Hedging Between Blocs: India’s dual membership in QUAD and SCO as a Coalition Formation Game
Arish Talwar
11/08/2026
This paper applies cooperative and non-cooperative game theory to analyse India’s simultaneous membership in two structurally opposed multilateral frameworks: the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (QUAD) and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO). Three nested models are developed. First, representing each grouping as a characteristic function game, this paper computes India’s Shapley value across both coalitions and demonstrates, in what we term the Pivot Theorem, that India’s marginal contribution to each bloc is uniquely irreplaceable, making full alignment with either coalition strictly suboptimal. Second, India’s simultaneous commitment signals are modelled as a two-audience cheap-talk game following Crawford and Sobel (1982); we show that India’s consistent abstentions on Ukraine-related UN General Assembly resolutions constitute a canonical semi-separating equilibrium signal, and identify the conditions under which rising signalling costs cause this equilibrium to collapse. Third, applying the Folk Theorem, we derive critical discount factor thresholds above which dual membership is a self-enforcing subgame perfect Nash equilibrium, and identify three structural shocks capable of destabilising it. The central finding is that India’s ‘strategic autonomy’ doctrine is not a fixed foreign policy preference but an equilibrium condition, one sustained by India’s pivot value and fragile to well-defined exogenous shocks.