REGISTRATION FOR THE 2023 EDITION OF THE INDO-PACIFIC REGIONAL DIALOGUE IS CLOSED.
2023 Edition of the Indo-Pacific Regional Dialogue (IPRD-2023):
New Delhi, 15th, 16th, and 17th November 2023
OVERARCHING THEME:
“GEOPOLITICAL IMPACTS UPON INDO-PACIFIC MARITIME TRADE AND CONNECTIVITY”
Oceans and seas, which are the font of all life on Earth, have, since time immemorial, been used for the passage of a wide variety of vessels that transport mercantile goods and people, and military wherewithal, from one geographical location to another. They are also vast storehouses of food, medicines, and minerals, and are the world’s foremost carbon sink, with oceanic phytoplankton generating a staggering 80% of our planet’s requirements of oxygen.
India’s own commitment to a national and regional transition from the existing ‘brown’ model of economic development to an enduring ‘blue’ one is an abiding feature of its maritime policy, which is encapsulated by the acronyms SAGAR (Security and Growth for All in the Region) and IPOI (Indo-Pacific Oceans Initiative). These twin concepts also underscore India’s willingness and ability to augment global efforts to provide ‘public goods’ within the predominantly, though not exclusively, maritime expanse of the Indo-Pacific. ‘Trade, Connectivity and Maritime Transport’ is one of the seven ‘pillars’ — which are, perhaps, better thought of as seven ‘spokes’ of a deeply interconnected web — of the IPOI. Both ‘Trade’ and ‘Maritime Transport’ are, of course, segments of maritime connectivity. It would be useful to recall that the Hon’ble Prime Minister of India, Shri Narendra Modi, had espoused the principle of “responsible maritime connectivity” in his remarks at the UNSC high-level open debate on “Enhancing Maritime Security: A Case for International Cooperation” on 09 August 2021, in which he specifically emphasised three key aspects in marine infrastructure creation, namely, the physical sustainability of such projects, the absorption capacity of the countries where such infrastructure is proposed to be developed, and appropriate global norms and standards for the creation of marine infrastructure.
No matter which manifestation of maritime connectivity — physical, digital, or cultural — is under consideration, careful and comprehensive attention must invariably be given to its six constituent elements, namely: (1) the ports that are desired to be connected physically and/or digitally; (2) the reliability, safety and security of the medium over which maritime connectivity (whether physical or digital) is sought to be established, sustained, or enhanced — with the physical medium including riverine, coastal and oceanic stretches, as also the directional vectors adopted, namely, International Shipping Lanes (ISLs) and (in times of military tension or actual armed conflict) Sea Lines of Communication (SLOCs); (3) the physical and/or digital platforms by means of which this maritime connectivity is effected — that is, various types of ships (manned / unmanned / autonomous / semi-autonomous) and/or digital platforms with their operating systems, applications, etc.); (4) the items being carried on or in these physical and/or digital platforms, namely, cargo and/or human beings and/or data packets; (5) the policy frameworks in both countries that deal with maritime connectivity; and (6) the rules-based legal- and other normative processes and practices that underpin safe maritime connectivity.
In very nearly all human endeavour related to maritime connectivity, ports constitute critical nodes of departure, arrival, and transit. Accordingly, access-to and utilisation-of the many ports that stud our regional littoral are sought by a variety of States, and non-State actors as well, to further their respective geoeconomic goals, as also non-geo-economic ones such as prestige, respect, comity, cultural influence, and people-to-people engagement. Indeed, port-led sustainable development is a mantra that is fast becoming ubiquitous across the Indo-Pacific.
Given that geopolitics — the effort to politically leverage geography to obtain and achieve one’s geoeconomic- and non-geoeconomic goals — incorporates a slew of geostrategies, it is only to be expected that ‘ports’ will be central to these geostrategies. Not only are ports impacted by maritime manifestations of geopolitics, they also, in large measure, shape the contours of the geostrategies through which geopolitics is advanced.
