Thousands of global security conferences are convened annually. Among the most prominent are the Munich Security Conference in Germany, the GlobSec Bratislava Conference in Slovakia, the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, the Global Security Exchange (GSX) in North America, and the Global Security Forum in Doha, Qatar. Invitees to these conferences include heads of state, defense and security professionals, policymakers, practitioners, and industry experts. These forums focus on contemporary geopolitics and their ramifications for geo-strategy, defense, and security. Participants engage in discussions to shape evolving international policies on security and strategy. Emerging topics in this context include international diplomacy, corporate security, and cybersecurity, particularly concerning AI and technology policies.
The impact of these discussions on security management professionals, law enforcement officials, the private sector, and non-state actors is recognized as essential to overhauling security and strategy to meet the challenges and adversities in this domain amid continuous innovation in defense research, hardware, and arms development. These forums play a significant role in influencing international security policy, statecraft, and strategic directions, highlighting trends and transformations.
The world of states faces enduring security dilemmas, which reflect the challenge of maintaining law and order within, between, and among nations. The problem of anarchy arises in the Hobbesian worldview, where there is no overarching world government, despite intergovernmental organizations like the United Nations and its specialized agencies. Citizens and people cannot escape this scenario, as they aspire to live according to Lockean principles or democratic desires to govern and challenge the Leviathan in statecraft, whether within their countries or in the global context of democracies versus authoritarian regimes. At this intersection of politics and diplomacy, statecraft recalibrates, leverages, and optimizes national interests to address the compounding consequences of war, conflict, confrontation, or competition—be they strategic, security-related, political, economic, energy-related, or driven by technological, diplomatic pressures, risks, and threats.
If strategy is about achieving victory in war, grand strategy, according to experts, is about advancing peace. While the purpose of both is to contain war and conflict, the former focuses on the theory of victory, whereas the latter emphasizes the theory of security. In this context, the current Shangri-La Dialogue, Asia’s premier annual defense and security summit hosted by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies in Singapore since 2002, aims to take stock of these phenomena—both practical and ideational in scope. The dialogue in its 22nd edition serves as a consequential intergovernmental Track One forum, convening global defense ministers, military chiefs, and security experts to discuss critical geopolitical and geostrategic challenges in the world around them.
As media coverage highlights concerns about US-China regional power dynamics and rivalry, technological infrastructure, competitive production edges, economic connections, and scaling up with grand strategic templates like the Belt and Road Initiative of the People’s Republic of China and the Indo-Pacific Strategy of democracies, discussions also focus on undersea infrastructure, such as cables and pipelines, which must be ensured and secured against obstacles, disruptions, or security threats. Meanwhile, ASEAN member states’ defense ministers are committed to ensuring the unobstructed flow of international trade in the maritime corridor, despite rising geopolitical instability and both unprovoked and provoked conflicts and impending crises.
The 2026 Shangri-La Dialogue took place from May 29 to 31, with key themes including shifting alliance frameworks, regional security partnerships in a fragmented and multipolar world, conflict risk management in international trade corridors, and regional balance of power politics and security challenges. These developments are enveloped, for example, in the America-Europe rift, tariff spat with trading countries, rearranging coalition, reordering the world with the advent of old powers and new powers in an opening world, regional reconfiguration and diplomatic initiatives, multilateral and multipolar trends and targeting wars against particular countries.
The pressing strategic and security challenges include territorial claims, such as former President Trump’s interest in Greenland, the America’s capture of Venezuela’s leadership, its threats to Cuba under its communist regime, Trump’s initiative of the fragile Board of Peace in the post-Hamas administration of the Gaza Strip amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict, the protracted Ukraine-Russia war with the Transatlantic Alliance’s support for Ukraine, Thailand-Cambodia territorial disputes, insurgencies in Myanmar, China’s claims in the South China Sea and disputes with ASEAN neighbors, North Korean threats, South Asian terrorism, and conflicts in West Asia involving countries previously labeled as part of the “Axis of Evil,” including recent American-Israeli attacks on Iran, as well as internal conflicts and social unrest in Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Afghanistan-Pakistan military action, and religious terrorism across West Asia, Central Asia, and South Asia, particularly in Jammu and Kashmir.
Similarly, in Africa, military coups across the Sahel region, internal disorder, revolts and rebellion in Sudan, Congo, Nigeria, and Kenya pose significant challenges, with the African Union serving as a last hope for enhancing stability on the continent. Narco-terrorism, human trafficking, and left-wing insurgencies in Central and Latin America have weakened governments, hindering their ability to achieve good governance in the Western Hemisphere, where the historical doctrinaire policy of America President James Monroe remains influential in its exclusive sphere.
These factual challenges to maintaining international peace and security are a cause for concern for those who seek to keep, promote and sustain it. A global entity like the UN should be at the forefront, galvanizing the strength of member states to keep violence, conflict, and war at bay in their unanimity and resolutions. With the division of the Western alliance – American and European rift, alongside Russia, China, and other multipolar great and middle powers like Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, India, South Africa, Turkey, Qatar, Brazil, et al, the world lacks a truly global consensus to address the security risks, challenges, and problems. Devoid of a concerted approach, acting alone would not yield maximum benefit to address the security threats – inside and outside. I believe agile diplomacy can deter the outbreak of insecurity and focus, refocus and reorient efforts and endeavors towards good governance, nimble management of internal affairs, and adherence to the rule of (inter)national law.
The Shangri-La Dialogue can stimulate discourse, deliberations, and debate on security affairs and strategies to tackle, grapple with, and manage new threats, risks, and insecurities worldwide. Such gatherings of leaders in their fields of expertise produce abstract contemplation based on ground realities and conjectures about the future of human security. Security is multifaceted, affecting the lives of people around the world. If we ignore it, we cannot establish a humanitarian lifeline, secure the resources necessary for existential and essential needs, or create an environment conducive to progress and prosperity for human well-being.
Against the global backdrop of current small-scale warfare in conflict hotspots, as reported in everyday news, and geopolitical pressures, we face challenges in politics, diplomacy, and international relations. A discussion is necessary to conduct a reality check and refresh our sensibility and sensitivity regarding the security issues, interests, concerns, and stakes of common people in their pursuit of peace, stability, or normalcy and nonviolence. Security plays a core role and bears responsibilities when politics and diplomacy fail. As we witnessed mobocracy in Kathmandu, whereby security forces were called in to restore normalcy. When democracy is discredited or derailed or befell or eroded, security provides ballast to civilian rule and serves as the bedrock of permanent government, namely, the bureaucracy and security sector. Security dialogue identifies the commonalities and differences to face the opportunities and threats as repercussions of bad governance or geopolitical anxieties at the local and global levels. It signals the cooperation, partnerships and coalition to forge ahead to subdue and pacify from inimical, hostile, or bellicose elements.
Mr. Kunwar is a penworker in politics and international relations, pitches from the Kathmandu Valley.