A recent decision by the World Bank to move Pakistan out of its South Asia grouping and place it within a category aligned with the Middle East appears, at first glance, to be little more than a statistical adjustment. But institutions like the World Bank do not merely organise data; they often encode assumptions about geography, economics, political affinity, and developmental logic. Is this a quiet acknowledgement of a geopolitical drift long in the making?
South Asia has long been a fraught but recognisable integer — a region bound by history, geography and, often, shared dysfunction. Economic trajectories were compared, developmental models debated, and political tensions contained within a broadly regional frame. Pakistan’s relocation subtly alters that grammar.
In explaining the reclassification, the World Bank has noted that regional groupings reflect “more than geography”; they are shaped by shared economic structures, development challenges, and cross-border linkages. By the Bank’s own calculations, removing Pakistan and Afghanistan raises South Asia’s average growth rate significantly while modestly lowering that of the newly configured Middle East, North Africa, Afghanistan and Pakistan grouping. The reclassification reflects a judgement that Pakistan increasingly resembles economies shaped by external financing, energy dependence, sovereign debt pressures, and geopolitical volatility rather than the growth dynamics of the Indian subcontinent.
Pakistan’s economic condition has, for some time, been defined by cycles of crisis and reprieve. Engagements with the International Monetary Fund have become almost ritualised, each programme promising stabilisation while postponing structural transformation. What sustains the system in between these interventions is not endogenous growth but external support, much of it emanating from Saudi Arabia and its Gulf counterparts. Financial deposits, oil on deferred payment, and emergency assistance have created a web of dependence that is now systemic rather than episodic.
The World Bank reclassification apart, and quite unrelated to it, Pakistan has long been uneasy with the idea of itself as merely a South Asian state. The very concept of South Asia inevitably places India at the centre. Pakistan’s founding imagination gestured instead toward a wider Islamic world, drawing on memories of Persianate and Central Asian political traditions that linked the northwestern subcontinent to worlds beyond it.
Over time, this instinct evolved into strategy. Pakistan repeatedly cast itself as a frontline state of the Islamic world. During the Cold War, it embedded itself in Western-led security alliances. During the Afghan jihad of the 1980s, it became a conduit for Saudi and American strategy. After 9/11, it once again positioned itself as indispensable to Washington’s war on terror. Today, amid turmoil in West Asia, it seeks another role: mediator between the United States of America and Iran.
This is not accidental diplomacy. Pakistan has learnt that it can derive relevance not from the scale of its power but from the utility of its position. In a fragmented international order, where adversaries often lack direct channels of communication, the ability to connect becomes a form of influence. The memory of Pakistan’s role in enabling the US-China rapprochement in 1971 left a deep imprint on its strategic psyche. It reinforced a belief that Pakistan matters most when larger powers require a bridge.
Thus Pakistan increasingly appears to see itself not merely as a South Asian country, nor simply as India’s rival, but as a hinge between worlds. That is where the self-image of a frontline Islamic-world state and the recent World Bank reclassification suddenly converge.
Pakistan today is economically linked to the Gulf, Islamic-world adjacent in civilisational self-perception, and globally useful in moments of geopolitical fracture. In this reading, ‘South Asia’ becomes too narrow a category for the role it seeks to inhabit. The aspiration is to transcend the region altogether and operate in the spaces between larger theatres of power.
Pakistan may no longer be attempting to compete with India symmetrically — an increasingly impossible contest given India’s widening economic and technological lead. Instead, it seeks agility, access, and manoeuvrability. In a fragmented world, relevance may flow not only from scale but also from speed — from the ability to move quickly between rival systems, broker conversations, and leverage geography into influence.
This helps explain why mediation has become central to Pakistan’s evolving self-image. The country increasingly appears to view itself not as a peripheral South Asian state trapped permanently in India’s shadow, but as an intermediary operating in the seams between larger geopolitical orders.
There is also a familiar rhythm to this reinvention. As careful students of Pakistan have observed, Islamabad has repeatedly sought strategic space beyond the subcontinent whenever asymmetry with India became too overwhelming to manage within a purely regional framework. From Cold War alliances to the Afghan jihad, from facilitating the US-China opening to its present role in the Iran crisis, Pakistan has repeatedly attempted to offset material imbalance through geopolitical utility.
The pattern, then, is not entirely new. What may be new is the world in which it is now unfolding. The emerging international order is increasingly receptive to intermediaries, connectors, and states that can operate across fractured geopolitical landscapes. Multipolarity has not produced equilibrium so much as fragmentation. Great-power rivalry has reopened spaces for middle actors that can mediate, convene, or provide access.
It is tempting to describe this as middle-power behaviour, but the term requires nuance. Unlike the classical middle powers of Europe, whose influence rests on economic resilience and institutional credibility, Pakistan’s leverage flows from access rather than capacity — from being trusted enough by competing actors to carry messages but not necessarily strong enough to shape outcomes.
The recent revival of US-Pakistan engagement reflects immediate circumstance more than strategic transformation. Washington needs channels into Tehran at a volatile moment in West Asia, and Pakistan possesses relationships that make such communication possible. But mediation is not the same as alignment. The deeper architecture of American strategy still rests elsewhere. India remains central to the US conception of the Indo-Pacific. Concerns about Pakistan’s deepening relationship with China persist within the American Establishment, as does long-standing Congressional distrust of Pakistan’s security state. Pakistan is being treated as tactically useful, not strategically foundational.
Yet the larger significance of this moment may lie beyond Pakistan alone. We may be entering a world in which states increasingly survive not through the accumulation of overwhelming power but through intermediation. Not every country can become a superpower. But some may become connectors: mediators, logistics hubs, diplomatic conduits, geopolitical switchboards linking rival systems that no longer speak easily to one another. Pakistan appears to be attempting precisely such a reinvention. The unresolved question is whether influence built primarily on connection can endure without deeper economic strength, institutional stability, and social coherence beneath it.
For South Asia, the implications are profound. Pakistan’s gradual disengagement from that frame reinforces a growing divergence and raises a larger question: is the very idea of South Asia as a coherent economic and strategic unit beginning to dissolve?
This fragmentation mirrors a broader transformation in the international system. The old cartographies of continents, regions, and blocs are giving way to more fluid alignments shaped by capital flows, energy dependencies, and strategic connectivity. States are increasingly defined not merely by where they are, but by the networks they inhabit. Pakistan’s reclassification is emblematic of this shift.
The World Bank’s decision, then, is more than a technical footnote. It is a marker of this changing landscape — a sign that the lines we draw on maps are increasingly outpaced by the realities of dependence and connection. Pakistan’s westward drift does not erase its South Asian past, but it does redefine its present. And in doing so, it compels us to rethink the very idea of region in a world where geography no longer tells the full story.
Nirupama Rao is a former Foreign Secretary. The views expressed are personal