This thesis aimed at evaluating the progress of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC), since its establishment in 1985. This study is significant because it has gone beyond the limited appraisal of SAARC in any particular area, such as economic integration, to present a detailed appraisal of cooperation under the overarching themes of economic cooperation, environmental security, human welfare, and cooperation in security matters (e.g. anti-terrorism). A detailed case study was pertinent for the purpose of presenting a critique of the Association's functionalist approach to regionalism vis-à-vis a basic assumption that cooperation in noncontroversial areas would pave the way for meaningful cooperation in sensitive areas, such as terrorism, and ultimately lead to regional security. As there is a plethora of literature available on SAARC, a new approach examining regionalism in South Asia was imperative. Apart from the reviewing of conceptual and empirical literature, and content analysis of official documents, this thesis is based on viewpoints from within SAARC extracted through interviews with officials and direct interactions with them while on an internship at the Secretariat. The external insights on the organisation were also collected through interviews of academics, researchers and journalists.

I was very tempted, when I received an invitation fresh off the press last month to attend my own inaugural lecture, to make inaugural lectures my theme tonight particularly in terms of the ground they covered and the perspectives they gave of the scholarly evolution of The University of New England. This temptation was made stronger by the fact that this is the 50th Anniversary of the Inaugural Lecture series. It was a temptation I eventually resisted because the archive of inaugural lectures was dauntingly vast and varied, and has been touched on anyway in Matthew Jordan's recently completed 'A spirit of true learning'.

In May 2002 Salman Rushdie described the Indian subcontinent as 'the most dangerous place in the world'. 1 This was no overstatement. Having gone to war on three previous occasions - in 1948, 1965 and 1971 - India and Pakistan seemed poised to go to total war over Kashmir. A fierce military skirmish in the mountainous Kargil sector dividing Indian and Pakistani Kashmir had set the scene for this in 1999. This time they confronted each other not only with conventional armed force, with more than a million troops massing along their joint border, 2 but also with nuclear missiles strategically targeted to inflict maximum destruction. India's Bharitya Janata Party (hereafter BJP) government, which had previously acknowledged an Indian pledge never to be the first to launch an attack, provocatively demanded the right to conduct a 'defensive' pre-emptive strike reminiscent of the doctrine George W. Bush had enunciated justifying unilateral US intervention against regimes it considered hostile. 3 The prospect of the world's first nuclear war loomed large.

Imperial history—the study of empires rising and falling—is making a comeback, if the recent outpouring of scholarly books on the subject is any indication. America’s current quest to install a system of international law and order in the 21st century—a 'pax Americana'—has rekindled this interest in empires. But so has the emerging framework of analysis within which imperial history is being debated and interpreted. That framework arises from the proposition that the United States is essentially an empire. It may be the most powerful of all time in military and economic terms, but America’s particular exercise of global ascendancy is characteristic of the empires which preceded it—especially Britain’s. Thus, the American empire is better understood when compared with and referenced against the kind of hegemony that empires of the past acquired and were able to exert (Ferguson 2004, p. vii). Though not the first to put this case, British historian Niall Ferguson has mounted it so forthrightly in 'Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire' that the key arguments of his book appear to have become standard points of concurrence or contestation for any subsequent reappraisal of American imperialism.

Studies on the impact of terrorism on an affected country's economy tend either to be discussed from a comparative cross-country perspective in development terms, a method considered unreliable and highly speculative (Sultan, 2013), or related more to the counter-terrorist measures adopted by developed (rather than developing) countries where detailed economic data is more readily available. Typical of the former approach is the World Bank's 2011 Development Report: 'Conflict, Security and Development', which broadly canvasses the ways conflict, violence and insecurity have impacted on and impeded the economic development of 'fragile' states. These are states that are deemed institutionally incapable of protecting their citizens from violence and oppression, and constitute, ostensibly in the World Bank's perspective, most of the non-developed world (World Bank, 2011). While the violent situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan is alluded to as 'consuming the attention of global policy makers' (World Bank, 2011), the report's focus is more on Africa than Asia. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan simply figure as a statistic in the selected World Development Indicator tables of comparative socioeconomic data for 135 economies (World Bank, 2011). In so far as terrorism is mentioned, it is undifferentiated as one of several 'new forms of violence' characterizing twenty-first century conflict.

If seven days is said to be a long time in politics, fifteen years must constitute an eternity in international relations. This is a period beginning in 1991 with President George H.W.Bush [Bush Snr.] confidently and repeatedly proclaiming that a "New World Order" of peace and security lay in prospect, and arriving at the beginning of 2006 when the spectre of war and insecurity under President George W. Bush [Bush Jnr.] looks more likely to materialise as an integral part of a New World Disorder instead. This paper attempts to provide not only an historical commentary of the turn of events of the last fifteen years, but also an explanation for them. Today, with the United States looking vulnerable rather than invincible and Islamist terrorism threatening to become ubiquitous, a world order of harmonious international relations based on any single universalist prescription of norms, rules and values - American or otherwise - looks decidedly distant.