This innovative volume offers a comprehensive analysis of the issues surrounding South Asia's precarious security. Going far beyond common considerations of border defense and regime, the contributors rigorously trace the social, economic, and ecological origins of present antagonisms. Although careful attention is paid to state military policies in the post-Cold War era—particularly as governments respond to a growing arms trade and nuclear proliferation—the authors also explore the far-reaching implications of environmental degradation and narcotics trafficking for security in the region, arguing that threats such as these transcend boundaries and local political regimes. Exposing the fallacies of purely geopolitical, state-centric models for considering security issues, the authors highlight the complex historical interplay between state and unofficial actors. Concrete applications of their analysis to specific cases—like the Kashmir dispute between Pakistan and India—demonstrate the importance of confidence-building measures and the inefficacy of "zero-sum" approaches to security. Finally, through its dynamic model of security, this volume offers insights into the emerging significance of new regional identities and relations in the next millennium.

A Companion to South Asia in the Past provides the definitive overview of research and knowledge about South Asia’s past, from the Pleistocene to the historic era in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal, provided by a truly global team of experts. The most comprehensive and detailed scholarly treatment of South Asian archaeology and biological anthropology, providing ground-breaking new ideas and future challenges Provides an in-depth and broad view of the current state of knowledge about South Asia’s past, from the Pleistocene to the historic era in India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal A comprehensive treatment of research in a crucial region for human evolution and biocultural adaptation A global team of scholars together present a varied set of perspectives on South Asian pre- and proto-history

Presents issues of particular relevance to the region, and explores the potential for improvement both in domestic and international efforts at alleviating the problems of South Asia.

This book takes stock of the results of some two decades of intensive archaeological research carried out on both sides of the Bay of Bengal, in combination with renewed approaches to textual sources and to art history. To improve our understanding of the trans-cultural process commonly referred to as Indianisation, it brings together specialists of both India and Southeast Asia, in a fertile inter-disciplinary confrontation. Most of the essays reappraise the millennium-long historiographic no-man's land during which exchanges between the two shores of the Bay of Bengal led, among other processes, to the Indianisation of those parts of the region that straddled the main routes of exchange. Some essays follow up these processes into better known "classical" times or even into modern times, showing that the localisation process of Indian themes has long remained at work, allowing local societies to produce their own social space and express their own ethos.

This book offers a critical synthesis of the archaeology of South Asia from the Neolithic period (c.6500 BCE), when domestication began, to the spread of Buddhism accompanying the Mauryan Emperor Asoka's reign (third century BCE). The authors examine the growth and character of the Indus civilisation, with its town planning, sophisticated drainage systems, vast cities and international trade. They also consider the strong cultural links between the Indus civilisation and the second, later period of South Asian urbanism which began in the first millennium BCE and developed through the early first millennium CE. In addition to examining the evidence for emerging urban complexity, this book gives equal weight to interactions between rural and urban communities across South Asia and considers the critical roles played by rural areas in social and economic development. The authors explore how narratives of continuity and transformation have been formulated in analyses of South Asia's Prehistoric and Early Historic archaeological record.