A South Asian Debate on Peace and Security: An Alternative Formulation in the Post-Cold War Era

Security is a contested concept. It has a different meaning and value for scholars, policy makers and analysts from all over the world. The fundamental questions such as: Who is being secured? From what threats?; and How, that is, by what means?, therefore elicit diverse responses. Furthermore, in the post-Cold War context, the debate on the nature and meaning of security has been enlarged to include attempts to broaden the meaning of security, as well as to deepen the agenda of security studies. The efforts to broaden the field seek to include a wide range of potential threats to security that range from economic and environmental issues to issues of human rights and migration.1 Those attempting to deepen the meaning of security seek to move the debate either down to the level of individual or human security or up to the level of international or global security, with regional and societal security as possible intermediate points.2 Most others have remained, by and large, within a state-centric approach, but have developed diverse terms (common, co-operative, collective, comprehensive) as “modifiers ” to security to advocate different multilateral forms of inter-state security co-operation that could ameliorate, if not transcend the security dilemma.3 This, too, has raised fundamental theoretical