Written by Tarun Perera
South Asia is routinely portrayed as one of the world’s most unstable regions, due to it being the location of nuclear rivalry, a hotspot for radicalized militant groups, and a geopolitical landscape where some of the most intractable territorial disputes in modern international politics remain unresolved. Despite the frequent escalation dynamics and internal insurgencies, the region has also exhibited a surprising degree of strategic continuity. Borders largely remain unchanged, rivalries have endured without collapsing into nuclear war (albeit conventional war has taken place), and regional institutions (however ineffective and inefficient) have persisted.
This paradox points to a deeper structural condition, where South Asia’s security problems endure not because institutions are absent or diplomacy is impossible, but because conflict itself has become institutionalized as the new normal. Rivalry is regulated rather than resolved, instability is contained rather than transformed, and political imagination is limited to preventing catastrophe rather than in constructing peace.
The result of prioritizing conflict management over conflict resolution is not peace, but a form of strategic containment where the most dangerous outcomes are avoided. The pervasiveness of this approach to diplomacy seems to have been unintentionally institutionalized, due to the complacency on the part of regional cooperation in mitigating conflict, thereby leaving behind an imperfect equilibrium that creates an unequal order and preserves the underlying causes of violence. In essence, regulated conflict itself has become an institution in the face of institutional failure.
The several domestic security concerns of South Asia within its regional security complex demonstrate this current situation: The regulated antagonism between India and Pakistan, Afghanistan’s deliberate exclusion from multilateral deliberation after the Taliban’s return to power, Bhutan’s role as a buffer state embedded within India’s strategic perimeter, and Sri Lanka’s selective non-alignment and dependent alignment based on requirement. What each of these cases demonstrates is that the region has learned to endure conflict efficiently, even as this efficiency prevents the possibility of meaningful transformation.
India-Pakistan: Managing rivalry as a permanent condition
Contemporary Indo-Pakistani relations exist not through isolated crises but through a durable pattern of managed rivalry. Both states found themselves in conflict from the moment they were founded in 1947, where cultural identity became politicized and subsequently securitized repeatedly in national politics. It is a rivalry whose most visible milestones are the four wars fought since independence, in 1947, 1965, 1971, and 1999, and numerous other escalations in the form of military standoffs and border skirmishes. Rather than diminishing over time, this rivalry has been repeatedly regulated through a cycle of confrontation and subsequent containment. This enabled a vicious cycle that is structurally resistant to resolution.
It is, however, not an instance of great power rivalry (as Pakistan is not a great power, but a middle power), but rather an enduring asymmetric regional rivalry embedded in a regional security complex. While the tensions cannot be understood as a great-power rivalry in capability terms, it displays many structural features associated with great-power competition. These include permanent strategic suspicions that are indicative of a power-security dilemma, nuclear deterrence, and reciprocity in nuclear arms racing. Moreover, the existence of a stability-instability paradox where proxy conflicts are waged through mediums such as non-state militant groups, and the perseverance of ideologically manipulated national narratives, enabling the ostracization of the ‘other’. Overall, nuclearization and aggressive socialization have transformed an asymmetric regional rivalry into one that behaviorally resembles a great-power rivalry, notwithstanding the absence of material parity between the two.
What makes this rivalry distinctive is not the absence of diplomacy, but the routinization of it. It has developed an equilibrium in which hostility is assumed to be permanent, and that escalation is something to be managed. The region experiences repeated cycles of sequential provocation, mobilization, signaling, and finally de-escalation, which is then followed by an immediate return to tense normality. There is no real motivation to end hostilities for good. It is instead reproducing a system of regulated antagonism, reinforced by institutional habits that prioritize control over transformation. The institution here is the institution of war itself, not bilateral cooperation. If there is any advantage to this situation, it is that it has made matters much more predictable due to escalation dynamics, such as those witnessed between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. A more desirable form of predictability could have been achieved through a medium of organizational strategic information transmission, but this has proved infeasible due to the paralysis that SAARC has found itself in since 2014 due to these bilateral tensions.
The first Indo-Pak war in 1947 broke out immediately after partition due to the contestation surrounding Jammu and Kashmir, which culminated in a stalemate and the establishment of the Line of Control (LoC). The second war in 1965 escalated from Pakistan’s ‘Operation Gibraltar’, which enabled insurgency in Kashmir, and was followed by a negotiated ceasefire that brought hostilities to an end, but reinforced the notion that territorial disputes must be managed rather than resolved. The third war in 1971 was catalyzed by events in East Pakistan, which prompted Indian intervention, which led to the creation of Bangladesh. The Kargil conflict in 1999 saw Pakistani forces occupy Indian positions along the LoC, provoking a short series of skirmishes that ended with India regaining ground but leaving the broader dispute unresolved. Most recently, the terrorist attacks in Pahalgam in 2025 demonstrated this once more, where the Indian response in the form of ‘Operation Sindoor’ targeted alleged militant infrastructure across the LoC, which led to border skirmishes and diplomatic expulsions before a ceasefire was declared. Each of these conflicts has one thing in common, which is that they ended not in a comprehensive settlement, but in arrangements that reinforced hostility instead of resolving longstanding grievances.
