Introduction

Author(s):  
Moeed Yusuf

The Introduction lays the groundwork for the rest of the book by introducing the need for a theory of nuclear crisis behavior centered on third-party mediation. Specifically, how does the presence of the unipole and stronger third parties alter the crisis behavior of regional nuclear powers situated within a unipolar world? And what implications does this have for crisis management, stability, and outcomes? The chapter introduces the puzzle and explains the book’s empirical focus on South Asia by highlighting that India and Pakistan are the only regional nuclear powers to have experienced major crises since the end of the Cold War. The chapter also summarizes the key findings from the three case studies, the 1999 Kargil conflict, the 2001–2002 military standoff, and the 2008 Mumbai crisis, and confirms evidence in line with the proposed theory of brokered bargaining.

Author(s):  
Moeed Yusuf

This chapter surveys the literature on nuclear crises. It begins by summarizing the Cold War treatment of these episodes, highlighting the centrality of bilateral deterrence and models such as “brinkmanship” in creating expectations for nuclear crisis behavior. Even though third-party actors remained important as superpower allies during the Cold War, literature during this period suffered from a two-actor bias flowing from the global hegemony of the superpowers. Post–Cold War literature tends to account for regional nuclearization and unipolarity but in summarizing this body of work, the chapter identifies that there is still insufficient knowledge of the various factors at play in regional nuclear crises.


Author(s):  
Moeed Yusuf

This book is the first to theorize third party mediation in crises between regional nuclear powers. Its relevance flows from two of the most significant international developments since the end of the Cold War: the emergence of regional nuclear rivalries; and the shift from the Cold War’s bipolar context to today’s unipolar international setting. Moving away from the traditional bilateral deterrence models, the book conceptualizes crisis behavior as “brokered bargaining”: a three-way bargaining framework where the regional rivals and the ‘third party’ seek to influence each other to behave in line with their crisis objectives and in so doing, affect each other’s crisis behavior. The book tests brokered bargaining theory by examining U.S.-led crisis management in South Asia, analyzing three major crises between India and Pakistan: the Kargil conflict, 1999; the 2001-02 nuclear standoff; and the Mumbai crisis, 2008. The case studies find strong evidence of behavior predicted by the brokered bargaining framework. They also shed light on several risks of misperceptions and inadvertence due to the challenges inherent in signaling to multiple audiences simultaneously. Traditional explanations rooted in bilateral deterrence models do not account for these, leaving a void with serious practical consequences, which the introduction of brokered bargaining seeks to fill. The book’s findings also offer lessons for crises on the Korean peninsula, between China and India, and between potential nuclear rivals in the Middle East.


2005 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Paul Kapur

Scholars attribute conventional violence in a nuclear South Asia to a phenomenon known as the “stability/instability paradox.” According to this paradox, the risk of nuclear war makes it unlikely that conventional confict will escalate to the nuclear level, thereby making conventional confict more likely. Although this phenomenon encouraged U.S.-Soviet violence during the Cold War, it does not explain the dynamics of the ongoing confict between India and Pakistan. Recent violence has seen Pakistan or its proxies launching limited attacks on Indian territory, and India refusing to retaliate in kind. The stability/instability paradox would not predict such behavior. A low probability of conventional war escalating to the nuclear level would reduce the ability of Pakistan's nuclear weapons to deter an Indian conventional attack. Because Pakistan is conventionally weaker than India, this would discourage Pakistani aggression and encourage robust Indian conventional retaliation against Pakistani provocations. Pakistani boldness and Indian restraint have actually resulted from instability in the strategic environment. A full-scale Indo-Pakistani conventional confict would create a significant risk of nuclear escalation. This danger enables Pakistan to launch limited attacks on India while deterring allout Indian conventional retaliation and attracting international attention to the two countries' dispute over Kashmir. Unlike in Cold War Europe, in contemporary South Asia nuclear danger facilitates, rather than impedes, conventional confict.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-22

Living in an area that has long been a battlefield where various world powers have often been at loggerheads, Pashtuns have frequently drawn the attention of several works of fiction. Yet literary scholars have largely ignored the importance of these works of fiction looking into the lives of Pashtuns. This paper proposes that from the times of the Cold War to those of the War on Terror, Pashtun identities have been clouded by the hegemonic discourses of the contesting global powers, leading to gaps and silences in their depiction in literature.This paper argues that the Pashtun images in contemporary Pakistani fiction in English exhibit strong influences of the dominating narratives; simultaneously, however, they seem to offer various patterns of subversion of the prevailing power narratives. Despite the fact that Pashtuns are generally regarded as the most subversive people of South Asia and that their lands have been regarded significant strategically as well as geographically, yet they are portrayed as the Others of the mainstream cultural discourses. This paper aims to highlight the contours of the socio-cultural and political valuation of Pashtuns in contemporary Pakistani fiction in English.


2019 ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Zorawar Daulet Singh

If we seek to make informed assessments about India’s future foreign policy and possible contestations, we must revisit a much larger and earlier slice of its strategic past, in order to discern prior policy patterns during times of inflexion and change. The Cold War period offers a rich and relatively untapped empirical reserve that can provide much needed depth to understanding Indian strategic thought and geopolitical practices. And, to truly understand Indian statecraft one must go beyond the study of non-alignment and examine more concrete ideas that have informed Indian geopolitics over the years. This book attempts to explicate some of these ideas and their application during some of the most significant events and crises in India’s immediate and extended neighbourhood over three decades during the Cold War. This chapter sets up the book’s main argument, lays out the conceptual framework, elaborates on the historical scope of the case studies, and, finally on the archival material that has been consulted by the author.


2010 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 401-421 ◽  
Author(s):  
JONATHAN BELL

ABSTRACTThis article argues that those termed ‘liberals’ in the United States had the opportunity in the late 1940s to use overseas case studies to reshape the ramshackle political agenda of the New Deal along more specifically social democratic lines, but that they found it impossible to match interest in the wider world with a concrete programme to overcome tension between left-wing politics and the emerging anti-totalitarianism of the Cold War. The American right, by contrast, conducted a highly organized publicity drive to provide new meaning for their anti-statist ideology in a post-New Deal, post-isolationist United States by using perceived failures of welfare states overseas as domestic propaganda. The examples of Labour Britain after 1945 and Labour New Zealand both provided important case studies for American liberals and conservatives, but in the Cold War it was the American right who would benefit most from an ideologically driven repackaging of overseas social policy for an American audience.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kanti P Bajpai ◽  
Stephen P Cohen
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  

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