Nontraditional Security Challenges in South Asia – 2025 (Phase 1 Workshop)

NBR successfully launched the project with a first-phase workshop exploring “Non-Traditional Security Challenges in South Asia: 2025” on November 20-22, 2009, in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in partnership with the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute (BEI), a leading South Asian think tank based in Dhaka.

The workshop plenary, organized around three thematically-focused panels on: 1) Food and Water Security; 2) Environmental Security and Disaster Management; and 3) Health and Human Security, respectively, included paper presentations by experts from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, China, and the United States. In his keynote address at the plenary session, Bangladesh Foreign Secretary Ambassador Mijarul Quayes stressed the importance of resolving non-traditional security issues as they will become the traditional security challenges of the future. BEI President Farooq Sobhan and NBR Senior Vice President Roy Kamphausen proceeded over the plenary session. Both expressed concern that the transnational nature of non-traditional security threats has the potential to exacerbate security tensions already present in South Asia. The event was well attended by a cross-section of policy stakeholders and received coverage in the local media, highlighting the importance of these issues in Bangladesh.

The second day of the workshop was dedicated to a closed session scenarios exercise with the expert panelists. During this session, applying NBR’s Back Story: Pathways to Plausible Futures model of alternative futures analyses, the project team analyzed three potential future scenarios for South Asia’s non-traditional security challenges in 2025.

Workshop Materials

For a summary of the workshop, please see the agenda.