Quad Hub
The Quad Hub aims to track Quad’s policy initiatives, activities, and discourse
About the Quad Hub
The Quad is a strategic grouping involving four countries: India, the United States, Australia, and Japan.
In 2017, senior officials from the Quad countries met on the sidelines of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Regional Forum (ARF). The grouping has expanded to regular foreign ministerial consultations and, since 2021, leader-level annual summits. The Quad’s role in the Indo-Pacific focuses on providing public goods to regional partners across numerous domains like cybersecurity, climate change, infrastructure, and maritime security.
The Quad Hub features interactive dashboards focusing on the Quad’s institutional history — detailing meetings at the official, ministerial, and leader levels — and outlining the key initiatives concerning the Quad’s sectoral focuses.
The Hub features Takshashila’s research, podcasts, and newsletters for advancing scholarship on the Quad. Our work spans semiconductors, biotech and biomanufacturing, maritime security, and the space sector.
We also have a dedicated weekly newsletter — the Quad Bulletin that tracks the grouping’s developments in the Indo-Pacific, with an eye towards India’s expanding relations with the three Quad countries.
Our Recommendations
Semiconductors
Given their unique global supply chain, multilateralism is not a choice but a necessity for semiconductors. We have argued that the Quad is suited for cooperation on semiconductors, and that the Quad should invest in building a robust joint semiconductor ecosystem based on certain key principles. For instance, the Quad should priortise forming a consortium aimed at building a diversified semiconductor manufacturing base and cooperate to develop new standards such as RISC-V and GaN manufacturing.
Biotech and Manufacturing
For the biotech sector, we have argued that the Quad should cooperate in the biotechnology domain, across six areas: pandemic research, sustainable agriculture and animal husbandry, vaccines, gene editing, synthetic biology, and computational biology. In more recent research, in collaboration with researchers at the Australian National University (ANU), we proposed that the Quad should commit to setting up a bio-manufacturing hub in India, which can act as a platform to coordinate and collaborate within the biotechnology sector between the Quad countries.
Maritime Security in the Indian Ocean Region
Within the maritime security domain, we have argued that the Quad should invest its resources to meet non-traditional security challenges in the Western Indian Ocean Region. The Quad can help aid efforts towards meeting the IUU challenge by strengthening legislative frameworks concerning combatting IUU, bolstering regional maritime surveillance networks, and building institutional connections with IOR organisations. Maritime terrorism, particularly drug smuggling and piracy, can be tackled by focusing on the implementation of key legal instruments and frameworks, and aiding capacities of WIOR countries.
Space Sector
In the space sector, we proposed the idea of a Quad space station, examining the collaborative potential between the Quad countries by comparing the countries’ space policy priorities, technological capabilities and the degree of past cooperation. Indian policymakers and the scientific community should view India’s space policy in the broader ambit of India’s technology strategy — where technology serves as a means to advance national goals that bring peace and prosperity to all citizens.
Research Documents
