Research & Insights

South Asia is one of the least internally connected regions in the world, and the standard explanations — tariffs, non-tariff barriers, transit restrictions, the state of bilateral politics — are all true and all incomplete. There is a further obstacle that is rarely named because it does not fit a policy brief: people in neighbouring countries here often have no particular reason to encounter one another.

Consider what actually generates familiarity between societies. Students who study abroad and return. Journalists posted in each other's capitals. Musicians who tour. Doctors who train together. Families with relatives across a line. Television that travels. Sports fixtures. Textbooks that mention the neighbour in a chapter other than the one about conflict. Each of these is a channel, and in this region a striking number of them are either narrow or closed.

The consequence is that when a bilateral relationship comes under strain, there is very little ballast. There is no large population on either side with personal reasons to discount the loudest interpretation of events. Familiarity, in other words, is not a pleasant by-product of good relations. It is a shock absorber, and it has to be built deliberately in advance of the shock.

This is the argument that has shaped my own work most directly. If the missing element is occasions to meet, then the most useful thing a non-governmental convener can do is manufacture occasions — expeditions, exchanges, joint observances, shared routes — and make sure they recur.

South Asia is young. That single fact reorganises every question about the region's future, and it cuts in two directions at once. A large young population is the strongest asset any society can hold, provided it is educated, employed and given a stake. Where those conditions are not met, the same demography becomes a source of pressure.

What is less often noticed is the effect on regional thinking specifically. The people who currently shape how these countries see each other formed their views in a different era — one defined by particular events, particular grievances and a particular information environment. The generation now entering adult life did not live through those events. Its reference points are formed online, laterally, and often globally. It is, in principle, more available to a regional frame than any cohort before it.

In principle. In practice, that availability is being filled by something else. Young people in this region are extremely well informed about North America and Western Europe and comparatively uninformed about the country two hundred kilometres away. This is not anybody's fault; it is what happens when the supply of accessible material about one's neighbours is thin. The window is real, but it is not permanent, and it will close by default if nothing occupies it.

Hence my preference for engagements that give young participants something operationally real to do. The youth engagement page develops this at length.

Modern borders in South Asia are recent. The cultural formations they cut across are not. Manuscript traditions, monastic networks, pilgrimage routes, architectural grammars, agricultural calendars, epic literatures and musical systems all developed across a space far larger than any present-day state, and they left physical traces that are still standing.

The Buddhist circuit is the clearest example I have worked with. Lumbini in Nepal, Bodhgaya and Sarnath and Nalanda in India, and the great sites of Sri Lanka — Anuradhapura, Polonnaruwa, Dambulla — form a single narrative that no one country can tell alone. Extend the frame eastward and it reaches Myanmar and Thailand; the entire BIMSTEC membership sits inside one heritage geography.

What makes such heritage diplomatically useful is that it is non-zero-sum. Establishing that a site matters to two countries does not diminish either claim. Conversations about conservation, access, scholarship and pilgrimage are technically demanding but politically inexpensive, which means they can proceed during periods when other conversations cannot. They also produce something rare: a stock of working relationships between officials, scholars and institutions that is already in place when a harder subject arrives.

There is a caution attached. Heritage can be narrowed into an argument about who owns what, and once that happens its diplomatic value inverts. The discipline lies in keeping the framing genuinely shared — a common inheritance, jointly held — rather than a competition over origin.

Unofficial dialogue is routinely over-claimed by its enthusiasts and dismissed by its critics, and both errors come from the same confusion about what the format is for. Track-II does not settle disputes. It has no authority, no mandate and no capacity to deliver anything. Judged as a substitute for negotiation it fails completely.

Judged correctly, it does four things well. It maintains contact when official channels thin out, so that the relationship does not have to be rebuilt from nothing. It allows ideas to be tested cheaply — a formulation can be floated, examined, found unworkable and dropped without any of it becoming a national position. It builds a cadre of people on each side who understand how the other side reasons, which is a different and more useful thing than knowing what the other side wants. And it widens the pool of participants beyond the foreign-policy establishment to include scholars, cultural bodies, practitioners and the young.

Its limits should be stated as plainly as its uses. Track-II depends on official tolerance; it can be shut down. Its participants can drift into a comfortable circle that agrees with itself and no longer reflects opinion at home. And it can be misread as representative when it is nothing of the kind. Good design addresses all three: keep official interlocutors informed, rotate participation deliberately, and be honest in public about what the exercise is.

The dedicated page sets out the history and mechanics of the format in detail.

When region-wide cooperation stalls, the productive response is usually not to keep pushing the largest framework but to work at a smaller scale where interests align more cleanly. This is the logic of sub-regionalism, and in this part of the world it points to the Bay of Bengal.

BIMSTEC, established in 1997, brings together Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand. It is a hinge grouping: five of its members are South Asian and two are Southeast Asian, which makes it the only regional body that treats the boundary between those two areas as an artefact of academic convention rather than a real division. For most of its history it was quiet. That is changing.

Its agenda is technical and sectoral — connectivity, energy, environment, disaster management, agriculture, science, public health, people-to-people contact. Precisely because the agenda is technical, it is comparatively insulated from political weather. And because the grouping is still assembling its habits, there is unusual room for non-governmental actors to shape what its people-to-people pillar actually becomes.

The Bay itself is the underlying argument. It is a shared ecological and meteorological system: the same monsoon, the same cyclone tracks, overlapping fisheries, connected river deltas. Countries that share a weather system have objective reasons to build joint capacity, and those reasons do not evaporate when politics turns difficult.

A great deal of cultural diplomacy is designed for audiences — people who receive a performance, applaud, and go home unchanged. The work that lasts is designed for publics: people who are given a role, and who therefore have to form a view.

The distinction became concrete for me during the domestic Buddha Circuit expedition. The riders were a small contingent. What made the route matter was the more than a thousand people who joined along the way — at halts, campuses and community receptions across seven states — because they were not spectators. They were hosts. Hosting requires preparation, and preparation requires learning something about the visitors and about why they are riding. That is a different cognitive act from watching.

Scaled up, this suggests a design principle for regional engagement generally: build formats in which local participants have an obligation to discharge. Receiving a delegation, briefing a school, preparing a site, translating a text, guiding a visitor. The obligation is what converts an event into a relationship, and relationships are the only durable output any of this work produces.