Global Conflicts and Security

• Option (d) is correct. The wave of protest began in Tunisia in December 2010 after the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Sidi Bouzid, and within weeks forced President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from office in January 2011. The Tunisian example then propagated across the region.
• Option (a) is incorrect but is the strongest distractor, because the Egyptian protests centred on Tahrir Square from January 2011 were by far the most visible episode internationally and ended in the resignation of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011; they followed Tunisia rather than preceded it.
• Option (b) is incorrect: Lebanon's Cedar Revolution belongs to 2005 and to a different sequence of events.
• Option (c) is incorrect: the Syrian protests began in Deraa in March 2011, several months into the wave, and escalated into a civil war. The chronology is the whole of the question, and the ordering of Tunisia, then Egypt, then Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria is the sequence to hold.

• Pair 1 is correctly matched. Chechnya is a republic within the Russian Federation, in the North Caucasus, and was the theatre of two wars with Moscow in the 1990s and early 2000s.
• Pair 2 is incorrectly matched. Darfur is the western region of Sudan, not of Mali, and was the site of the conflict from 2003 that led to the International Criminal Court proceedings against Omar al-Bashir and to the deployment of the joint African Union and United Nations mission. The distractor works because Mali was itself in the news at this time over the northern insurgency and the French intervention of 2013.
• Pair 3 is incorrectly matched. The Swat Valley is in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, not in Iraq, and was under Tehrik-i-Taliban control before the Pakistani military operation of 2009; it is also where Malala Yousafzai was shot in 2012. The official answer is therefore (a). A candidate confident of any one of the three mismatches makes progress, and rejecting pair 3 alone removes (b), (c) and (d) together.

• Statement 1 is incorrect. The Nuclear Security Summit process was initiated by the United States following President Obama's Prague speech of April 2009, and the four summits at Washington in 2010, Seoul in 2012, The Hague in 2014 and Washington again in 2016 were convened by the host governments on the initiative of the United States. They were not held under United Nations auspices, and the process was deliberately kept outside the UN system so as to secure head of government level attendance and concrete national commitments without the constraints of a universal forum. The summit series concluded in 2016, handing its work to the IAEA, the UN, INTERPOL and other bodies.
• Statement 2 is incorrect. The International Panel on Fissile Materials is an independent group of arms control and non proliferation experts from some seventeen countries, established in 2006 and based at Princeton University, which publishes the Global Fissile Material Report. It is a non governmental expert body and has no organisational relationship whatever with the IAEA, which is an autonomous intergovernmental organisation reporting to the UN General Assembly and Security Council. Both statements failing, the official answer (d) follows. Governing principle applicable across this whole family of items: distinguish intergovernmental organisations from state led summit processes and from independent expert panels, and do not let the presence of the word international or the subject matter of nuclear security imply UN or IAEA parentage.

• Option (d) is correct. Famine was formally declared in parts of Unity State in South Sudan in February 2017, the first such declaration anywhere in six years, driven by civil war, displacement from farmland and the collapse of markets. In Yemen the war from 2015 onward, together with restrictions on the ports of Hodeidah and Saleef and the destruction of the currency and the salary system, produced what the United Nations repeatedly described as the world's largest humanitarian crisis, with millions in acute food insecurity.
• Option (a) is wrong: Angola and Zambia had drought and economic stress in this period but no conflict driven famine of this scale.
• Option (b) is wrong: Morocco and Tunisia are middle income North African States with no famine and no relevant armed conflict.
• Option (c) is the strongest distractor, since Venezuela's economic collapse did produce severe malnutrition and mass emigration into Colombia, but the cause was hyperinflation and policy failure rather than war or ethnic conflict, and Colombia was the receiving country rather than an affected one. Governing principle: the stem specifies famine caused by war or ethnic conflict, so the discriminator is the presence of active armed conflict, which narrows the field to Yemen and South Sudan at once.

Hence (d).

• Option (b) is correct. The two state solution is the framework for resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflict by establishing an independent State of Palestine alongside Israel, broadly on the pre 1967 lines with agreed land swaps, and it is the position embodied in the Oslo Accords and in successive United Nations resolutions.
• Option (a) is wrong: the disputes involving China, whether across the Taiwan Strait or in Tibet and Xinjiang, are framed by Beijing as one country questions, and the vocabulary used there is one China and one country two systems, which is the opposite formula.
• Option (c) is wrong: Iraq's internal question is Kurdish autonomy within a federal Iraq, and the September 2017 Kurdistan referendum was about secession, not about a two state partition of the kind meant here.
• Option (d) is wrong: Yemen's war is between the internationally recognised government and the Houthi movement, with a southern secessionist strand, and it is discussed in terms of federal or unitary arrangements rather than as a two state solution. Governing principle: the phrase is a term of art attached to one conflict, and the elimination turns on noticing that the other three conflicts are all argued in the language of unity or autonomy rather than of partition into two States.

