This edited volume examines global power-rivalry in and around South Asia through Bangladeshi lenses using imperfect and overlapping interest concentric-circles as a template. Dynamics from three transitions —the United States exiting the Cold War, China emerging as a global-level power, and India’s eastern interests squaring off with China’s Belt Road Initiative, BRI—help place China, India, and the United States (in alphabetical order) in Bangladesh’s “inner-most” circle, China, India, and the United States in a “mid-stream” circle, and the United States and Latin America, among other countries, in the “outer-most” circle, depending on the issue. In an atmosphere of short-term gains over-riding long-term considerations, the desperate, widespread search for infrastructural funding inside South Asia enhances China’s value, raises local heat, releases new challenges, with costly default consequences looming, issue-specific analysis overtaking formal bilateral relations and a stubborn uncertainty riddling the Bangladeshi air as its policy preferences stubbornly show more certainty.

A sweeping and theoretically original analysis of the India-Pakistan rivalry from 1947 to the present. Since their mutual independence in 1947, India and Pakistan have been engaged in a fierce rivalry. Even today, both rivals continue to devote enormous resources to their military competition even as they face other pressing challenges at home and abroad. Why and when do rival states pursue conflict or cooperation? In The Difficult Politics of Peace, Christopher Clary provides a systematic examination of war-making and peace-building in the India-Pakistan rivalry from 1947 to the present. Drawing upon new evidence from recently declassified documents and policymaker interviews, the book traces India and Pakistan's complex history to explain patterns in their enduring rivalry and argues that domestic politics have often overshadowed strategic interests. It shows that Pakistan's dangerous civil-military relationship and India's fractious coalition politics have frequently stymied leaders that attempted to build a more durable peace between the South Asian rivals. In so doing, Clary offers a revised understanding of the causes of war and peace that brings difficult and sometimes dangerous domestic politics to the forefront.

This study is primarily meant for readers outside India, and that explains the lengthy background which it provides. Although literature on the issue is growing daily, each work is written from a certain angle, and that is quite understandable. Every mind has a particular drawing bias; the information supplied is therefore necessarily coloured by tpe views a writer holds. There are to the author's mind two ways of approaching a subject: One would attempt to fit the facts into the value system of the writer, the other would try to draw values from the mass of materials under study. In either case there is no escaping the subjective evaluation of the narrator; and the present writer does not claim any immunity from the process. Kashmir's present history has two aspects. One of them is international, and here the ups and downs in the fortunes of the two States are to be seen against the complexity of power relations in the multinational world body. The other is the internal dynamics, which have their own compelling logic. An attempt has been made in this study to correlate the two into some sort of unity, but it is not for the writer to evaluate its success.

'Since the partition of India in 1947, Jammu & Kashmir has been a site of frequent unrest and violence. In Unravelling the Kashmir Knot, author and senior advocate Aman Hingorani applies a legal lens to ongoing debates surrounding the national identity of the region and its people, recounting how decades of misconceived policies have culminated in its current state of affairs. The book decrypts major milestones in the history of J&K, from the signing of the Instrument of Accession in 1947 and the Reference to the United Nations in 1948 to the Abrogation of Article 370 in 2023, critically examining their stipulations and impact on global opinion on the Kashmir issue. Drawing from personal correspondences and official documentation, Hingorani explores the role that larger-than-life figures like Jawaharlal Nehru, Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Louis Mountbatten played in shaping the Kashmir policies of their nations. He discusses the influence of Pakistan and China in J&K in the context of geo-political and strategic realities, and the possible depoliticization of the Kashmir issue through the International Court of Justice. Comprehensive yet accessible, Unravelling the Kashmir Knot plucks lesser-known details about J&K’s history from obscurity and emphasizes the importance of charting a realistic path forward to resolve the Kashmir issue.

When the British withdrew from India in 1947, two new states were created, India and Pakistan. Ever since there has been near permanent conflict between the two, breaking out in to all-out war on three occasions. The main point of contention in this conflict is the area of Kashmir, which both parties lay claim to. This study offers a comprehensive historical and political evaluation of the unfolding crisis, in a way that is approachable for anyone with a keen interest in the political, without needing any previous knowledge. Lars Blinkenberg (1931-) a law graduate from Aarhus University in Denmark, as well as a student of Law and Political Science at Cambridge is a man who has dedicated himself to the foreign services. He has served with Danish embassies in London and New Delhi as a counsellor before rising to Ambassador to Venezuela (81-86), Nigeria (92-96) and Syria (96-99). He is a man with a wealth of experience of international politics and conflict.