New Delhi, Feb 9 (IANS) The concerns that India and other Asian nations will face on security and other fronts two decades hence will be the focus of a three-day conference that Defence Minister A.K. Antony will inaugurate here Thursday, its organisers said.
“The objective of the Asian Security Conference is to explore, in some depth, the key drivers of change on the continent,” N.S. Sisodia, director general of the defence ministry funded think tank Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), told reporters here Tuesday.

“The timeline of 2030 is a useful method to indicate a particular frame of reference and scholars will make their projections for Asia’s over this period,” he added.

Admitting that the future “cannot be predicted” as the past “is not an indicator but gives us many lessons of the drivers of the future”, he added: “We can, however, develop a variety of scenarios.”

“The idea, therefore, is not so much to engage in an exercise to predict the future as it is to scan the emerging geo-political terrain and offer some guideposts to planners, policymakers, mediapersons and those interested in international politics and security,” Sisodia pointed out.

To this end, three key questions will be addressed across the nine sessions of the conference: the key challenges Asian countries will face in 2030, the potential areas of conflict that must be considered for Asia in 2030 and the regional institutional frameworks that will be required to avoid future conflicts in Asia.

What then, will be the drivers of future change?

Sisodia identified these as economic growth, climate change, demographics, urbanisation, migration, resource competition, technology, military modernisation, globalisastion, extremism and terrorism.

Some 40 participants from 13 countries will be attending the conference. Among them are Pakistan’s Pervez Hoodbhoy, a nuclear physicist, political-defence analyst and peacenik; Israel’s Martin van Creveld, a military historian and theorist; Iran’s Ali Karami, an expert in molecular biology; Britain’s Judith Brown, a historian of modern South Asia; Indian American author Nayan Chanda; and Zoya Hasan, a professor at the Jawaharlal Nehru University.