Hence (b).

The Senkaku Islands, called Diaoyu by China, are a group of uninhabited islets in the East China Sea administered by Japan and claimed by both China and Taiwan. The dispute matters out of proportion to the size of the islands because sovereignty over them carries with it claims to surrounding waters, fishing grounds and possible seabed hydrocarbons, and because the United States has stated that its security treaty with Japan covers territories under Japanese administration.

• Option (b) states this and is correct.
• Option (a) is wrong on two counts: the islands are natural features, and artificial island building is a South China Sea phenomenon, a different theatre with different claimants.
• Option (c) is wrong because no permanent American base stands on the islands, which are uninhabited, and the reference to Taiwan's defence conflates separate questions.
• Option (d) is wrong because the International Court of Justice has made no such declaration, and no case concerning these islands has come before it; nor are South East Asian states claimants here.

• Pair 1 is incorrectly matched. China's permanent overseas military base in Africa is at Djibouti, on the Horn and commanding the approaches to the Red Sea, not in Chad, which was in the news for the death of President Idriss Deby and the military takeover that followed.
• Pair 2 is correctly matched. The Guinean military under Mamady Doumbouya seized power in September 2021, deposing President Alpha Conde, suspending the constitution and dissolving the government.
• Pair 3 is correctly matched. Lebanon entered one of the most severe economic depressions recorded anywhere in modern times, with currency collapse, banking failure and shortages of fuel and medicine.
• Pair 4 is correctly matched. President Kais Saied of Tunisia suspended Parliament and dismissed the Prime Minister in July 2021, invoking emergency powers under Article 80. Three pairs are correct, giving (c).
• Options (a) and (b) undercount, and (d) requires accepting the Chad base, which is the one substitution the question makes.

• Statement I is correct. Israel established relations with Egypt in 1979 and Jordan in 1994, and under the Abraham Accords of 2020 normalised relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Morocco, with Sudan also moving towards normalisation.
• Statement II is incorrect. The Arab Peace Initiative was proposed by Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and adopted by the Arab League at the Beirut summit in 2002. It was an offer, conditioning full normalisation on Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 lines, the establishment of a Palestinian State with East Jerusalem as capital and a just settlement of the refugee question. Israel never accepted or signed it, so describing it as signed by Israel and the Arab League is wrong, and Saudi Arabia was its author rather than a mediator.
• Statement I correct and Statement II false gives (c).

All four countries experienced successful military seizures of power in a short span, Mali in 2020 and again in 2021, Chad in 2021 following the death of President Deby, Guinea in 2021 and Sudan in 2021, part of a wider reversal of democratic transitions across the Sahel and West Africa that also touched Burkina Faso and Niger.

• Option (a) fails because rare earth discovery is not a shared feature of these four.
• Option (b) fails because China's only overseas military base in Africa is at Djibouti, which is not among them.
• Option (c) fails because although Sahel countries face desertification, that is a slow environmental process shared with many neighbours and was not the reason these four were in the news together.

Hence (d).

• Pair 1 is correct. Argentina was in the news through 2023 for inflation above two hundred per cent, currency collapse and debt distress, culminating in the election of Javier Milei on a radical stabilisation platform.
• Pair 2 is correct. Fighting broke out in Sudan in April 2023 between the Sudanese Armed Forces under General Burhan and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces under Hemedti, precisely a war between the regular army and a paramilitary force, and it prompted India's evacuation mission Operation Kaveri.
• Pair 3 is incorrect. Turkey has not rescinded its NATO membership and remains a member with the alliance's second largest armed forces. Turkey was in the news for the opposite reason, namely its leverage over the accession of Finland and Sweden, which it eventually ratified. Two pairs are correct, giving (b).

• Statement-I is correct. The Sahel, the semi arid belt south of the Sahara running through Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad and neighbouring states, has seen worsening insecurity from jihadist insurgency, communal conflict, displacement and the withdrawal of French and United Nations forces.
• Statement-II is correct. Mali saw coups in 2020 and 2021, Burkina Faso twice in 2022, Niger in 2023, alongside earlier seizures of power in Chad and Guinea.
• Statement-II explains Statement-I, since repeated military takeovers hollow out state capacity, disrupt counter insurgency cooperation and trigger the withdrawal of external partners and the imposition of sanctions, each of which deepens instability. Hence (a).
• Option (b) fails because the causal link is direct and widely documented.
• Options (c) and (d) fail because both statements are factually correct.