Political instability and domestic disorder in India, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Pakistan have drawn further continuing international attention to South Asia. In the two biggest states, creeping domestic militancy jeopardizes security in major Pakistani cities while India struggles with Naxalite activity in its north and east. These instabilities, plus the continuing prospect of an India–Pakistan crisis, make South Asia's future very hard to predict. However, instability also presents opportunities – the future is not rigidly path-dependent. With the caveat that all long-range predictions are guesses, here are three plausible but very different scenarios. The real future could see the region go down one, two or even all three of these paths, perhaps at different times, and it will be shaped by processes that we only partially understand.

Scenario #1: The United States of South Asia (USSA)

In 2013, reconciliation between India and Pakistan looked to be a tenuous prospect, at best. A new crisis over alleged beheadings, and the suspension of progress on economic normalization, led to gloomy predictions about the future. Despite the fact that Pakistan and India had returned to the negotiating table, Hawkish voices on both sides of the process called India–Pakistan normalization improbable, if not if not impossible. However, there were small steps that, in retrospect, were forerunners of a promising future.

The 2005 UN World Summit was a pivotal event in the formal progression of the responsibility to protect (R2P) principles. Paragraphs 138–9 of the summit's outcome document articulated the fundamental responsibilities of states and the wider international community. The R2P approach was directly applied for the first time by the Security Council to the genocide in Darfur and most recently to the international response in Libya during the Arab Spring uprisings in 2011 and 2012. Since the late 1990s, the concept of R2P has evolved into what supporters now claim is a new type of responsive norm regarding how the international community should react to serious and deliberate human rights violations. The 2001 UN International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty co-chaired by Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun articulated in detail the principles of R2P. These principles were then formally endorsed by the majority of states at the 2005 UN General Assembly World Summit in New York.

At the 2005 summit, the international community almost unanimously endorsed the idea that states have a fundamental responsibility to protect their own citizens, and in most cases the citizens from other states, from gross human rights violations and other mass atrocities. However, the progression of R2P from concept to principle to formal ratification in 2005 has been a very difficult one with a great deal of disagreement over the validity of R2P as a substantive or even a developing norm in international affairs.

While home to about 20 percent of the world's population and 40 percent of the world's poor, South Asia accounts for only about 3 percent of both global gross domestic product (GDP) and total world trade. The states of the region have followed a long history of protectionism with inward looking polices that curtailed the region's economic growth as well as its trade flows, both within and outside the region. Unilateral liberalization initiatives started in the 1990s and worked towards accelerating growth – raising trade and investment flows in the region and as a result South Asia's growth rate over the last decade has exceeded the average in developing countries. Likewise, the region's export and import growth has been quite robust at 9.1 and 4.1 percent respectively in 2012 against 7.0 and 6.2 percent in developing countries (UNCTAD 2012).

At the outset, references to regional trade in South Asia need to account for the diversity and varied priorities of the different member states of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC): India is a major emerging economy with substantial economic and political clout not only in South Asia but also in the world; Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bhutan and Maldives are developing nations, while Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Nepal are least developed member states. Additionally, while Sri Lanka and the Maldives are small island states, Afghanistan, Bhutan and Nepal are landlocked nations.

This chapter introduces the major conceptual developments in the research on security. It addresses the conceptualization of both state and human security in relation to empirical, political changes in the international landscape from post–World War II to contemporary times. The discussion throughout focuses on state versus human security and the bulk of studies made on the content of and links between these two. The overall aim is to contextualize and introduce the discussion of protection and prevention responsibilities in Chapter 3. We begin with an outline of what state-centricity means as a security concept. Traditional views are presented followed by contemporary observations regarding state capacity relative to what has become known as weak, failing and failed states. Empirical data from the World Bank, the UK Department for International Development, Foreign Policy, the Fund for Peace and Transparency International is presented and analysed as to its relevance to state capacity and capability.

The Kosovo crisis and the Rwanda crisis of the 1990s and the current situation in Somalia, Chad and Sudan are critically analysed in this chapter to provide practical examples of what has come to be known as the failed state syndrome. According to the data mentioned above, Somalia, Chad and Sudan are failed states, with up to thirty other states under critical stress. Our intention is to not only demonstrate the multiple levels of failure within such states but also to show how the international community responds to such humanitarian disasters.

