In a world fracturing along competing axes of power, Congress MP Dr. Shashi Tharoor took the stage at the Richard von Weizsäcker Forum 2026 on Tuesday, October 6, for a fireside conversation that cut to the heart of one of global diplomacy's most urgent questions: can middle powers still chart their own course? Tharoor engaged in the discussion with Prof. Dr. Senem Aydin Düzgit, a prominent scholar of European politics and international relations, covering the shifting role of middle powers, the possibilities and hard limits of strategic autonomy, and how nations can exercise meaningful influence when great-power rivalry increasingly sets the terms.

The Middle-Power Moment — and Its Contradictions

The timing of this conversation is pointed. As the United States, China, and a resurgent Russia compete to redraw the rules of the international order, a cluster of nations — India, Türkiye, Brazil, South Africa, the Gulf states — find themselves courted by all sides and pressured by each. Strategic autonomy, the doctrine of preserving independent foreign-policy space without formal alignment, has become both a shield and a tightrope for these countries. For India, the tension is vivid. New Delhi has deepened its Quad partnership while sustaining its historic ties with Moscow, bargained for discounted Russian oil through the Ukraine conflict, and pushed its own candidacy for a reformed UN Security Council seat. The question Tharoor and Düzgit explored — how much room for manoeuvre genuinely exists in a bipolar or multipolar squeeze — is not theoretical for Indian policymakers. It is a weekly calculation.

Prof. Düzgit and the Forum's Significance

Prof. Dr. Senem Aydin Düzgit is a leading European academic voice on transatlantic and EU-neighbourhood politics, known for rigorous comparative work on democracy, foreign policy, and Türkiye's geopolitical pivot. The Richard von Weizsäcker Forum, named after the late German Federal President and statesman celebrated for his moral clarity on post-war reconciliation, convenes policymakers, scholars, and public intellectuals to debate exactly the kind of structural shifts reshaping global governance. Tharoor's presence there — as a former UN Under-Secretary-General, former Union Minister of State for External Affairs, and a sitting parliamentarian from Thiruvananthapuram — signals the forum's draw toward voices that straddle the Global South and international institutions simultaneously.

A Lively Q&A and What It Signals

The session closed with what Tharoor described as 'a lively Q&A with the engaged audience', a detail that matters: these forums often function as informal diplomatic corridors where ideas get stress-tested and positions get refined. The questions from the floor, in a room likely populated by European policymakers and academics, would themselves reflect how the West is rethinking its assumptions about countries that refuse clean alignment. For India's foreign-policy watchers, the exchange underscores a growing global appetite to understand — not just manage — the logic of strategic autonomy as practiced by the world's most populous democracy. Middle powers are no longer just swing votes. They are increasingly the stage on which the next architecture of global order gets drafted — and Tharoor, in Berlin, was helping write the script.