The Hedging World

Book Description

The Hedging World: Portfolio Diplomacy, Strategic Autonomy, and the Doctrine of the Global Majority

Dr Naim Tahir Baig (Institute of Geo-Strategic Studies)

About This Book

On 13 February 2025, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi stood before the cameras at the White House and signed the US-India COMPACT - a framework for defence co-production, semiconductor investment, and critical-minerals supply chains. Twelve days later, India's BRICS Sherpa was seated in the gilded conference rooms of the Itamaraty Palace in Brasília, opening the Brazilian presidency of the very bloc Washington had spent three years trying to marginalise. The same government. The same week. The same strategy. The Hedging World is the first book to give that strategy the systematic analytical treatment it has earned.

Drawing on primary sources, background interviews with serving and former officials across eight capitals, and an unusually dense evidentiary base spanning the transformative biennium of 2024 to 2026, Dr Naim Tahir Baig argues that India, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, South Africa, and their peers are not fence-sitters, free-riders, or transitional cases awaiting alignment. They are practitioners of a coherent, rule-governed foreign-policy architecture - what the book terms portfolio diplomacy - in which security, economic, technological, and ideological ties are deliberately assembled across multiple great-power patrons so that no single patron can revoke all four ledgers simultaneously. The strategy has a name in every capital that practises it: strategic autonomy in New Delhi, active non-alignment in Brasília, bebas-aktif in Jakarta, bamboo diplomacy in Hanoi, the zero-enemy posture in Riyadh. The vocabularies are native to their settings. The structure, this book demonstrates, is the same.

The Hedging World moves across eight detailed country studies to build a comparative argument of unusual rigour. It develops an original analytical framework - the four-ledger portfolio model - and tests it against a tier structure that distinguishes first-tier hedgers with structural leverage (India, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Brazil) from second-tier hedgers whose positions depend on the equilibrium the first tier has established (Indonesia, South Africa, Kenya), and from sub-baseline cases (Pakistan, Turkey) where the vocabulary of hedging has been performed without the structural conditions to sustain it. It engages the costs as well as the achievements of the strategy: the limits of African hedging under debt exposure and AGOA conditionality, the institutional gap between BRICS aspiration and plumbing reality, and - with unusual candour for a scholar writing from inside the hedging world - the moral weight of what neutrality has cost the citizens of states under military attack. The book concludes with a theoretical chapter that constructs three falsifiable predictions from the framework and situates the analysis within a Global IR tradition that takes hedger doctrines seriously as contributions to theory, not merely as data.

This is a landmark contribution to the study of contemporary international relations - essential reading for scholars and students of foreign policy, security studies, and global governance, and indispensable for policymakers seeking to understand why the Global Majority has refused to choose, and what that refusal means for the international order of the coming decade.