Through a number of high-profile projects under the rubric of the Belt and Road Initiative, China has been a particularly active player in all elements of maritime connectivity, across the Indo-Pacific and beyond. These include its involvement in port-development to support the increasingly likely opening-up of the Northern Sea Route, as also in more traditional areas of the Indo-Pacific ranging from the South Pacific, through Southeast and South Asia, all the way to the eastern Africa and West Asian littoral, incorporating a number of island nations along the way. However, China is by no means the only major player that is engaged in maritime connectivity as a function of its geopolitics. There are other grand maritime connectivity plans and projects that, too, are afoot. The India-Middle East-Europe Corridor (IMEC), the International North South Transit Corridor (INSTC), the Asia-Africa Growth Corridor (AAGC), the Bay of Bengal Industrial Growth Belt (BiG-B), Japan’s Nacala Corridor and its Northern Corridor (both in Africa), are only some of the more striking examples.
Geopolitical uncertainties also impact ports located in the proximity of the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea, and the Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb.
Farther afield, the Russia-Ukraine armed conflict, now in its second year, is significantly impacting supply chains and value chains all across the Indo-Pacific. Indeed, the impact of this European conflict upon the geostrategies by which nation-states, both near and far, seek to attain their geoeconomic goals is as profoundly disruptive as it is disturbing.
The race for hard-to-obtain minerals such as cobalt and rare earth elements (REE) such as yttrium, scandium, lanthanides, etc. that are necessary for a number of high-technology applications, has acquired decidedly geopolitical overtones even as it accelerates the concomitant race to commence commercial mining of the deep seabed — the regulation of which the International Seabed Authority (ISA) will find increasingly challenging as private players get involved.
Likewise, undersea cables pose enormous regulatory and transnational legal challenges even as their indispensability to economic growth — including the development of smart ports and smart logistics — receives increasing recognition and attention. The fact that these vital components of every nation’s critical maritime infrastructure are owned and controlled almost entirely by international conglomerates of private companies offers not only an additional dimension of the challenge but, paradoxically, simultaneously provides us with additional opportunities to harness the tremendous agility, acumen, and economic power of these private entities. Where undersea pipelines are concerned, the share of private players is less marked, but the upstream and downstream implications of geopolitically driven disruptions are obvious to one and all, especially in the aftermath of the 26 September 2022 attacks on the Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2 gas pipelines. These issues and events serve to highlight, yet again, the absolute criticality of maritime domain awareness (MDA) enhanced by space-based assets and systems — and the simultaneous but no less pressing need to focus significantly greater attention upon underwater domain awareness (UDA). Well-intentioned regional initiatives, including the IPMDA, will need concerted action by several countries that are already progressing national and sub-regional efforts in all three of these variants of the maritime domain — space, surface, and subsurface.
In all these contexts, it is impossible to ignore the overarching influence and ubiquitous impact of cyberspace, which is — and will probably remain — an intensely contested domain involving not only State actors but benevolent and malevolent non-State ones as well. Once malevolence is ascribed to non-State actors, maritime crime must necessarily get added to the mix, adding several further layers of complexity to an already convoluted environment. It seems clear that individual States as well as collectives will need to intensify and elevate the processes of their respective engagement with multinational organisations such as the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (the UNODC).
It is quite apparent that within the predominantly maritime expanse of the Indo-Pacific, a clear understanding of the complex regional interplay between maritime connectivity and geopolitics is critical for formulation and execution of strategies aimed at attaining regional security, stability, safety, peace, sustainable development, and prosperity. The IPRD-2023 accordingly aims to coalesce regional perspectives on the various constituent aspects of maritime connectivity that have been set forth in this Concept Note. It aims to provide a reasonable degree of specificity to some of the attendant issues in order to identify precise lines of action along which regional cooperation may be progressed in order to promote responsible maritime connectivity.
IPRD-2023 will be conducted in physical format in New Delhi, through six professional sessions spread over a three-day period covering the 15th, 16th and 17th of November 2023 and will, through the agency of a series of globally renowned subject-matter experts and eminent speakers, explore geopolitical impacts upon Indo-Pacific maritime trade and connectivity.
