For Sri Lanka, maritime security is not an abstract geopolitical concern. The island’s location near major shipping routes creates opportunities for trade, fisheries, and economic development, but it also brings responsibilities. Illegal fishing, smuggling, maritime accidents, environmental threats, and disruptions to shipping require surveillance, trained personnel, reliable equipment, and cooperation with other countries.
Sri Lanka cannot address all these challenges alone. External partnerships are therefore necessary. India, China, Japan, the United States, and other partners offer different forms of assistance, technology, training, and maritime cooperation. The question is not whether Sri Lanka should cooperate with them. It is how that cooperation can strengthen the country’s capabilities without unnecessarily narrowing its future choices.
This distinction matters across the Indian Ocean, where security cooperation is also becoming a way for states to establish influence, build relationships, and promote their preferred approaches to regional order.
The cost of a security partnership
A patrol vessel, coastal radar system, or maritime surveillance platform can provide an immediate operational benefit. Yet the acquisition of equipment is only the beginning of its cost. Maintenance, spare parts, specialist training, software updates, fuel, and eventual replacement can create obligations that continue for years.
These costs become especially important when a recipient state has limited financial resources. A capability that appears affordable at the point of delivery may prove difficult to sustain later, particularly if essential maintenance or technical support remains concentrated in the hands of an external provider.
The issue extends beyond defence procurement. Modern maritime security increasingly depends on information systems, data-sharing arrangements, communications infrastructure, and technical expertise. A state may possess the equipment it needs but still depend on another country to keep it operational or to provide information required for effective decision-making.
Research by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman on weaponised interdependence explains how states can gain influence from their positions within important international networks. Their work focuses primarily on economic and information networks, but it raises a relevant question for maritime security: what happens when a state relies heavily on external partners for essential technical services, information, or operational support?
Such reliance does not automatically produce political pressure. Nor does accepting assistance mean surrendering strategic autonomy. The concern is more practical: does a partnership leave the recipient with credible alternatives if its priorities change or the relationship becomes difficult to maintain?
Sri Lanka’s choices within a changing regional order
Sri Lanka’s maritime responsibilities are recognised in the Sri Lanka Navy’s NAVSTRAT-2030 strategy, which emphasises maritime security, modernisation, partnerships, and the protection of national interests.
The challenge is to translate these ambitions into sustainable capabilities. This requires more than acquiring platforms or increasing the number of international engagements. It requires understanding the long-term financial and technical obligations attached to each partnership, alongside its operational benefits.
Sri Lanka’s engagement with regional maritime-information networks illustrates the choices facing smaller Indian Ocean states. The Information Fusion Centre–Indian Ocean Region (IFC-IOR) facilitates information-sharing among regional maritime partners, and Sri Lanka is represented at the centre through a liaison officer. Sri Lanka also operates its own Information Fusion Centre in Colombo, which supports maritime-domain awareness through the collection, analysis and sharing of information.
These arrangements can complement one another, but their strategic value for Sri Lanka depends on whether they strengthen national capacity and preserve the ability to cooperate with different partners. The important question is not whether participation in an Indian-led mechanism automatically creates dependence, but whether the terms of cooperation leave Sri Lanka with meaningful room for independent decision-making.
China and other external actors also maintain maritime relationships across the region, although their purposes, institutional arrangements, and practical consequences vary. These relationships should be assessed individually rather than treated as interchangeable expressions of geopolitical competition.
For Sri Lanka, the sensible approach is neither automatic alignment with one power nor the assumption that every external initiative presents a strategic threat. It is to evaluate what each arrangement delivers, what obligations it creates, and how much freedom the country retains to adjust its policies later.
This is also an institutional question. Bilateral partnerships may complement regional cooperation, but they can also produce separate systems, overlapping commitments, or competing expectations. The result depends on how governments negotiate agreements, share information, maintain oversight, and connect external assistance to national priorities.
Maritime-security cooperation is also an expression of foreign policy. Through bilateral partnerships, technology transfers, training and participation in regional institutions, states pursue security interests and seek to shape the rules and practices governing their region. These approaches need not be identical, even when partners share practical objectives such as safer sea lanes and better maritime surveillance.
