Mohan Guruswamy and his group of scholars are to be complimented for this new approach to analysing security in a region, based essentially on examination of socio-economic data. Ever since human security entered the lexicon of security discourse and the annual United Nations Human Development Index came to be published some two decades ago, security is no longer related exclusively to the state and its hard power. This point in particular is highlighted well by General Raghavan, the President of the Centre for Security Analysis and the sponsor of the project. He defines what the Centre understands as security in the preface ‘as an amalgam of components that encompasses the needs of the citizen and society. Its components include economic, environmental, societal and political dimensions.’
This of course is not new in India, where the security discourse remains otherwise mired in history and in conflict. A modest effort was made by the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in the late 1990s through separate projects on Human Security and Comprehensive and Cooperative Security, funded by the Japan Foundation. The Ford Foundation later supported an even more ambitious pan-Asian project on Non Traditional Security from 1999-2002. Leading institutes in South Asia under the Regional Centre for Strategic Studies in Colombo,