In a research report titled The Quadripolar World: Understanding Twenty-First-Century Geopolitics, published by the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and authored by S. Yash Kalash (senior fellow at CIGI).
The report proposes a new way of looking at international politics in the twenty-first century. Kalash argues that the usual frameworks of bipolarity, unipolarity, and even the broad idea of multipolarity fail to explain today’s global realities. Instead, he introduces the quadripolar geopolitical framework (QGF), which identifies the US, China, India, and Russia as the four primary strategic poles shaping the world order. This framework seeks to capture the contradictory nature of global politics, where countries compete and cooperate at the same time.
The report traces how the world politics evolved from the bipolar order of the Cold War to the short-lived unipolar order of the US in the 1990s. That era of American primacy, however, has given way to a more fragmented and fluid order. States are reasserting sovereignty, alliances are increasingly flexible, and institutions are under strain. Kalash insists that while the language of multipolarity is now common, it suffers from an absence of analytical specificity, and the QGF aims to fill this gap by providing a more structured yet flexible lens.
Within this framework, the US remains the most comprehensive power, with global military reach, technological leadership, and financial dominance. China, on the other hand, is the systemic challenger, building parallel institutions, pushing projects like the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO). India emerges as a strategic swing power, simultaneously deepening ties with the US, maintaining historic defence links with Russia, and promoting itself as a leader of the Global South. Russia, despite its economic weakness and sanctions, continues to act as a disruptive power by leveraging energy, nuclear capacity, and asymmetric tools of influence.
Kalash also notes why the EU, despite its impressive economic weight, does not qualify as a pole in this framework. Its lack of unified sovereignty and military capacity means it functions more as a coalition of middle powers than as a single strategic actor, a prerequisite for pole status.
At the centre of the report is the four-quadrant matrix of the QGF, which maps ideological alignment versus strategic autonomy, and systemic rivalry versus economic interdependence. This allows for a more realistic understanding of international relations. For instance, India’s ability to simultaneously work closely with the US and sustain defence cooperation with Russia or the coexistence of U.S.-China rivalry with deep economic interdependence, as not a contradiction, but a defining feature of today’s politics.
The report also highlights the role of middle powers such as Brazil, Indonesia, Türkiye, and Vietnam, which increasingly pursue pragmatic, issue-specific partnerships instead of committing to fixed alliances. They use strategic hedging, transactional bargaining, platform opportunism extracting benefits without compromising sovereignty or triggering sanctions.
In conclusion, Kalash’s quadripolar framework, offers a way to make sense of the uncertainty, fluidity, and overlapping alignments that define the current global order. It provides an analytical structure that feels more attuned to the realities of twenty-first century geopolitics, giving policy makers, scholars and strategists clarity amid the turbulence of a reshaped world.