Smaller states, meanwhile, are not merely recipients of external initiatives. They can diversify partnerships, choose between institutional channels and use regional forums to protect their own priorities. The important question is how these interactions influence both the choices available to individual states and the institutions through which regional security is organised.
Why regional institutions matter
The Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) provides a regional framework in which maritime safety and security sit alongside other shared priorities. Its value lies in offering a forum for states with different interests to pursue areas of practical cooperation.
Regional institutions cannot eliminate strategic rivalry, resolve every dispute, or replace bilateral security arrangements. They can, however, help establish common procedures, facilitate dialogue, and make cooperation less dependent on any single relationship.
This matters for smaller states. When technical standards, information-sharing practices, training arrangements, and maritime procedures can be developed through broader regional cooperation, governments may have more options than when essential capabilities depend on a single provider.
The objective should not be to exclude external powers. Their resources and expertise can make important contributions to regional security. Instead, cooperation should be organised so that participating states retain meaningful roles in setting priorities and determining how shared arrangements are used.
Sri Lanka can contribute to this process by supporting practical regional initiatives, improving coordination among its own maritime agencies, and ensuring that external assistance is connected to a long-term national capability plan.
The question is not only whether a maritime-security partnership makes a state more dependent on an external provider. It is also whether it changes how regional security cooperation is organised. Bilateral arrangements may strengthen regional mechanisms by improving information-sharing and operational coordination. In other circumstances, they may divert cooperation into less inclusive channels, limit participation, or reduce the centrality of existing forums.
These outcomes are not automatic; they depend on how states negotiate terms, choose institutional venues, and connect external assistance to national priorities. For smaller maritime states, the ability to work with different partners without losing meaningful room for decision-making is an important part of security.
A practical test for strategic autonomy
One useful way to assess maritime-security partnerships is through what I call the “Doctrine of Credible Restraint (DCR)”. It is a proposed analytical framework for examining whether states can strengthen their security capabilities while preserving meaningful strategic choice. Its value must be established through careful comparison and empirical research.
The framework focuses on four questions.
First, can the recipient state afford to sustain the capability over its full life cycle, rather than merely accept it initially? Second, does it have access to the technical knowledge, maintenance, and spare parts required to operate the system reliably? Third, do the associated operational and institutional arrangements create obligations that are difficult to change? Finally, can the government revise or decline a future commitment without facing disproportionate costs?
These four questions function as diagnostic indicators rather than assumed causal pathways; their analytical value must be established through careful comparison of actual partnerships.
These questions shift attention from the identity of a donor to the structure of the relationship. A partnership with a major power may strengthen national capacity and preserve considerable freedom of action. Another arrangement, even one without a formal alliance or military base, may create vulnerabilities if the recipient has few alternatives.
The framework must also recognise the opposite possibility: states can manage dependence, diversify their relationships, negotiate safeguards, and resist external preferences. Evidence of cooperation alone cannot establish political alignment or coercion.
For policymakers, the practical implications are straightforward. Security planning should include life-cycle cost assessments, transparent contractual terms, access to maintenance knowledge where feasible, interoperable systems, and realistic alternatives to essential external services. Regional cooperation should complement these safeguards rather than substitute for them.
Building capability without narrowing choice
The Indian Ocean does not need fewer security partnerships. It needs partnerships that remain useful, sustainable, and compatible with the interests of the states that enter them.
For Sri Lanka, strategic autonomy should not mean isolation from external assistance. It should mean retaining the ability to cooperate with different partners, reassess commitments, and make national decisions without facing avoidable constraints created by earlier arrangements.
That requires governments to look beyond the immediate value of a donated vessel, a new surveillance system, or a training programme. They must also consider the financial, technical, operational, and institutional relationships that follow.
The wider lesson is that maritime security is not measured only by the capabilities a country acquires. It is also measured by the choices it can still make after acquiring them. In a region where cooperation and competition increasingly operate through the same networks, preserving those choices is an important part of building a stable maritime order.
Mojtaba Barghandan is a researcher in maritime governance and geopolitics. His research examines maritime security partnerships, strategic autonomy, and how external dependence interacts with regional institutional cooperation.
