The 11th IISS Shangri-La Dialogue will take place from the 1-3 June 2012.
Initiated in 2002 in response to the clear need for a forum where the Asia-Pacific’s defence ministers could engage in dialogue aimed at building confidence and fostering practical security cooperation, the IISS Asia Security Summit – or Shangri-La Dialogue as it has come to be known – has established itself as a key element of the emerging regional security architecture. It is the most important regular gathering of defence professionals in the region and has become a vital annual fixture in the diaries of Asia-Pacific defence ministers and their civilian and military chiefs of staff. By catering for their specific interests and needs, and by facilitating easy communication and fruitful contact among them, the Shangri-La Dialogue has helped to engender a sense of community among the most important policy-makers in the defence and security establishments of regional states and of major powers with significant stakes in Asia-Pacific security.
The Dialogue’s format, agenda, and cohort of delegates have evolved incrementally. The IISS soon modified the Dialogue’s structure – originally based simply on plenary sessions – to permit several simultaneous break-out groups during one half-day of the summit, allowing in-depth discussion of a greater variety of critical regional security topics. After several years, we established the principle that all speaking slots in plenary sessions and break-out groups would be allocated to ministers, other senior official delegates or distinguished legislators with strong defence credentials.
Because the states of the Asia-Pacific, an extraordinarily large and diverse region encompassing the majority of the world’s population, face an extremely wide range of defence and security challenges, the IISS has
