Search

The Belt and Road Initiative rattled the South Asian security environment vigorously as it involved strong territorial sensitivities of India, which found itself engaged on two fronts with Pakistan and China. The BRI has been the geoeconomic drive projecting China's peaceful rise. It has been welcomed with hope and suspicion as Western powers are equally interested in containing China in the Asian order. This paper examines BRI as a source of external transformation to the regional security complex model devised by Buzan. South Asia's inadequacies in bringing internal transformation, as envisioned by Buzan, allow the BRI to be a source of cold peace in the region. The BRI looks at decentered region-building with an appeal of great power overlay. This tier is relevant in diluting the South Asia geopolitical polarities. The paper claims that BRI influences South Asian geopolitics, where India and Pakistan are no longer locked into bipolarities. The smaller states are bandwagoning with China, and that calibrates the South Asian regional security complex. The cold peace laced with geoeconomic transformation can render a regional transformation to the security complex such that the South Asian regional security complex might dissipate into two or more mini-complexes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The state structuration in Afghanistan began with the ethnopolitical portioning of the state. This had intrinsic limitation as the common Afghan would only see state coming through particularistic arrangements conveyed through traditional authority. The secular institutions such as bureaucracy, law and civil society had disadvantage in this setup. The provincial governance showed better resilience to such ethnopolitical structure and at the same time National legislature too strived for more powers that could lend credence to secular institutions in Afghanistan. The role of democracy in promotion of such cause was only partially successful as the majoritarian power often slipped into the dominance of Pashtun warlords that carried a sense of distrust due to the superimposition of Taliban identity in their geocultural realms. Therefore, it depended a lot on leaders to make a careful choice between limited democracy and limited ethnocracy. The minority in Afghanistan took up the cause of secular institutions as they were the larger guarantee of their inclusion in power sharing. But the majoritarian leadership has often bargained outside the institutional framework that can be seen as consociational arrangement effectively weakening the secular institutionalization. This paper looks into the power sharing arrangement between Pashtun and non-Pashtun groups within the fiduciary limits of ethnofederalism and ethnogeopolitics that have shaped the evolution of Afghan state post 9/11. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eurasian Geopolitics as explained in the Heartland model has been reincarnated as Energy Geopolitics. Germany and India are the two strategic economies of the Inner Crescent of Mackinder's 'Heartland' Model and are largely similar in geopolitical focus to the rest of Eurasia. The article argues that in the coming decades at least, Russia will play an important role in these countries' energy vision. A similar unique convergence of goals regarding energy technology requirements will also be seen in the coming decades. India cannot abandon the developmental needs of its one billion plus people to the energy monopolies. Neither does Germany as a significant global economy wish to hang its globalisation efforts on similar energy uncertainties. Both countries therefore seek to spread their energy security through technology-centred geopolitical pluralism. Central Asian energy resources thus seem to be a geopolitical temptation that both nations find hard to ignore. Geopolitical contingencies, it is argued, might bring them together to explore a mixed set of options under some kaleidoscopic combination of an altogether new energy vision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]