periphery

The global order is unsettled: Power is diffusing, polarities are shifting, and regions once peripheral have staked their claim to centrality. Resources are contested, technologies both miraculous and menacing, and the guardians of order are being outflanked by new actors and new theatres of conflict. New forms of war upend the consensus on how best to defend societies. Global commons — from oceans to orbits, from supply chains to cyberspace — have become global battlefields.

This pillar confronts the persistent shadow of conflict that hovers over the global landscape. Old threats mutate, new ones multiply, and frozen conflicts may burst aflame at any moment. The security order must be recalibrated to confront not only terror and ideology but also the technologies that enable them. Threats no longer lurk at the margins but pulse in civilisational centres, from divided societies to contested cyberspace, from the borders of Europe to the heart of Africa. How we navigate today’s storms will determine the shape and safety of the harbours we eventually find.

Repairing the Commons : New Groups, New Guardians, New Avenues

The global compact that supported the postwar order is fraying. The institutions that gave it life – the UN, the WTO — are struggling to serve a multipolar world. In this vacuum, agility replaces architecture. The world is being rewired — through mineral corridors, maritime linkages, and digital highways. South-South solidarities and new plurilateralisms are displacing old frameworks, creating flexible, interest-driven coalitions to shape global governance where consensus has stalled.

This pillar examines the connective tissue of the emerging order. India’s recalibration — from BRICS to IMEC to the UFI trilateral — underscores a new strategic grammar. The Global South is no longer a constituency, it is a coalition, a force multiplier for a fairer order. In this fluid landscape, India is not a balancing but a builder, creating new structures for leadership, resilience, and shared growth.

White Whale: The Pursuit of 2030

In a world diverting resources to security from solidarity, how can development aspirations be met? As 2030 draws ever nearer, ambition must give way to accountability. The Sustainable Development Goals, set in 2015, are facing a crisis. Progress has stalled, funding fatigue is visible, and planetary limits are closing in. The question now is not what was promised, but what can still be delivered.

This pillar asks what will take to recentre development in the global order. Can technology bridge gaps that politics has widened? What does gender equity mean in a digital, postpandemic economy? What do the world’s young demand beyond rhetoric? Most importantly, can development survive in a world defined by division and self-absorption? If not, what must a post-SDG compact look like — one grounded in realism, reciprocity, and responsibility?

The Eleventh Hour: Climate, Conflict, and the Cost of Delay

Across the world, nations are moving from pledges to action and accountability. Countries are putting into place the institutional systemic changes needed to finance and withstand the shock the future may bring. Green finance and investment are moving across borders, but not at the rate needed; governments, despite the uncertainty, are seeking to ensure that the supply chains that determine future prosperity are safeguarded.

In the absence of a worldwide consensus, emerging economies, on the frontline of the transition, must perforce assume leadership. They seek to design resilience, reduce harm, and adapt to what is already inevitable. The challenge is both moral and material: to replace apathy with agency, to turn the cost of delay into a call for action.

Tomorrowland: Towards the Tech-topia

Power today flows through the lines of an algorithm. Code defines identity, data dictates geopolitics, and AI shapes the wealth of nations. Technology is fast outpacing the ability of states to regulate it. We already know technology will shape us – but will we have a chance to shape technology first?

This pillar explores the evolving architecture of digital governance — the clash of regimes, the race for innovation, and the ethics of autonomy. Technology is redefining truth, work, and even personhood. The world must craft oversight that is agile yet anchored, inclusive yet secure. Progress may never be slowed, but it might still be steered to ensure that the machine serves humanity and not the other way around.

Trade in the Times of Tariff: Recovery, Resilience, Reinvention

Electorates everywhere have demanded sovereignty over their economies. In response, nations are moderating their commitment to globalisation, recommitting to industrial policy, and asserting their right to self-reliance. Yet what could merely be fragmentation has also brought forth innovation. Nations are diversifying their partnerships and rethinking value creation beyond the traditional hierarchies. Constraint is breeding creativity.

This pillar studies the evolving map of global commerce. The old hierarchies of trade are dissolving, replaced by dynamic partnerships that balance competition with cooperation, sovereignty with interdependence, self-reliance and shared growth. Progress, as ever, is born not in ease but in effort — not despite adversity, but because of it.

Inauguration

Narendra Modi

Prime Minister of India

Alexander Stubb

President of Finland

Curator

Samir Saran

President, Observer Research Foundation, India

Hosts

Aparna Ray

Joint Secretary (Policy Planning & Research), Ministry of External Affairs

Sunjoy Joshi

Chairman, Observer Research Foundation, India

Harsh V. Pant

Vice President, Studies and Foreign Policy, Observer Research Foundation, India

Speakers

Christopher Landau

Deputy Secretary of State, United States of America

S. Jaishankar

Minister of External Affairs, India

Jane Holl Lute

Former Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security; Atlantic Council Board Director; Scowcroft Center Advisory Council Member; President & Chief Executive Officer of SICPA North America, United States of America