South Asia is a region bearing much promise, and no fewer challenges. Aside from the widely covered traditional security threats—terrorism and armed conflict—at the forefront of the regional agenda are issues of gender, resource scarcity, climate change, and other complex, structural roadblocks hindering development and growth, writes Gleb Makarevich, Research Fellow, South Asia and Indian Ocean Group, Center of the Indo-Pacific Region, IMEMO RAS
Defence Above All?
From the Himalayan mountain arc in the north to the atolls of the Indian Ocean in the south, from the Baloch deserts in the west to the Burmese jungles in the east stretches a region conventionally referred to as South Asia. Even the territorial sweep of these—admittedly highly conditional—boundaries plainly hints at the diversity of security challenges characteristic of this region.
Despite this, even within the expert community discussions are often reduced to military-political issues alone. This is understandable: the region is marked both by episodes of escalation between major powers (India–Pakistan, India–China), and by the intensification of intra-state armed conflicts—these crises alone suffice to saturate the news cycle.
However, the concentration of expert attention on the defence policies of South Asian states does not diminish the importance of other issues—terrorist activity, shortages of energy resources, questions of water management and agricultural production, climate change, and gender security.
These threats do not always relate directly to the geopolitical constructs favoured by many analysts, yet they play no lesser—and arguably an even greater—role for the populations of South Asian countries themselves. It is for this reason that we shall attempt to examine traditional and non-traditional threats to regional security in their totality, highlighting the interconnections between them.
Old Feuds
The most obvious example of a complex phenomenon commanding the attention of both South Asia specialists and the wider international studies community is the Indo-Pakistani conflict. Even a preliminary deconstruction presupposes isolating the Kashmir issue, encompassing the question of sovereignty over the region, the legal status of territories controlled by India and Pakistan, and the dynamics of armed confrontation involving both state and non-state actors; the risk of full-scale war between India and Pakistan, including land and naval operations, as well as air, missile, and drone strikes on the internationally recognised territory of the adversary; and the nuclear dimension of the conflict, with New Delhi treating China as a participant in the broader strategic confrontation too.
A similar multilayered character defines the Afghan–Pakistani conflict: a border problem typical of many post-colonial states, dividing a shared ethno-cultural space; terrorist activity at the hands of radical ethno-religious armed groups; and concerns regarding the involvement of third parties in the conflict.
A consequence of the region remaining so prone to conflict is not only the elevated likelihood of the use of force at the interstate level, but also a broader normalisation of violence. As a result, terrorism is widely regarded as one of South Asia’s principal challenges.
The Roots of Terror
When discussing the terrorist threat, public perception tends to prioritise the Middle East, although some South Asian states could rival their western neighbours. Pakistan, for instance, ranks second in the Global Terrorism Index (after Burkina Faso)—the country experiences hundreds of terrorist attacks annually, claiming the lives of military personnel, law enforcement officers, and civilians alike, and in recent years this trend has been steadily intensifying.
While the situation in India is less dramatic, terrorism remains an acute problem: alongside the activities of numerous radical Islamist organisations, the country has extensive experience in confronting left-wing extremist groups. This is further compounded by the presence of numerous ethnic separatist movements.
Resource Scarcity
Energy security issues are acute across the region: South Asian countries are net importers of energy resources, and their availability determines not only overall macroeconomic growth rates and the development of specific sectors, but in some cases the stable functioning of public utilities and the national economy as a whole. Thus, for India, an energy deficit would mean slower economic growth, whereas for Pakistan it translates into regular rolling blackouts. An extreme case is Sri Lanka: the fuel crisis of 2022 became one of the markers of the inefficiency of the country’s entire economic model and a catalyst for mass protests that forced the ruling elite to resign their posts.
Resource scarcity is also evident in water management and agriculture. The interdependence of the two systems is particularly critical in countries where the majority of the population is employed in the agrarian sector. Rising water withdrawals and inefficient water use adversely affect food security: even if low yields do not produce outright hunger or malnutrition, they reduce farmers’ incomes and necessitate increased agricultural imports, impacting the balance of payments and raising food prices for end consumers. Although in the past year, even this issue has come to acquire . a military-political dimension, another aspect appears more significant—both expert communities and populations across South Asia are especially concerned about the consequences of climate change.
Increased intensity of monsoon precipitation, for example, triggers catastrophic flooding, claiming hundreds of lives and destroying millions of homes. Such disasters are typical of coastal states and countries with major river basins—such as Bangladesh and Pakistan. Beyond infrastructure damage and crop losses, another destabilising consequence is climate-induced migration: people are forced to leave their habitual environment and relocate to unfamiliar areas, where their living conditions and sense of personal security are unlikely to improve—this is particularly true for women.
Gender and Discrimination
There are several issues that, whenever current events bring them to the fore, are guaranteed to dominate the front pages of South Asian newspapers. One such issue is gender-based discrimination against women in its broadest sense, as well as sexual violence, domestic abuse, and specific applications of customary law—whether child marriage or aspects of divorce procedures that infringe upon women’s rights.
It should be noted, in fairness, that the governments of South Asian countries do address these issues and attempt to resolve them—gender security is identified as a component of national security, specialised legislation is adopted, and campaigns are launched to prevent sexual offences and customary family law practices that contradict constitutional norms.
The difficulty lies in implementing these initiatives within traditionally structured societies whose functioning is, moreover, constantly threatened by interstate, intrastate, and transboundary armed conflict, shortages of critical resources, and climate change, which erodes the natural environment.
The cumulative effect of these conditions not only reduces the likelihood of resolving gender security issues, but also calls into question the very possibility of effectively countering the full spectrum of traditional and non-traditional threats in South Asia. Nevertheless, an essential step towards understanding the region’s security challenges lies at least in shifting the analytical focus from geopolitical confrontation to the everyday life of the individual, and to the threats that surround him or her.
