Limits of Hegemony in a Regional State System: A Framework for Order in South Asia.

ABSTRACT Limits of Hegemony in a Regional State System: A Framework for Order in South Asia Prof. Shrikant Paranjpe Dept. of Defence & Strategic Studies University of Pune, Pune 411007, India South Asia has traditionally been analyzed within the framework of the regional state system. This approach considered India as a regional hegemon, Pakistan as a bargainer or a partner state, small powers of the region as peripheral dependents and extra regional interests as a fourth constituent. South Asia has come to be regarded as an area of critical concern in terms of potentials for a conflict. The conflict situations that one seeks to address in South Asia today are not a product of the classical cold war collision and collusion. These are now related mainly to conflicts of local or regional nature and often require new criterion for harmonizing national security and regional security. This paper seeks to understand the limits to hegemonic interactions in a regional state system and develop a framework for the establishment of order in South Asia. . The development of a ‘governing image’ is in part the creation of an ‘order’ in international relations. International order is not a stagnant pattern of interaction amongst states; it is a continuous set of arrangements designed for establishing a pattern of stable interaction within states. The concept of peace is defined within the confines of such an order. It is not to be considered as a universal and permanent absence of war. It is to be defined as a generally accepted world order which indulges effective machinery for settling disputes by persuasion and arresting violence by counter-force. The application of this to the South Asian regional state system would involve two considerations: the need to separate global images of order from regional images that would essentially be based on local considerations of security; and two, the need to separate security needs of the region as a whole from the security needs of individual countries of the r regional state system. This paper accepts the continuing validity of the nation state as a central actor in international relations. The paper also accepts the logic of the process of globalisation in terms of the erosion of traditional jurisdictions of the nation state. Essentially therefore the setting is dual: the continuing domination of a state-centric approach with the coexistence of a variety of non-state actors. South Asia appears to be confronted with three issues that dominate the debate on the emergent order in the region: question of hegemony and the legitimacy of the use of force; the issue of bilateralism and the question of order from the perspective of civil society. Against this backdrop that one can present an agenda for South Asia. At one level the agenda would follow the state centric approach based on the conceptual formulation of primacy of politics. At another level it is necessary to design an approach based on the civil society that operates both in tandem and independently of the State. Ideally, in a society of sovereign states, order would be a product of democratic movement towards some form of global governance. In its absence, power needs to be so distributed that states are not tempted to seek their interests through recourse to violence. Since peace cannot be promoted from a position of strength, discussion, negotiation and accommodation necessarily supplement the power approach. The essential premises of arguments in favor of conflict management relate to the prevention of escalation of conflicts, eschewing coercive settlements, and initiating processes, which achieve mutual benefits. Conflict management theories can help foreign policy makers to develop systematic processes for both preventive diplomacy and dispute resolution. It would require a movement away from traditional strategic concepts to developing conceptual and political foundations for negotiations and joint problem solving to meet the challenges of ethnic-nationalist frictions. In the present world, such a process is to be promoted at both levels, the State and non-State to achieve a degree of success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]