Strategic Reckoning - Perspectives on Deterrence and Escalation Post-Pahalgam - May 2025

The May 2025 crisis, marked by India’s preemptive cross-border strikes and Pakistan’s calibrated retaliation, shattered long-held assumptions about deterrence in South Asia. What New Delhi has sought to normalize as a “new normal” is, in reality, a perilous “new abnormal” of institutionalized brinkmanship under the nuclear shadow. This edited volume offers a sober counter-narrative. It situates Pakistan’s deliberate restraint and measured response as a model of responsible deterrence, while warning that perpetual crisis instability risks uncontrollable escalation. Contributors assess the military, doctrinal, normative, and narrative dimensions of the conflict, exploring how emerging technologies, shifting doctrines, and contested information spaces are reshaping deterrence. Collectively, the essays underscore a clear message: stability cannot rest on unilateral compellence or coercion. Instead, it demands recalibration of doctrines, norms, and communication, to ensure that deterrence once again serves its true purpose: preventing war, not normalizing it.