·        established to contribute to regional and international security and stability by promoting transparency and greater responsibility in transfers of conventional arms and dual-use goods and technologies

·        One of the world’s four major export control regimes, the other three being the Nuclear Suppliers Group, the Missile Technology Control Regime and the Australia Group. 

·        To be admitted to the Arrangement, states must meet certain criteria, including acquiescence to a range of global nonproliferation treaties, including the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT).

·        A Secretariat for administering the agreement is located in Vienna, Austria. Like COCOM, however, it is not a treaty, and therefore is not legally binding.

·        India joined as the 42^nd participating state on 07 December 2017.

·        India adopted the control list for SCOMET (special chemicals, organisms, materials, equipment, and technologies) items, mandatory under the Wassenaar Arrangement.

·        India will be able to more easily access dual use technologies and materials and military equipment that are proscribed for non-participating members.

·        India will also be able to sell its nuclear reactors and other materials and equipment indigenously produced without attracting adverse reactions.

·        It will also be in a better position to collaborate with other countries in developing such capabilities.

The Arrangement is based on five crucial principles: 

·        It contributes to regional and international security and stability. 

·        It promotes transparency and greater responsibility in transfers of conventional arms and dual-use goods and technologies. 

·        It complements and reinforces the export control regimes for weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. 

·        It is not directed against any state or group of states. 

·        5. It uses export controls as a means to combat terrorism. 

·        Open not only to States that are party to either the Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage or the Paris Convention on Third Party Liability in the Field of Nuclear Energy (including any amendments to either), but also to other States provided that their national legislation is consistent with uniform rules on civil liability laid down in the Annex to the Convention.

• India had also passed its own domestic nuclear liability law, the Civil Law for Nuclear Damage (CLND) Act in 2010.

·        Works under the jurisdiction of the United Nations Security Council and its mandate included: preparing proposals for a treaty for the regulation, limitation and balanced reduction of all armed forces and all armaments, including the elimination of all weapons of mass destruction.

Conference on Disarmament

·        The Conference on Disarmament (CD) is a multilateral disarmament forum established by the international community to negotiate arms control and disarmament agreements

·        Based at the Palais des Nations in Geneva. The Conference meets annually in three separate sessions in Geneva.

·        All decisions of the body must be agreed upon by consensus according to the rules and procedures of the conference.

·        Known as the world’s “Atoms for Peace” organization

·        Promote the peaceful use of nuclear energy, and to inhibit its use for any military purpose,
including nuclear weapons and materials by the early detection of the misuse

·        An essential component of Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), which states that each Non-Nuclear Weapon State is required to conclude a safeguards agreement with the IAEA

·        HQ – Vienna

·        India has ratified an Additional Protocol with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)

·        Mandate has broadened to focus on the “3Es” of effectual energy policy: energy security, economic development, and environmental protection

• Only OECD member states can become members of the IEA.
• A candidate country must be a member country of the OECD. But all OECD members are not IEA members.
• Mexico officially joined IEA as its 30th member country. It is the first Latin American country in IEA. 
• Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Morocco, Singapore and Thailand are the associate members of IEA.
• Eligibility for Membership:

·        Crude oil and/or product reserves equivalent to 90 days of the previous year’s net imports.

·        Reduce national oil consumption by up to 10%.

·        Legislation and organisations to operate the Coordinated Emergency Response Measures (CERM) on a national basis.

·        World Energy Outlook

·        IEA promotes reduction of CO₂ emissions for both conventional fossil-fuel carbon capture and storage (CCS) and for bioenergy

·        First international organisation to focus exclusively on renewable energy, addressing needs in both industrialised and developing countries

·        Headquartered in Masdar City, Abu Dhabi

·        Members: 180 states and EU

·        Official United Nations observer

·        adopted at a Diplomatic Conference held in Hong Kong, China, in May 2009.

·        intends to address all the issues around ship recycling, including the fact that ships sold for scrapping may contain environmentally hazardous substances such as asbestos, heavy metals, hydrocarbons, ozone depleting substances and others.

·        address concerns about working and environmental conditions in many of the world’s ship recycling facilities.

·        Multilateral convention adopted in 2009, which has not entered into force

·        Overseen by the International Maritime Organization (IMO)

·        India, ratified on 28 November, 2019

·        Member States included the United States, Canada, and American allies in Europe.