It was the ultimate memory machine: a device that would store information associatively, keeping a record of all the interconnections between ideas – but never forget things. In this chapter I tell the story of a technical ‘vision’ that has survived for over seventy years: Vannever Bush's memory extender, or Memex. Memex was an electro-optical device designed in the 1930s to provide easy access to information stored associatively on microfilm, an ‘enlarged intimate supplement’ to human memory (Bush [1945] 1991, 102). Literary and historical works routinely trace the history of hypertext through Memex, and so much has been written about it that it is easy to forget the most remarkable thing about this device: it has never been built. Memex exists entirely on paper. As any software engineer will tell you, technical white papers are not known for their shelf life, but Memex has survived for generations. What, then, can we say about a dream that has never been fulfilled, but nonetheless recurs? Memex has become an inherited vision within hypertext literature.

In 1991 Linda C. Smith undertook a comprehensive citation-context analysis of literary and scientific articles produced after the 1945 publication of Bush's article on Memex, ‘As We May Think’, in the Atlantic Monthly. She found that there is a conviction, without dissent, that modern hypertext is traceable to this article (Smith 1991, 265). In each decade since the Memex design was published, commentators have not only lauded it as vision, but also asserted that ‘technology [has] finally caught up with this vision’ (ibid., 278).

Regional integration is a postcolonial process, the objectives of which are not always clear-cut. On the face of it, the process may be initiated as a means to foster economic cooperation, with trade facilitation being the major outcome. The underlying purpose of integration is, however, more often than not, for countries to forge links to safeguard their long-term political and security objectives, and to minimize the possibility of armed conflict. The most obviously successful example of regional integration in recent times is of course that of the European Union, which has effectively precluded armed conflict in Western Europe for the last 60 years. The broader objective of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) is to promote socioeconomic development in the region, but an offshoot of that stated strategy would be the maintenance of peace and security in the long term.

Cooperation in South Asia has, however, the added dimension of possibly being a catalyst for long-term poverty reduction in a region where one billion people (of a total of 1.5 billion), or 66 percent of the population, live on less than $2 a day (World Bank 2010a). The past decade's average annual regional growth, estimated at 6 percent, gives some cause for hope, but masks significant disparity in economic performance across the eight countries that comprise the region. Further, the link between gross domestic product (GDP) growth and poverty reduction is not always clear – the latter generally does not follow from the former unless redistribution of wealth and income is affected as part of a larger government policy of equitable development.

South Asia is one of the most diverse regions in terms of religion, ethnicity, language and cultural practices. It includes believers of all Semitic and Oriental religions. The history of state formation in South Asia is an interesting interplay of religion and politics. All states, except India and, more recently, Nepal, have their own declared state religions. While in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Maldives Islam is the state religion, Sri Lanka and Bhutan have declared Buddhism as their state religion. India and lately Nepal are declared secular states and have made provision for equal treatment of all religions in their constitutions.

Religions in South Asia: Precolonial Period

Oriental religions like Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism originated in South Asia. Semitic religions arrived in South Asia very early due to the vibrant trade relations between South Asia and West Asia. Christianity reached the region as far back as the first century CE (Fernando and Gispert-Sauch 2004, 59). Before the European colonial powers established their predominance in the western coast of India, Christianity was already established as a major religion there.

Islam arrived in South Asia in the seventh century. It was brought to the Malabar Coast as part of the trade and cultural interactions with the Arabs (Rantattani 2007, 24). Later, Islam spread to northern India as part of the interactions between Persia, Central Asia and South Asia. Religion and religious interpretations functioned as ideological cover and justification for kingdoms and empires.

South Asia, with a population of 1.7 billion, is the second most populated region of the world, after East Asia. Nearly half of the world's poor live in this region. It is one of the fastest growing regions, registering an average gross domestic product (GDP) growth rate of 6 percent per annum over the last two decades (1990–2010). Yet, it is also the least integrated region with high incidence of cross-border conflicts and vulnerability to internal and external shocks, climate change and natural disasters (e.g., floods, droughts, cyclones, etc.).

Agriculture (including crops, livestock, poultry and fisheries) continues to be a vital sector of the economies of the South Asian region despite significant structural change over the past two decades. Agriculture is still the main source of livelihood for 75 percent of its population that lives in the rural areas; it constitutes about 21 percent of the GDP and employs about 42 percent of the labor force of the region. The regional picture however masks the significant differences in the size and structure of the South Asian economies as reflected in Table 1.

For instance, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka with agriculture value added ranging between 12 to 38 percent of total GDP are transforming at a relatively rapid pace from agro-based to transforming economies, while Afghanistan, Bhutan, Maldives and Nepal with agriculture value added about 40 percent or more are still primarily agro-based.