Pakistan is also undergoing significant political fragmentation due to several secessionist and separatist movements in its provinces. Separatist violence in places including Balochistan and periodic unrest in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa have created a condition of chronic insecurity. These movements impose continuous costs on governance and weaken civilian authority, yet they coexist with a powerful and politically motivated security establishment. The dominance of the military in Pakistan’s political economy has itself become a source of fragility. Repeated interventions in civilian rule and the prioritization of strategic rivalry with India have hollowed out state institutions and distorted development priorities. Rather than resolving internal fragmentation, this structure reproduces it, locking the country into a cycle where insecurity justifies military influence, and military influence leads to weak governance outcomes.
Afghanistan after 2021: Exclusion and the limits of regionalism
The Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021 did not fundamentally alter South Asia’s security dynamics but rather fully established its position as an outsider. Acknowledged as an unstable periphery to the region, and even more so after it was reluctantly accepted into SAARC in 2007 due to contested definitions regarding its regionality, as it is not constituted as either a South Asian, Central Asian, or Middle Eastern state. This territorial ambiguity questioned the very premise of SAARC’s regional parameters and further invited its decline by neglecting how membership would further enable incursions into Pakistani politics through groups such as the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, commonly known as the Pakistani Taliban. With the Taliban’s control fully consolidated in 2021, the implications for influencing Pakistani politics are far more widespread.
Afghanistan’s return to Taliban rule established its position as a permanent outsider to the South Asian regional order. What changed was not Afghanistan’s relevance to regional security, but the region’s response, as exclusion became the default course of engagement due to the political awkwardness stemming from the fact that a terrorist organization had ascended to the government of a nation-state. This exclusion was made evidently clear when India had rejected Pakistan’s signaling in 2021 to host a SAARC summit after the ascendancy of the Taliban. The prospects for an SAARC summit were already bleak ever since Indo-Pakistani tensions were aggravated in August 2014, when Pakistan’s high commissioner to India met with Kashmiri separatist leaders shortly after Narendra Modi’s invitation for peace negotiations was commenced. Thus, the prospects for SAARC re-engagement remain bleak due to the issues in both Afghanistan and Kashmir.
The Taliban’s position in terms of the international legal sovereignty that it lacks from other states is yet another enigma, as the state of Afghanistan is recognized, but not the Taliban regime and its Islamic Emirate. So if another SAARC summit were to take place, it would have to either awkwardly include the Taliban or exclude it from the proceedings. If the latter is pursued, then it only makes sense for Afghanistan to be delisted from SAARC permanently. But this would raise similar concerns regarding states like Pakistan as well, which have a history of deliberately supporting terror groups. Therefore, if being a terrorist organization qualifies as ground for exclusion, but supporting terror groups as a state is not, there needs to be a thorough re-examination of what constitutes grounds for inclusivity in regional organizations like SAARC. Moreover, there needs to be a sufficient re-examination of the basis for cooperation overall, rather than limiting it purely to regionality. SAARC’s already fragile consensus-based model cannot accommodate a member state whose governing authority is politically toxic for several of its members.
However, institutional isolationism does not neutralize the risks emanating from Afghanistan, which include refugee flows and narcotics trafficking. The current status quo suggests that the regional attitude towards Afghanistan is a policy of structural complacency due to the inability to fully reconcile its role in the region, or whether it even belongs in the region to begin with. This pattern further substantiates Afghanistan’s position as an externality rather than an integrated member of South Asia’s shared security architecture. Therefore, the Taliban takeover exposed the limits of regionalism by demonstrating how quickly integration tends to disintegrate when the political costs of toleration rise.
India-Bhutan-China: Buffer States and Asymmetric Stability
Bhutan’s unique position as a protected state illustrates how stability is often engineered through hierarchy rather than resolution. Bhutan lies at the intersection of India’s northern security perimeter and China’s expanding continental reach. Its role in the regional security complex is not that of a mediator, but of a buffer state whose security alignment is structurally embedded within India’s regional strategy, to such an extent that there exists what foreign policy analysts would refer to as a ‘special relationship’. Despite being a sovereign state in its own right, India remains involved in Bhutan’s foreign policy and security to such an extent that there is an asymmetric partnership. This is apparent with Thimphu having no formal diplomatic relations with Beijing, and its border negotiations with China being based entirely on Indian territorial imperatives. This arrangement has produced a distinctive form of stability where Bhutan’s sovereignty is preserved in purely symbolic terms but is severely undermined in practice.
The Doklam crisis in 2017 demonstrated Bhutan’s lack of foreign policy autonomy, when a dispute between China over road construction on the Doklam Plateau escalated into a military standoff between Indian and Chinese forces, with Bhutan left mostly uninvolved. India’s intervention was justified based on preventing a strategic shift near the Siliguri Corridor, which is a narrow land bridge connecting India’s northeastern states to the rest of the country. While military escalation was ultimately avoided and the status quo was restored, nothing was actually resolved. Border disputes between Bhutan and China remain unresolved, and Sino-Indian tensions persist as they did before. What is revealed is that the absence of open conflict is achieved not through multilateral guarantees or regional norms, but through institutionalized asymmetry where small powers absorb the constraints necessary to stabilize great-power competition. Conflict prevention in this context relies more on deference, as the regional hegemonic order in South Asia is seemingly hierarchical, not anarchical in nature.
