The escalating tensions between India and Pakistan have received renewed attention of late. Since their genesis in 1947, the nations of India and Pakistan have been locked in a seemingly endless spiral of hostility over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Ganguly asserts that the two nations remain mired in conflict due to inherent features of their nationalist agendas. Indian nationalist leadership chose to hold on to this Muslim-majority state to prove that minorities could thrive in a plural, secular polity. Pakistani nationalists argued with equal force that they could not part with Kashmir as part of the homeland created for the Muslims of South Asia. Ganguly authoritatively analyzes why hostility persists even after the dissipation of the pristine ideological visions of the two states and discusses their dual path to overt acquisition of nuclear weapons, as well as the current prospects for war and peace in the region.

This volume, first published in 2005, analyses the persistence of the India-Pakistan rivalry since 1947.

The Mumbai blasts of 1993, the attack on the Indian Parliament in 2001, Mumbai 26/11—cross-border terrorism has continued unabated. What can India do to motivate Pakistan to do more to prevent such attacks? In the nuclear times that we live in, where a military counter-attack could escalate to destruction beyond imagination, overt warfare is clearly not an option. But since outright peace-making seems similarly infeasible, what combination of coercive pressure and bargaining could lead to peace? The authors provide, for the first time, a comprehensive assessment of the violent and non-violent options available to India for compelling Pakistan to take concrete steps towards curbing terrorism originating in its homeland. They draw on extensive interviews with senior Indian and Pakistani officials, in service and retired, to explore the challenges involved in compellence and to show how non-violent coercion combined with clarity on the economic, social and reputational costs of terrorism can better motivate Pakistan to pacify groups involved in cross-border terrorism. Not War, Not Peace? goes beyond the much discussed theories of nuclear deterrence and counterterrorism strategy to explore a new approach to resolving old conflicts.

In examining the forces that made the Indo-Pakistani relationship prone to conflict, Dr. Ganguly focusses first on the nature of the British colonial disengagement policy, a hasty and ill-conceived procedure that served to exacerbate the ideological differences between India's major political parties, the Congress and the Muslim League. Their competing views–the Congress espoused a secular polity while the League drew its inspiration from Islamic tenets–formed the basis of the two polities that emerged from the collapse of the British Indian empire. Disputes also arose over the uncertain status of Kashmir. With the lapse of the British doctrine of paramountcy (recognition of the British as the sovereign power in India), the so-called princely states had to join either India or Pakistan on the basis of geographic location and demographic composition. Kashmir posed a problem because of its location and because it had a Hindu monarch ruling a Muslim majority population. This peculiar status made it the center of a Pakistani irredentist claim. This claim was rejected by India, iintent upon demonstrating that all minorities could thrive under the aegis of secular government. Once set in motion by the interplay of domestic, regional, and systematic factors, these three forces--disengagement, ideological differences, and the conflict over Kashmir--brought the subcontinent to war in 1947-1948, 1965, and 1971. Dr. Ganguly provides a comprehensive and comparative analysis of these three Indo-Pakistani conflicts as well as an assessment of both the impact of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan on the security of South Asia and the changes in the perceptions of that security.

Using an analysis of patterns of international crisis and war from 1948 to 1975, Patrick James suggests why some international crises result in war while others do not. Over one hundred cases are used to assess the three most prominent explanations for crisis escalation to war: (1) war is the result of rational choice by leaders who expect to gain from it; (2) war is the product of the outward projection of political unrest within states; and (3) war is the result of classical balance of power politics. James concludes that the best explanations for war include elements from all three categories.