·        Committed to the principle that an attack against one or several of its members is considered as an attack against all. This is the principle of collective defence, which is enshrined in Article 5 of the Washington Treaty.

·        What are the three alliance of NATO? Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council (EAPC) is a 50-nation multilateral forum for dialogue and consultation on political and security-related issues among Allies and partner countries. Mediterranean Dialogue is a partnership forum that aims to contribute to security and stability in NATO’s Mediterranean and North African neighbourhood. Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) is a partnership that aims at long-term global and regional security by offering non-NATO countries in the broader Middle East region the opportunity to cooperate with NATO.

·        Response to NATO, the USSR created Warsaw Pact

WARSAW PACT

·        Signed in 1955, the pact was formed on the immediate aftermath of admitting West Germany to NATO, during cold war.

·        It is a treaty establishing a mutual-defence organization among then Soviet Union, Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Romania.

·        After democratic revolutions in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of Soviet Union, the pact was formally dissolved in 1991

·        formally established in 1963 by the FAO and the United Nations General Assembly

·        strives to eradicate hunger and malnutrition

·        coordinated the five-year Purchase for Progress (P4P) pilot project

·        Major provider of direct cash assistance and medical supplies, and provides passenger services for humanitarian workers

·        HQ – Rome

·        India was elected to the Executive Board of the World Food Programme, along with France, Ghana, the Republic of Korea, Russia and Sweden by acclamation for a three-year term beginning on 1 January 2022.

·        Food Security Climate Resilience Facility and R4 Rural Resilience, will be an integral part of WFP’s contribution to implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement.

·        The State of School Feeding Worldwide Report

·        Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2020 

·        part of UN Secretariat

·        established by the United Nations General Assembly in 1964 and it reports to the UN General Assembly and United Nations Economic and Social Council

·        principal achievements of UNCTAD (1964) have been to conceive and implement the Generalized (GSP)

·        member of the United Nations Development Group

·        support implementation of Financing for Development, as mandated by the global community in the 2015 Addis Ababa Agenda

·        founding member of the United Nations Sustainable Stock Exchanges (SSE) initiative along with the Principles for Responsible Investment, the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative (UNEP-FI), and the UN Global Compact.

·        HQ – Geneva, Switzerland

·        195 member states 

·        Reports: The Trade and Development Report, The Trade and Environment Review, The World Investment Report, The Economic Development in Africa Report, The Least Developed Countries Report, UNCTAD Statistics, Digital Economy Report (formerly known as the Information Economy Report), The Review of Maritime Transport, The International Accounting and Reporting Issues Annual Review, The Technology and Innovation Report

·        established in 1978 as an outcome of the first United Nations Conference on Human Settlements and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat I) 

·        headquarters at the United Nations Office at Nairobi, Kenya

·        mandated by the United Nations General Assembly to promote socially and environmentally sustainable towns and cities with the goal of providing adequate shelter for all

·        member of the United Nations Development Group

·        India has been unanimously elected as the President of the UN-Habitat in the year 2017.

• Report: The State of the World’s Cities, The Global Report on Human Settlements, New Urban Agenda, Sustainable Development Goals and Urban Local Bodies – The Future We Want

·        Waste-Wise Cities initiative asks communities, cities and towns around the world to “rethink, reduce, recycle, refuse and reuse waste”.

• Habitat III took place in Quito, Ecuador in 2016 to ratify the “New Urban Agenda”, building on the Habitat Agenda of Istanbul in 1996.  Habitat III was one of the first UN global summits after the adoption of the Post-2015 Development Agenda and the Paris Climate Change Agreement.

·        United Nations entity working for the empowerment of women.

·        member of the United Nations Development Group

·        entity works to position gender equality as fundamental to the Sustainable Development Goals, and a more inclusive world.

·        Work within the framework of the UN Charter and the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action

·        Recently, India was elected by acclamation to the Executive Board of UN Women for a three-year term beginning on January 1, 2022.

·        COMMIT Initiative

·        The Generation Equality campaign

·        No legal obligation to one another

·        United by language, history, culture and their shared values of democracy, free speech, human rights, and the rule of law

• All members have an equal voice, regardless of size or economic stature.
• India is a member nation.
• Commonwealth Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) is an independent, non-partisan, international nongovernmental organization, headquartered in New Delhi.

