South Asia is no stranger to insecurity. Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan are convulsing under pressure from the Taliban. Killings continue in Kashmir as two of the world's largest armies glare at each other across the Indo-Pakistani divide. Suicide bombings, interreligious feuds, and Naxalite revolts tug at the seams of India's quilted population. Fragile peace prevails in Nepal and Bangladesh, while Sri Lankans try to pick up the pieces after the brutal end to a 27-year civil war. Alongside the violence, other threats to human security abound—most dramatically in the form of immense floods, earthquakes, and other natural disasters.
This timely book helps explain why South Asia suffers from such high levels of domestic and regional insecurity. Editor T. V. Paul sets the stage by arguing that these security woes stem largely from two sources: weak state capacity and an anemic regime of interstate norms. As the title suggests, its contributors—who include experts on international security and the region—focus primarily on the first point. They generally agree on the relative frailty of South Asian states, ranging from “strong-weak” India (p. 15) to the fragile governments in Kathmandu and Kabul. They also concur with Paul's assessment that states lacking material capabilities, institutional capacity, and legitimacy are prone to added insecurity. Nevertheless, the authors offer diverse perspectives on the specific causes of state frailty and its consequences.
The book's first major endeavor is to identify the causes of state weakness in South Asia. At one end of the spectrum are arguments focused on policy choices and leadership failures. At the other end are explanations rooted in longer-term structural factors. The book does not present an explicit agent-structure debate but usefully juxtaposes examples of these arguments at the outset. Robert Rotberg argues that states' relative failure or success is “largely man-made” (p. 43) and that institutional and structural weaknesses stem from poor executive decisions. Matthew Lange follows by highlighting constraints imposed by geography, economic resources, ethnic diversity, and the legacy of colonial rule and institutions. Indeed, South Asia's leaders face serious obstacles to state consolidation as they seek to govern dauntingly diverse populations across colonial borders, rugged mountain ranges, and jungles. Extraregional actors also impose constraints, often contributing to ideological divides and infusing local rivalries with external arms and ammunition.
Unsurprisingly, no general theory emerges about the relative importance of agency and structure. Both clearly matter, and at times South Asia's weak states appear overdetermined, as governments are saddled with structural impediments and the path-dependent consequences of their own poor decisions. For example, Baldev Raj Nayar contends that both structural factors—such as colonial legacies and ethnic cleavages—and policy missteps explain why South Asian states have generally been slow to plug into the global economy and reap the “mostly positive” effects for state capacity (p. 119). Mustapha Kamal Pasha argues that both historically shaped identities and actions by jealous leaders have thwarted the emergence of a strong autonomous civil society that could otherwise supplement South Asian state institutions and hold them accountable.
Importantly, the book's six country-focused chapters suggest significant causal variation across states. Lawrence Ziring argues that Pakistan was created during the process of British decolonization without even the territorial or institutional “rudiments” of a strong functional state, and that “weakness only begot further infirmity” (p. 172). Rasul Baksh Rais also accords considerable weight to structural factors when discussing Afghanistan's weakness, focusing on its geographic and political character as a remote “frontier state” (p. 196). As they argue, those two troubled states were born with severe structural handicaps, which even effective leaders would be hard-pressed to overcome.
By contrast, Sankaran Krishna contends that Sri Lanka seemed “uniquely poised among developing countries to be a success story” (p. 222), and he attributes much of the state's weakness to failures by Sinhalese leaders, who sought support through ethnic allegiances rather than civic nationalism. India was also not predestined to be weak. David Malone and Rohan Mukherjee stress that social and regional divisions have constrained Indian policy but also note the country's “rapid and positive response to liberalization” (p. 163). Nehru's decision to pursue economic autarky was not foreordained; India could have strengthened earlier than it did. Leadership decisions are crucial in the process of punctuated political evolution, and the structural burdens imposed by South Asia's history and geography are not insurmountable.
In addition to examining causes of state weakness, the contributors discuss its consequences for regional security. They generally avoid the tautological trap of defining weak states as insecure ones by emphasizing that state strength is a function of much more than security services. Paul argues that leaders of weak states tend to face “complex, multidimensional security challenges” (p. 7) and lack the institutional capacity to address them. To meet immediate threats, leaders frequently resort to repression, stoke cross-border conflict to mobilize nationalist support, and seek external sponsors. In the longer term, those actions often exacerbate local and regional tensions. Benjamin Miller argues convincingly that much of modern South Asian conflict stems from a “state-to-nation imbalance” (p. 74). When states lack strong capabilities and civic loyalty, and when boundaries cut across ethnic lines, secessionism, irredentism, terrorism, and other security challenges flourish.
Variation across countries is again evident. India appears best situated to meet security threats. Its neighbors enjoy less democratic or performance legitimacy and less capacity to deliver basic services, contributing to the rise of violent Islamist groups in Bangladesh, risks of renewed ethnic and ideological strife in Sri Lanka and Nepal, and myriad problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Many contributors rightly allude to the chicken-and-egg relationship between security and state capacity and the paradox that short-term efforts to consolidate state power often provoke countermeasures by the state's challengers, prolonging insecurity.
A few themes could be better elaborated in the volume. In general, the contributors do a better job identifying structural causes for state weakness than pinpointing key policy missteps or missed opportunities. How close were some of South Asia's frail states to developing along stronger lines? The role of the regional order could also be further developed. Paul notes that the noninterference principle has helped the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) achieve interstate peace even amid continuing internal violence. Rotberg argues that a more proactive international approach to failing states is needed, citing the “Responsibility to Protect” (p. 46). This opens space for an important debate: Is South Asian security plagued more by excess intrusiveness or by the lack of decisive leadership, most likely by India? This could be the basis for a future study.
Overall, South Asia's Weak States makes an admirable contribution. It diagnoses South Asia's problems through a strong set of conceptual and historical studies. The conclusion by Paul and Theodore McLauchlin identifies the key question as scholars and policymakers seek a cure: How can vicious cycles of state weakness and insecurity be reversed into virtuous ones? There is no silver bullet, but arming oneself with a better understanding of the sources of South Asian insecurity will certainly help.
