In recent years, the term “Indo-Pacific” has become a buzzword in diplomatic, military, and strategic circles from Washington to Canberra, New Delhi to Tokyo. Shinzo Abe’s strategic imagination “Confluence of the Two Sea”, outlined in his address to the Indian Parliament in August 2007, inspired the creation of a new region: The Indo-Pacific. Framed largely as a maritime theatre of competition, it invokes images of naval power, strategic chokepoints, supply chains, and rising superpower rivalries – especially with China at the centre of the equation.
But as powerful as this vision is, it remains incomplete.
Lately, the Quad, a grouping of Australia, India, Japan, and the United States, having “symbiotic link” with the geopolitical concept “Indo-Pacific” in its core conceptualization, moved beyond security dialogues to include other areas like infrastructure, healthcare, sustainability. However, the maritime determinism and the state-centric approach of the current discourse tied with the Indo-Pacific remain among the key strategies for countering China’s hegemonic expansion and outreach in the region.
Following Abe’s legacy, the Indo-Pacific region as presently imagined is largely a top-down, state-centric, maritime-military construct. It is notable not just for who it includes, but for whom it excludes: indigenous communities, landlocked societies, spiritual traditions, and the ecological systems that sustain life across the region.
One of the most striking silences in current Indo-Pacific discourse is the absence of the trans-Himalayan world – particularly Tibetan Buddhist communities, highland ecologies, and the ancient cultural corridors that once knit the Himalayas to Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean.
This is not just an academic omission – it is a conceptual, strategic and moral failure.
People-centred, Bottom-up Indo-Pacific
A more grounded, inclusive Indo-Pacific vision recognizes that connectivity in Asia has never been purely maritime, nor driven exclusively by states or empires. For centuries, Buddhist monks, traders, pilgrims, and forest communities have traversed and shaped the Himalayan foothills and Indian Ocean rim, from Lhasa to Luang Prabang, from Bodh Gaya to Bali.
These traditions did not mobilize fleets or armadas. They mobilized ideas, ethics, art, and spiritual ecology – all of which are as critical to long-term peace and sustainability as naval coalitions or port infrastructure.
Today, the world is in a climate crisis, where cooperation on water, glaciers, forest conservation, and indigenous knowledge is urgent.
There’s also a growing fatigue with state-centric securitization and military competition in the Indo-Pacific. The stability and efficacy of Quad is questionable. Civil society, environmental movements, and spiritual communities are seeking alternative visions.
Why the Trans-Himalayan Matters
Consider this: The Tibetan Plateau, often called the “Third Pole,” is the source of most major rivers that feed the Indo-Pacific – Indus, Ganges, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Salween, and Yangtze. Climate change, glacial melt, and water insecurity in this region pose far greater risks to human security than many conventional military threats.
Tibetan Buddhist philosophies, with their deep emphasis on interdependence, compassion, and environmental stewardship, offer frameworks for cooperation that are profoundly aligned with 21st-century needs – from climate justice to conflict resolution.
And yet, Tibet and its neighbouring Himalayan societies are invisible in the very strategic architecture being built to secure the Indo-Pacific.
A New Vision: People, Planet, Peace
Tibet and the broader Himalayan cultural landscape are becoming increasingly geostrategically visible (e.g., China-India tensions, water security), making the inclusion of these regions strategically inevitable, even if uncomfortable.
This is why there is an urgent need to step up efforts dedicated to reimagining the Indo-Pacific from the ground up that challenges a monolithic and militarized narrative of regional order, offers a civilizational counterpoint grounded in lived realities and spiritual ethics, and embodies a vision of the Indo-Pacific not as a theatre of contest, but as a region of continuity, care, and co-existence. This people and ecology centred framing of the Indo-Pacific fills a serious epistemological and moral gap in the current Indo-Pacific discourse.
Bottom-up Indo-Pacific seek to centre:
People: Through oral histories, cultural diplomacy, and indigenous voices long excluded from elite dialogues
Planet: By focusing on ecological continuities from the Himalayas to the oceans, and integrating spiritual-ecological ethics into policy
Peace: Promoting non-violent traditions of diplomacy, especially rooted in Tibetan Buddhism and trans-Himalayan cosmologies
This is not a sentimental or utopian gesture. It is a strategic necessity. Without a broader and more inclusive conception of regional security – one that factors in culture, community, and climate – we risk building alliances that are brittle, blind, and ultimately unsustainable.
Not a Rival, but a Complement
There is no denying that geopolitics matters. State competition, maritime strategy, and economic corridors are all vital. But they must be informed by the lived realities of communities, and complemented by traditions of peacebuilding that come from within the region – not imposed from without. This grounded, bottom-up vision does not oppose the Indo-Pacific. It completes it. It corrects the imbalance in current Indo-Pacific thinking by re-centering people, ecology, and culture; reintegrating the Himalayan hinterlands, especially Tibet, which were historically connected with Southeast Asia through Buddhism, trade, and migration; and challenging the maritime determinism of current discourse that marginalizes landlocked or upland regions like Tibet or Northeast India.
The vision thus outlined may encounter resistance and skepticism from certain actors in the traditional strategic community. The security hawks, particularly from the US institutions, may likely label or dismiss it, as “soft” or peripheral to “hard” security priorities (freedom of navigation, military alliances, etc.). Some may view the inclusion of Tibetan communities as provocative, particularly vis-à-vis China, which has a record of suppressing alternative Tibet narratives in international forums. Countries like Cambodia, Laos, or Myanmar, which are politically close to China, may hesitate to officially engage with this complementary Indo-Pacific thinking that includes Tibetan perspectives, even though culturally they are part of the broader Buddhist Indo-Pacific.
The Way Forward
The salience of the bottom-up Indo-Pacific vision is mainly in its non-confrontational outlook. Those from the non-traditional security studies might find this re-envisioning of the Indo-Pacific in greater alignment with their methodological approaches. The emphasis on soft power, people-to-people ties, and spiritual diplomacy as essential to long-term peace and cooperation, cannot be ignored even within traditional security strategies.
The time has come to reweave the Indo-Pacific, with the Himalayas in view, and humanity at its heart.
[Image by Stefan Schweihofer from Pixabay]
Yashwant Singh is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Sociology at GITAM (Deemed to be) University, Bengaluru Campus, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. He has an M.Phil in Sociology from the University of Delhi and Ph.D in Sociology from University of Hyderabad, India. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.
