Detailed look at complex region

The Indian Ocean region, while of direct strategic relevance to Australia, has in recent years received far less attention than other neighbouring regions such as Southeast Asia and the South Pacific.

The concentration of the Australian population in the southeast of the continent has doubtless contributed to this sense of the western coast as remote and therefore unthreatening. The appearance of this volume, written by Sandy Gordon but drawing on background material prepared by all four contributors for the June 1995 International Forum on the Indian Ocean Region, is therefore particularly to be welcomed.

For specialists, it offers a nuanced account of a range of security issues by which the region is confronted, and of the complexities which beset the emergence of anything resembling a regional identity. For the non-specialist, it provides a wealth of background detail to facilitate a better understanding of one of the world's more complicated regions.

The book opens by pointing to a range of factors which have induced profound changes in the region - economic liberalisation in South Asia, the end of Apartheid in South Africa, the globalisation of media, the southward gaze of the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, the growth of trade linkages between South and Southeast Asia, and an increasingly shared unease in the region about the new trading regime associated with the emergence of the World Trade Organisation. However, Gordon warns that "none of these positive trends will count unless the extremely difficult security environment" in the Indian Ocean region can be ameliorated. It is to the contours of that environment that the first part of the book is directed.

Here, the book moves smoothly from a discussion of the Indian Ocean as a security system, to consideration first of the interests of key actors, and then the nature of conventional and non-conventional security issues in the region. The retreat of the superpowers following the end of the Cold War has left the region with a "pernicious legacy" in the form of sophisticated arms in what many would see as the wrong hands. Yet this is only one factor which has complicated the security interests of both regional and external actors, and especially the United States. The acute tensions which once existed between Washington and New Delhi, so evident from Henry Kissinger's account of the Bangladesh crisis in The White House Years, have considerably abated; but the difficulties for the US in devising a coherent policy towards the subcontinent remain, not least because India "is the only Indian Ocean power of potential strategic reach".

Indo-Pakistani tensions, together with the politics of oil, dominate the book's discussion of conventional security threats. The complexities of the longstanding Kashmir dispute are neatly brought out, with Gordon making the point that there may be something positive to be learned from the fact that in the years since the 1989 Kashmir uprising, India and Pakistan have not gone to war - although Pakistan in particular, as the smaller state, has paid a very high price for its attempts to match India militarily.

While the proliferation of "weapons of mass destruction" - nuclear, chemical, and biological - is a matter of concern, not least because "it is doubtful whether Pakistan is yet able to deter India in the usual meaning of the word", the "non-conventional" security issues of illicit movements of peoples and narcotics are more troublesome on a day-to-day basis, and this the book documents with considerable force. Refugee movements, which figure very prominently in the region, are at the same time a factor of potential destabilisation for elites in states with weak political institutions; and profits from narcotic trafficking strengthen forces with an interest in the debilitation of state actors which might challenge them.

In this respect it is ironic that the US, which seemingly turned a blind eye to Pakistan's support for the ultra-fundamentalist Afghan Taliban in the naive hope that this would put an end to problems of "drugs and thugs" in Afghanistan, now faces the embarrassment of reportedly substantial increases in the area of land under Taliban control on which the opium poppy is cultivated.

The book concludes with a substantial discussion of efforts to build regional identity, and of the problems which confront such efforts. There is, Gordon argues, "no core organisation equivalent to ASEAN capable of providing 'ballast' to regionalism in the Indian Ocean", nor any "strong sense of common threat that would transcend existing bilateral tensions and unite otherwise disparate security complexes".

The efforts of former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans to foster regional cooperation are carefully explored, but are now of primarily historical interest given the shift from multilateral to bilateral approaches in the regional diplomacy of the Howard government. The author's caution about the need to address security issues seriously if regional identification is to flourish is wise given the difficult history of efforts to foster regionalism.

This book stands as an example of how evidence can be carefully sorted and sifted to support measured and useful conclusions about even the most controversial of questions, and provides a fine illustration of the kind of work in which scholars in the region must engage if an appropriate epistemic community is ever to crystallise.

Dr William Maley
Senior Lecturer in Politics, University College UNSW