For decades, the field of strategic studies in South Asia has been dominated by a familiar, almost comfortable, set of anxieties: the intractable India-Pakistan conflict, the unresolved border with China, and the persistent shadow of nuclear escalation. Today, the 21st century "Great Game" has new players and a new board—the US-led Indo-Pacific strategy versus China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This 21st-century rivalry is turning our vital economic arteries, like the Bay of Bengal, into theatres of strategic competition.

We see this contest play out in the strategic dance around port access—from the Chinese-managed operations in Sri Lanka's Hambantota and Pakistan's Gwadar to India's counter-investments. From Dhaka to Colombo, and Kathmandu to Malé, smaller states are being pressured to choose sides, carefully balancing infrastructure loans against strategic partnerships. Our ports, once simple gateways for commerce, are now scrutinized as data points in a global contest for influence. High-level diplomatic visits increasingly focus on security pacts and exclusive economic zones, pulling the region's focus firmly toward traditional geopolitics.

But while our strategic community remains fixated on this 20th-century chessboard, a more insidious and existential set of 21st-century threats is at our doorstep, rendering the old rivalries dangerously obsolete. This obsession with hardware and territory is a dangerous diversion. It ignores the fact that non-traditional security (NTS) threats are already eroding our national power from within—attacking our economies, displacing our populations, and fraying our social cohesion.

The hard truth is that while we prepare for a conventional, state-on-state conflict that may never come, our region is quietly and rapidly being destabilized by forces that no navy or air force can defeat. These are the non-traditional security (NTS) threats, and for South Asia—home to nearly 40% of the world's poor and almost half its population living in climate "hotspots," according to the World Bank—they are not academic. They are here.

South Asia's Hard Truths

First and foremost is the climate emergency, which security analysts correctly identify as the ultimate "threat multiplier." This is not a future problem. The melting Himalayan glaciers threaten the long-term water security of over a billion people downstream. More immediately, rising sea levels and coastal erosion pose a direct existential threat to nations like the Maldives and vast, densely populated deltaic regions of Bangladesh. The economic costs are staggering; the World Bank has warned that without urgent action, climate change could cost the region an average of 1.8% of its GDP by 2030, rising to a catastrophic 8.8% by 2100.

This devastation is already fueling mass displacement. By 2050, the World Bank predicts, South Asia could see over 40 million internal climate migrants—with Bangladesh alone accounting for nearly 20 million. We need only look at the devastating 2024 floods that inundated regions of Assam in India and Sylhet in Bangladesh, or the increasing frequency of "super-cyclones" in the Bay of Bengal. This instability creates desperate populations, fuels resource conflicts, and provides fertile ground for extremist radicalization.

Second is the resurgence of transnational terrorism and organized crime. The political instability in Afghanistan has re-energized groups like ISKP (Islamic State Khorasan Province) and the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP). The 2025 Global Terrorism Index highlighted this alarming trend, noting that the TTP was the fastest-growing terrorist group globally, with deaths attributed to it rising 90%. The same report revealed that Pakistan experienced a devastating 94% increase in terrorism-related deaths in 2024, the largest surge in the world.

These groups, whose extremist ideologies do not respect our carefully drawn borders, are funded and enabled by vast, entrenched networks trafficking in narcotics, weapons, and people. The "Golden Crescent" drug trade, valued at billions, flows through the region, corrupting institutions, overwhelming law enforcement, and creating a violent parallel economy that erodes state authority from within.

Third is the silent menace of cyber warfare. As our economies, from Dhaka's financial sector to "Digital India," rapidly digitize, our critical national infrastructure becomes a prime target. The 2022 ransomware attack on India's All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) was a stark warning, paralyzing healthcare services for millions for weeks. More recent reports in 2024 highlighted that government, financial, and industrial sectors are the most commonly targeted. With India's digital economy alone projected to cross $1 trillion by 2026, a single coordinated cyber-attack could cripple a nation's economy, disrupt supply chains, and cause public panic far more effectively than a border skirmish.

This brings us to the catastrophic failure of our intelligence and security architecture. For too long, our region's powerful and well-funded intelligence agencies have invested their primary resources in countering each other. State-on-state espionage has taken absolute precedence over human security. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2024, regional military budgets continued to soar. India's defense budget reached $86.1 billion, while Pakistan's stood at $10.2 billion.

Compare this combined $96 billion-plus expenditure on traditional defense with the negligible, fragmented funding for regional climate resilience, public health cooperation, or the under-resourced SAARC Disaster Management Centre. The trust deficit is so deep that it has rendered regional bodies like SAARC all but useless for meaningful security cooperation. Actionable intelligence on a shared terror cell or an impending cross-border health crisis is more likely to be withheld as a strategic advantage than shared as a common good. We are, in effect, meticulously polishing our guns while the floodwaters rise around our feet. It is time for a profound strategic recalibration. We must pivot from a security doctrine based on state-centric containment to one based on region-wide, human-centric resilience.

Depoliticise Cooperation On NTS

This requires two immediate shifts. First, we must depoliticize cooperation on NTS. The challenges of climate change, pandemics, and counter-terrorism are shared, borderless, and existential. They demand shared intelligence and joint action. We need a robust, apolitical mechanism—perhaps through BIMSTEC, which, with a combined GDP of over $5 trillion, serves as a natural bridge between South and Southeast Asia and bypasses the Indo-Pakistani gridlock. What is needed is a bold, concrete step: the establishment of a permanent, apolitical 'Regional NTS Coordination Centre' under the BIMSTEC charter. This centre's sole mandate would be to share real-time, actionable data on cyclone formation, public health threats, terrorist financing, and cyber-attack signatures.

Second, the strategic studies community itself must change its focus. We must find the courage to tell our policymakers that the 21st-century's primary battles will not be fought over barren mountain passes or deep-sea ports. They will be fought in our flooded cities, on our unsecured networks, and against the extremist ideologies that prey on climate-displaced populations. We must pressure our leaders to prioritize budgets for climate adaptation, water security, and cyber-resilience with the same urgency they afford to missile defense.

Continuing to view South Asian security only through the prism of great-power rivalry is a luxury we can no longer afford. The defining challenge of the 21st century will not be who "wins" the Indian Ocean. The choice is stark: continue to fiddle with the old "Great Game" while our house burns, or finally come together to build a fire brigade.

(The author is a research scholar in the Department of International Relations, Jahangirnagar University, Dhaka, Bangladesh. Views expressed are personal. He can be reached at md.saiful.stu2018@juniv.edu.)