11th South Asia Conference - Non-traditional Security Challenges in South Asia: Agenda for Cooperation

It is a truism to say that cooperation on hard security issues among countries in South Asia is a non-starter, given the lack of mutual trust and confidence in the region. The official efforts at enabling economic cooperation for last 33 years, through a regional organisation-- South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC)-- have remained hostage to inter-state rivalries inhibiting generation of the much-needed consensus to move forward. This has often led strategic analysts to pessimistic conclusions about the prospects of regional cooperation even in other areas of mutual interest. However, in recent years, there has been an uptick in the efforts at the civil society level to identify non-traditional security (NTS) areas where the countries have minimal level of difference and a shared interest in cooperation. Generating popular consensus at track II level for effective regional cooperation in these areas requires regular exchanges of views and concerns about the costs of non-cooperation. There is a need for evolution of actionable plans and programmes to turn this idea into reality.

The concept of security has witnessed significant modification in recent decades following the end of the Cold War. Its scope has been widened to cover issues like food, energy, information (cyber), demography, ecology (climate change), natural disasters, human and drug-trafficking, migration, economy, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, transnational terrorism and even pandemics. Most of these issues are not regarded as hard security issues and hence they are less emotive in nature. Nevertheless, the security import of these issues should not be underplayed. The world has lost more men and resources to crises around no-traditional security issues than to wars during the last century. By some estimates, South Asian states have lost nearly half a million lives and resources worth $59 billion during last two and half decades to natural disasters and ecological hazards alone. Given the trans-boundary nature of these challenges, they cannot be effectively handled by any state alone. This is where the argument in favour of regional cooperation to deal with these issues kicks in.

The South Asian region flaunts diverse geographical features with the Himalayas in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south and substantial part of the plain land watered by rivers flowing from the northern mountain ranges. This geo-physical feature has made India vulnerable to frequent floods, cyclones, earthquakes, and droughts. Their frequency and severity have increased under the impact of climate changes due to anthropogenic pressure on natural resources. All this have had severe impact on the availability of food and water. The geographical expanse from the Hindu Kush region of Afghanistan till the island countries of Sri Lanka and Maldives in the Indian Ocean are impacted by the trans-border dimension of the problems that accompany these issues. Frequent natural calamities have resulted in displacement of population internally and also across state frontiers. The massive earthquake in Nepal, frequent flooding in the region, rise of sea level that threatens low-lying countries of the region are some of the examples here. As per official claims, about 30 million Bangladeshis would risk becoming climate migrants by 2050. Man-made security challenges like communicable diseases, religious extremism, refugees, internal migration, energy scarcity and cyber-attacks are equally challenging.

The effect of these threats is amplified by the under-preparedness of the states to evolve cooperative mechanisms to deal with the situation. It is further aggravated by the fact that out of eight South Asian countries, four are LDCs. The region is home to 40 percent of the world's poor and some 51 percent of the population is categorized as food and energy deficient. A recent World Bank report indicates that almost half of South Asia’s population lives in vulnerable areas. Due to falling agricultural yields, lower labour productivity or related health impacts, the people of this region would suffer from declining living standards and this will constrain the capacity of the state to cope with such stress.

The region is also confronted with the challenge of securing continued supply of energy to sustain sound economic growth. All most all countries of the region are dependent on external sources to meet their energy demands.

In the last 15 years, South Asia has experienced the most number of terrorist related incidents that have threatened the stability of several states. The US Department of State Country Reports on Terrorism 2015 & 2016 say that South Asian countries are on frontline of terror attacks, after Iraq. Four out of the top ten countries experiencing the most number of terrorist attacks are in Southern Asia— Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nigeria, Egypt, Philippines, Bangladesh, Libya, and Syria. Around 3967 attacks took place in these four countries in 2015.

Similarly issues like cyber security, water scarcity, pandemics and Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Relief (HADR) have been acknowledged as pan-South Asian problems that demand concerted and cooperative multilateral action, which is not as intense as it should be given the lack of awareness about the issues on the one hand and the absence of the habit of inter-state cooperation in these areas on the other.

There is a belief gaining ground in the region that it is easier for states to work together to address these challenges in a cooperative manner, and this is likely to generate the necessary impulse for collective action in future in areas hitherto considered sensitive and critical in the region.

Objectives

Against this backdrop the proposed conference would deliberate on the challenges posed by NTS; the means and ways in which they can be handled; explore whether the states in the region are prepared to meet these challenges collectively; the experience of the existing regional cooperation mechanisms in dealing with some of these issues so far; and the way forward.

This conference is an annual calendar event organised every year by the South Asia Centre, where the main objective is to identify and deliberate on various challenges the region is confronted with and to identify mechanisms to meet such challenges. As outlines above, in this year’s conference, we have identified NTS challenges and prospects of regional cooperation as an important area of enquiry.

The conference would discuss the following research questions

1. What are the main NTS challenges in the region?
2. What kind of mechanisms are available-- at bilateral, sub-regional and regional levels-- to mitigate these challenges?
3. Is it easier to generate regional consensus around the need for collective action to address common NTS challenges, and has there been any effort to bring the states together on these issues?
4. What are the potential inhibitors of cooperative action?
5. Does the region require collective security efforts to mitigate these common challenges?
6. Is there any prescription for future (the way ahead)?