New Delhi, March 9 -- Regional organisations rarely collapse dramatically; they drift quietly into irrelevance. The South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) appears to be caught in precisely such a drift. The organisation has not convened a leaders' summit since 2014, when the eighteenth SAARC summit was held in Kathmandu.Yet the need for regional cooperation in South Asia, one of the world's least integrated regions remains pressing.

At the 2025 UN General Assembly, Bangladesh's interim leader Muhammad Yunus urged the revival of SAARC, noting that South Asia has "no alternative to regional cooperation."

Yet the structural need for regional cooperation in South Asia has not disappeared. Nearly a quarter of the world's po...