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The US withdrawal from Central Asia, Russia-Ukraine conflict and diverted great-powers' competition from the region necessitate and drive the Central Asian region to revive historical links and open up in southern direction. The circumstances also induce Russia to open up trade routes to South via Central Asia. Central Asia with prudent regional approach may move from a "shatter belt" status (a region torn by internal strife and external intervention) to strengthened regionalism in the absence of direct great powers' competition. The changed geo-political and geo-economic situation presents new opportunities to Central Asia, Afghanistan and South Asia for developing the Central-South Asia economic corridor, though accompanied with challenges within Afghanistan. The paper argues that the recent changes in the situation of the region provide additional space to the Central Asian countries for political maneuver to address the issues of security and development by materializing Central-South Asia economic corridor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Regionalism (regional integration) has gained much attention particularly amongst the peripheral regions to address the challenges of globalization imposed by the core regions, to tackle the issues of under- development and to arrest the process of further marginalization. Central and South Asia are the least integrated regions in the world. However the regions possess greatest potential for regionalism due to a number of factors including huge energy resources but high differences in resource endowment, trade and economic complementarity, vast but contiguous landmass, gravitational pull of geographical proximity on movement of goods, common culture and history, and having identical political and economic challenges. Basic structure for regional integration has been framed on the principles of open regionalism in the forms of Regional Trade Arrangements/Agreements (RTAs). The framework of Regional Integration Arrangements (RIAs) includes RTAs regarding energy trade i.e. agreements on pipelines and trade in goods i.e. bilateral, trilateral and multilateral trade agreements. The process will gain momentum by prioritizing economic interests over the regional geopolitics shaped by the extra-regional states having political stakes in the region. Regional states need to focus on the functional area' i.e. energy, for providing base to regional integration inter and intra-regionally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]