Moreover, there is no space for multilateral mediation as there is no regional mechanism capable of addressing Sino-Indian competition in the Himalayan belt. Stability is instead maintained through bilateral dominance. Bhutan, therefore, represents a less intense, but more unique form of perpetual institutionalization where conflict is neither resolved nor confronted openly but perpetuated through structural dependency. This passive-aggressive arrangement is functional solely because it limits agency and suppresses contestation, creating a unique regional order where hierarchy establishment is interchangeable with cooperation.
Sri Lanka and strategic non-alignment: stability through dependency
Sri Lanka does not constitute a mini-complex of its own; rather, it is a secondary state whose security behaviour is shaped by primary actors of the regional security complex such as India and China. Unlike buffer states such as Bhutan or the conflict dyad existing between India and Pakistan, Sri Lanka has pursued a long-standing doctrine of non-alignment and strategic flexibility. In principle, this posture is meant to preserve autonomy. In practice, it has increasingly functioned as a crisis management strategy that promotes dependency rather than independence.
Sri Lanka’s non-alignment is best understood not as ideological neutrality, but as an adaptive response to regional asymmetry. Lacking the material capacity to shape regional security outcomes, successive governments in Sri Lanka have prioritised avoiding entanglement in great-power rivalry, while maximising access to external economic and political support through bandwagoning with either China or India based on the ideological basis of domestic regimes. This pattern of selective engagement with India and China fluctuates based on necessity and circumstance, guaranteeing stability but inevitably limiting agency and strategic autonomy in formulating unilateral foreign policy.
This was first apparent in Sri Lanka’s recent economic crisis in 2022, which is arguably still not over. Faced with a balance of payments collapse, the government was reliant on ad hoc assistance and debt restructuring. The absence of meaningful regional economic or security mechanisms meant that survival depended on bilateral goodwill and international financial institutions. Therefore, non-alignment in this context did not insulate Sri Lanka from vulnerability. Rather, it merely shaped the terms on which dependence was negotiated. Sri Lanka’s dependent behaviour reinforces rather than challenges the prevailing order by adapting to the existing security environment, absorbing its constraints while minimising exposure.
Unlike Bhutan, Sri Lanka demonstrates that stability through perpetual institutionalisation does not require formal hierarchy or military alignment. Stability is instead produced through ambiguity and flexibility in crisis management. However, this form of stability ultimately falls short as it privileges short-term survival over long-term transformation by recognising regional insecurity as an enduring condition. In this sense, the Sri Lankan case exemplifies how smaller states are disciplined into strategies of accommodation. Non-alignment is no longer an avenue towards strategic autonomy, but a mechanism for living with structural imbalance. The result is a regional security complex in which dependency on great powers remains institutionally embedded.
Rethinking what a ‘solution’ means
South Asia’s security predicament is often framed as a problem of weak institutions. The region’s instability is not primarily the result of institutional absence, but of institutional complacency. There has been a gradual development of a security environment that is capable of containing conflict, even as it struggles to overcome it. Reconsidering South Asia’s persistent insecurity requires rethinking what constitutes viable ‘solutions’ in the first place, where solutions are not merely mechanisms for managing rivalry, but as challenges to the institutional arrangements that make rivalry sustainable.
This has profound implications for how solutions are conceived, because as long as sustainable peace is defined as the avoidance of catastrophe rather than the establishment of trust, states will continue to prioritize risk management over political imagination. Reimagining South Asia’s security future demands a willingness to unsettle the incentives that make rivalry functional, dependency tolerable, and exclusion convenient. Until such a shift occurs, an unstable stability will remain its most reliable achievement and most enduring limitation.
What is often described as institutional weakness is better understood as maladaptation to a highly polarised security environment. The primary reason for this is the overwhelming prioritisation of crisis management. In the India-Pakistan dyad, ceasefires and third-party mediation are designed to prevent escalation rather than transform the underlying rivalry. In Afghanistan’s case, exclusion and selective engagement are used to contain risks without addressing the structural sources of instability. In Bhutan and Sri Lanka, stability is achieved through asymmetric alignment and strategic ambiguity. The cumulative result is a regional order that reproduces itself through familiarity, where conflict becomes predictable, but at the cost of institutions becoming merely procedural. The only constant institution is that of regulated conflict.
Tarun Perera is a recent graduate in International Relations and is currently engaged as a visiting lecturer at the Royal Institute of Colombo. His research interests include foreign policy analysis, comparative politics, historical sociology, and post-conflict reconciliation, with a particular focus on Sri Lanka and the Global South. He can be reached at tarunperera2003@gmail.com
Factum is an Asia-Pacific-focused think tank on International Relations, Tech Cooperation, and Strategic Communications accessible via www.factum.lk.
The views expressed here are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the organization’s.
