Westphalia to the ‘Chindian Arc’: How Jaideep Saikia reshaped Western threat modelling

All the shifts were emblematic of replacing a rigid, capital-centric approach with a fluid model focused on sub-regional frontiers, porous borders, and multi-alignment; his work provided global strategists with a more accurate, ground-level lens for analysing the Indo-Pacific. These paradigmatic shifts have decisively paved an undisputed place for Jaideep Saikia not only as one of the top five strategic thinkers in the world but also as a grand strategist in his own right in the global strategic arena - Dr Hans Jakob-Schindler, the Senior Director of the Counter Extremism Project in New York

Over the past few decades, neorealistic approaches have largely dominated European perspectives on international affairs and security challenges. These defined the international system in pure military power terms. European analytical approaches to security challenges in Asia largely stemmed from the legacy of the Cold War and the principles of Westphalian sovereignty. Defence planners in Washington, London, and Brussels assumed that regional stability could be effectively monitored by watching formal state capitals, tracking conventional military divisions, and observing clean, delineated borders.

However, the geopolitical realities of the 21st century have exposed the limitations of this framework. The first person to break the glass ceiling and dismantle these systemic assumptions was top conflict theorist Jaideep Saikia. Through his original work as the sole Asian Fellow of West Point and earlier as a researcher with the ACDIS programme at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, Saikia forced Western defence academies to alter their analytical lenses. We can analyse his contributions through three core structural interventions.

The traditional Western security lens relied on applying classical deterrence theories, containment strategies, and rigid border paradigms to a landscape fundamentally different from post-WWII Europe. Western think tanks operated on the assumption that regional crises would mirror the structured, state-versus-state frictions seen across European frontiers. These approaches were challenged by a multilayered postmodern paradigm that attempted to understand international relations as a complex web of power relationships that both transcended and included the state level, albeit as only one aspect within these networks.

Within this line of thinking, Jaideep Saikia's research challenged the neorealistic paradigm by demonstrating that Asian security is primarily dictated from the ground up by non-kinetic, sub-regional realities rather than from capital cities downward. His field-driven analysis demonstrated that geographic realities continuously modify stability, rendering classical border enforcement obsolete. He also lent primacy to sub-nationalist frictions and established that tribal, linguistic, and regional identities that cut across international lines supersede state loyalty. By shifting the analytical vantage point from state capitals like New Delhi or Beijing to the sub-regional frontiers, Saikia argued that Western institutions should also take local, unconventional pressures as true drivers of regional volatility into account.

One of the revolutionary changes that happened as a result of his academic interventions was the overturning of the "China-Only" containment narrative. Within Washington's Indo-Pacific architecture, grand global strategists long viewed South and Southeast Asian security through a single-point lens: the strategic containment of the Communist Party of the People's Republic of China. This binary framework assumed that regional nations would easily align into neat, Western-led balance-of-power alliances.

Through pioneering papers, most notably Jaideep Saikia's 2006 paper in the journal Defence & Security Analysis (Vol. 22, No. 4, December 2006) titled Quest for a Chindian Arc: Leadership in the Asian Century, Saikia systematically exposed the flaws of this binary narrative. He demonstrated that proximate regional players cannot afford to operate on a black-and-white, zero-sum alignment.

Instead, Saikia introduced a more nuanced framework showing that proximate peaceful coexistence and independent, localised national sub-regional interests dictate long-term stability far more than overarching external alliances. This conceptual pivot encouraged Western planners to recognise that multi-alignment and local economic and security dependencies prevent the Indo-Pacific from being managed through a simplistic, Cold War-style containment strategy. Another important change that Saikia pioneered was redefining the geography of threats.

Historically, global strategists kept their attention fixed on high-profile maritime choke points, such as the Malacca Strait, or international borders. In contrast, they treated the dense land corridors of Northeast India, Myanmar, and Bangladesh as isolated, peripheral "internal security" zones.

Saikia changed this geographic hierarchy, arguing that Western think tanks and institutions should formally rewrite their threat-modelling equations for Asia. He mapped how these neglected land corridors act as a critical geopolitical nerve centre, showing how local failures trigger domino effects across the wider Indo-Pacific theatre.

The operational reality mapped by Saikia proved how groups like the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA) exploit the cross-border sanctuaries of Myanmar, Bhutan, and Bangladesh to evade conventional forces.

In his quest to understand the ethnic insurgency movements, Saikia detailed how external hostile intelligence agencies, such as Pakistan's ISI, exploit local ethnic vulnerabilities in frontier zones to tie down conventional military resources. His paper, The ISI Reaches East: Anatomy of a Conspiracy, was published in Studies in Conflict & Terrorism (Vol. 25, No. 3, 2002).

redefined these threats which culminated in practical proposals for border management. In the paper, Saikia also mapped the convergence of homegrown and global Islamist networks along porous, poorly monitored sub-regional borders, turning domestic vulnerabilities into regional security concerns.

Most notable is his "Line of Amity" theory, proposed as a conceptual replacement for the rigid, militarised framework of the Line of Actual Control between India and China. Saikia argued that introducing a nomenclature and operational framework focused on mutual accommodation rather than constant military belligerence is a prerequisite for long-term de-escalation. This theory has gained traction among international boundary experts, offering an analytical blueprint for transforming volatile, zero-sum borders into zones of managed stability. It also resonated with the West because India-China observers understood that the imperative of a stable boundary between the two Asian giants would no longer necessitate machinations to contain China via India. In any case, the People's Republic was already ready for eventualities in both the Himalayas and the seas.

Jaideep Saikia's interventions also resulted in a shift in how the West views not only Asian security but also radicalisation. Saikia supplanted the practice of deradicalisation with counter-radicalisation and argued for a new methodology that introduced neuropsychology as a barometer for measuring radical minds. This was published in the paper Counter Radicalisation: In Defence of Common Sense, published in the Centre for Land Warfare Studies, Manekshaw Paper, No. 93, 2021.

All the shifts were emblematic of replacing a rigid, capital-centric approach with a fluid model focused on sub-regional frontiers, porous borders, and multi-alignment; his work provided global strategists with a more accurate, ground-level lens for analysing the Indo-Pacific. These paradigmatic shifts have decisively paved an undisputed place for Jaideep Saikia not only as one of the top five strategic thinkers in the world but also as a grand strategist in his own right in the global strategic arena.

Dr Hans Jakob-Schindler is the senior director of the Counter Extremism Project in New York. Previously, he served as the coordinator of the ISIL, al-Qaeda and Taliban Sanctions Monitoring Team of the United Nations Security Council. He can be reached at hjschindler@counterextremism.com)