Abstract
Global crises increasingly force governments to reformulate trade policy priorities under uncertainty, yet existing theories offer limited insight into how such shocks reshape negotiation agendas. This study analyses how major disruptions, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, geopolitical conflicts, and tariff sanctions, have shaped agenda evolution in trade negotiations over the period 2016-2026. This study focuses on India and comparative evidence from the United Kingdom and the United States. It takes into account text analysis and also constructs a longitudinal corpus of negotiation drafts, ministerial statements, parliamentary debates, and media discourse. The study performs dynamic topic modeling, transformer-based semantic embeddings, named-entity recognition, and temporal discourse analysis. The findings of this study suggest that crises rarely trigger simple priority shifts; instead, they produce layered agenda evolution, incorporating supply-chain resilience, strategic autonomy, digital trade, sustainability, and economic security alongside existing objectives. The study offers a computational framework for understanding how trade policies evolve during a crisis.
