In this fractured region where fault lines are preserved by politics, the study of international relations and security are framed largely by national perspectives. "What serves my country's interest best?" – not necessarily "my country's best interest" – has been not just the standard foreign-policy lens, but also the most common framework in regional analysis. The 1980s and 1990s seemed to offer new openings for regional cooperation, but developments in more recent years appear to have reversed the promise of those initiatives.
In 1983, the declaration for the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) was signed, and the organisation was founded in 1985. The idea of 'South Asia' felt at once familiar – a new, more neutral name for the region that was historically referred to as 'India' – but also like an import. 'South Asia' was already being used in American academic and policy circles to avoid conflating the region with India. The funding of regional collaborative projects by American foundations may have reinforced this impression, creating, especially in India, a lingering distaste for the term.
Through the 1980s, there was growing excitement about cross-border travel and multi-country projects like the Ford Foundation-funded 'Problems of Governance in South Asia', which was housed at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi but owned equally by think tanks across the region, with each country producing a country volume, a regional volume and related anthologies. The output included some of the first texts for regional perspectives on a range of issues from poverty to ethnic conflict to democracy. This first generation of publications, which included comparative studies, such as Urmila Phadnis's Ethnicity and Nation-building in South Asia, and early publications by the International Centre for Ethnic Studies in Kandy and Colombo, laid the foundation for a new way of understanding regional politics: the countries and peoples of Southasia are separate but connected, different but similar.
The idea for the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies (RCSS) was born at a regional conference which discussed the need for an organisation that would facilitate collaborative work and dialogue. At that point, both the challenges of obtaining visas and high costs limited cross-border travel and multi-state projects. This new centre, it was decided, would be located neither in India nor Pakistan but in a country to which all SAARC nationals could travel with ease. It would present regional researchers with an opportunity to work and think together about shared problems, to deepen existing links as a way of sidestepping nation-state barriers.