·        CHRI’s objectives are to promote awareness of and adherence to the Harare Commonwealth Declaration, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and other internationally recognized human rights instruments, as well as domestic instruments supporting human rights in member states.

·        Signed between P5 + 1 (USA, UK, France, Russia, China, Germany and EU) and Iran

·        Prevent Iran from producing a nuclear weapon

·        Endorsed by UN Security Council Resolution 2231

·        On 8 May 2018 the United States officially withdrew from the agreement

·        First arms-control treaty to abolish an entire category of weapons systems.

• On August 2 2019, the US formally exited from the treaty.
• The INF Treaty banned all of the two nations’ land-based ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and missile launchers with ranges of 500–1,000 kilometers (310–620 mi) (short medium-range) and 1,000–5,500 km (620–3,420 mi) (intermediate-range).
• The treaty did not apply to air- or sea-launched missiles.

·        Entered into force on 5^th February, 2011.

·        Successor to the START framework of 1991 (at the end of the Cold War) that limited both sides to 1,600 strategic delivery vehicles and 6,000 warheads.

·        Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam, and the United States

·        US withdrew in January 2017

·        Agreement could not be ratified as required and did not enter into force

·        original TPP contained measures to lower both non-tariff and tariff barriers to trade, and establish an investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) mechanism

·        Not yet signed mainly due to opposition from the European Union side

·        USA had been lobbying for TPP and TTIP because USA is disillusioned with the WTO

·        Free trade agreement (FTA) between Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Peru, New Zealand, Singapore and Vietnam

·        Evolved from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)

·        11 signatories have combined economies representing 13.4 percent of global gross domestic product, at approximately US$13.5 trillion, making the CPTPP one of the world’s largest free-trade areas by GDP, along with the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement, the European Single Market, and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership.

• India did not join CPTPP as it seeks to place greater labor and environmental standards on its other partners and CPTPP draft includes narrowly detailed qualifications on standards for investment protection, provisions to protect the host state’s right to regulate, and the imposition of detailed transparency requirements.

·        sets down minimum standards for the regulation by national governments of many forms of intellectual property (IP) as applied to nationals of other WTO member nations

·        negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of (GATT) in 1994 and was administered by the WTO

·        introduced intellectual property law into the international trading system for the first time and remains the most comprehensive international agreement on intellectual property to date

·        Specifically, TRIPS requires WTO members to provide copyright rights, covering authors and other copyright holders, as well as holders of related rights, namely performers, sound recording producers and broadcasting organisations; geographical indications; industrial designs; integrated circuit layout-designs; patents; new plant varieties; trademarks; trade names and undisclosed or confidential information

·        In 1994, India signed the agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS).

·        In 2002, India also joined the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) Convention. Both TRIPS and UPOV led to the introduction of some form of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) over plant varieties.

·        Member countries had to introduce restrictions on the free use and exchange of seeds by farmers unless the “breeders” were remunerated.

·        25% of global GDP, 30% of global trade, 26 % of global foreign direct investment flows and 45 % of the total population.

·        Members: Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam

·        Five ASEAN’s FTA partners—Australia, China, Japan, New Zealand, and South Korea

·        Takes into account the East Asia Free Trade Agreement (EAFTA) and the Comprehensive Economic Partnership in East Asia (CEPEA) initiatives

·        India is not a member country

·        India pushed to include the Automatic Trigger Safeguard Mechanism or ATSM.  This will automatically increase levies once imports cross a given threshold. ATSM is considered as an effective tool in balancing trade among multilateral partners.

·        full members are Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay

·        Associate countriesare Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru and Suriname.

• Bolivia is still complying with the accession procedure while Venezuela has been suspended since 1 December 2016. 

·        Promote a common space that generates business and investment opportunities through the competitive integration of national economies into the international market.

·        It currently confines itself to a customs union, in which there is free intra-zone trade and a common trade policy between member countries

·        Members: United Nations, Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Britain, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, South Korea and Turkey

·        90 % of the world’s GDP, 80 % of world trade (or, if excluding EU intra-trade, 75 %), two-thirds of the world population, and approximately half of the world land area

·        seeks to address issues that go beyond the responsibilities of any single nation

·        Spain is a permanent guest and always participates in the G20 summits. Every year, the host country also chooses other guests.

