Strategic Corridors and Regional Integration: IMEC, I2U2, and the Future of Multilateral Cooperation

This Capstone research developed governance and institutional design recommendations for the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC), with a focus on how to make the corridor effective, coordinated, and politically sustainable. The team structured the analysis around three core pillars: institutional design, sequencing and stability, and structural vulnerabilities and inclusive expansion.

This research was conducted through primary fieldwork in India in March 2026, including semi-structured interviews with stakeholders across the logistics, maritime, finance, and diplomatic sectors. The outbreak of the US-Israel-Iran conflict and the subsequent closure of the Strait of Hormuz afforded a rare opportunity to stress-test IMEC's operational and political frameworks against worst-case scenarios in real time, alongside the actors responsible for navigating them. These conditions shaped the findings in ways that desk research alone could not have produced.

First, the team examined what a centralized IMEC secretariat should look like in practice. Drawing lessons from regional and multilateral infrastructure initiatives such as the EU, AU, BRI, and BRICS, the team analyzed how these frameworks were formed, the coordination challenges they faced, and how governance gaps were addressed. The team assessed how a lean, facilitative secretariat — rather than a binding supranational authority — could coordinate investment flows, harmonize legal and customs frameworks, manage data governance, and oversee infrastructure development across jurisdictions. This included exploring financing architecture options, from UN-style assessed contributions to project-by-project blended finance coordinated through a Financing Coordination Unit, while recommending against a dedicated IMEC financing institution until a defined project pipeline exists.

Second, the team analyzed sequencing and stability. Given geopolitical instability across parts of the corridor, the team proposed a three-phased development of IMEC: first leveraging momentum from existing signatories, then building trust through existing bilateral and multilateral arrangements along IMEC, finally expanding IMEC membership to include new actors of influence.

Third, the team examined structural vulnerabilities and proposed an inclusive expansion strategy that keeps IMEC flexible and open to non-signatory states. The crises of 2023–2026 have demonstrated that the world's exposure to Middle Eastern chokepoints is not a manageable risk but a systemic vulnerability. IMEC must therefore be understood not as a geopolitical aspiration, but as a resilience-oriented architecture — grounded in diversified routes, redundant infrastructure through Omani port integration and Gulf rail completion, strategic inclusion of Egypt as a co-development partner, and adaptive governance capable of operating under persistent instability.