·        does not have permanent offices or employees.

·        India called for “New Global Index” 15^th G20 Virtual Summit held in 2020

·        The G-20 countries make up around 80% of the world’s economy. As opposed to the G-7, which discusses a broad range of issues, deliberations at the G-20 are confined to those concerning the global economy and financial markets.

·        India is slated to host a G-20 summit in 2022.

G20 Regional Forum

·       Called the ‘G20 Religion Forum’, or R20 for short, it will be a parallel event to the annual G20 summit that Indonesia will host this year, and is being seen by scholars as an attempt to “quell the ideas of radical Islam and extremism and promote moderatism”.

·       The religious summit would leverage the G20 “to help ensure that religion in the 21st century functions as a genuine and dynamic source of solutions, rather than problems”.

·       The R20 will seek to accomplish this by creating a global platform through which religious leaders of every faith and nation may express their concerns and give voice to shared moral and spiritual values.

·       R20 is aimed at developing a global platform of cultural, religious, and civilisational leadership that can pro-actively help countries in tackling some of the 21st-century challenges.

·        France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada

·        As of 2018, the G7 represents 58% of the global net wealth ($317 trillion), more than 46% of the global gross domestic product (GDP) based on nominal values, and more than 32% of the global GDP based on purchasing power parity.

·        Known as the ‘G-8’ for several years after the original seven were joined by Russia in 1997. The Group returned to being called G-7 after Russia was expelled as a member in 2014 following the latter’s annexation of the Crimea region of Ukraine.

·        Does not have a formal constitution or a fixed headquarters.

·        The decisions taken by leaders during annual summits are non-binding. The rise of India, China, and Brazil over the past few decades has reduced the G-7’s relevance, whose share in global GDP has now fallen to around 40%.

·        support each other’s bids for permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council

·        primary aim is the permanent member seats on the Security Council

·        G4’s bids are often opposed by the Uniting for Consensus movement, and particularly their economic competitors or political rivals

·        The G4 nations are regularly elected to two-year terms on the Security Council as non-permanent members by their respective regional groups

·        To date, twenty countries have signed up for ReCAAP.

·        India is a member country

·        one of the largest trade blocs in the world by gross domestic product.

·        In September 2018, the United States, Mexico, and Canada reached an agreement to replace NAFTA with the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement (USMCA)

·        The USMCA took effect on July 1, 2020, replacing NAFTA.

·        Created a free-trade area of 1.6 billion people in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka to reduce customs duties of all traded goods to zero by the year 2016

·        Afghanistan as the 8th member state of the SAARC ratified the SAFTA protocol 

·        encourage and elevate common contract among the countries such as medium and long-term contracts.

·        formed in order to increase the level of trade and economic cooperation among the SAARC nations by reducing the tariff and barriers and also to provide special preference to the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) among the SAARC nations.

·        preferential tariff arrangement that aims at promoting intra-regional trade through the exchange of mutually agreed concessions by member countries.

·        Members are Bangladesh, China, India, Republic of Korea, Lao PDR and Sri Lanka.

·        oldest trade agreement between the countries of the Asia-Pacific region.

·        also the first preferential trade agreement between developing countries

• The main objective of APTA is to speed up economic development in the seven participating states. It aims to liberalize trade and investment which would promote inter-regional trade and strengthen the economies of the participating countries. It also aims to reduce tariff and regulatory barriers for commodities, technology and investments.

·        an international organisation consisting of 23 states bordering the Indian Ocean

·        Open Regionalism for strengthening Economic Cooperation particularly on Trade Facilitation and Investment, Promotion as well as Social Development of the region

• India, Australia, Iran, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, South Africa, Mozambique, Kenya, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, Bangladesh, Singapore, Mauritius, Madagascar, UAE, Yemen, Seychelles, Somalia, Comoros and Oman are among the members of IORA.

• India is a member state.  India hosted the 2^nd IORA Renewable Energy Ministerial meet in 2018. It has adopted “Delhi Declaration on Renewable Energy in the Indian Ocean Region”

• Pakistan is not a member.

·        The Indian Ocean Dialogue (IOD) is a flagship initiative