South Asia

45 Items

Jawaharlal Nehru with Zhou Enlai

Public Domain

Journal Article - Cold War History

'China Marching with India': India's Cold War Advocacy for the People's Republic of China at the United Nations, 1949–1971

| 2023

Recent scholarship on Sino-Indian relations in the 1950s has emphasized cooperation, revising previous narratives of an inexorable march towards the 1962 border war. This article reassesses that cooperation by focusing on India's role as an intermediary between the unrecognized government in Beijing and the United Nations (UN). Chinese sources reveal that Sino-Indian cooperation over UN affairs was complicated by competing conceptions of how the decolonizing world should fit into the international system and who should be at the helm. Despite such disagreements, the Cold War UN provided a setting where divergent post-colonial visions could be sublimated into meaningful international cooperation.

Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation: How States Pursue the Bomb

AP

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Strategies of Nuclear Proliferation: How States Pursue the Bomb

| Winter 2016/17

Understanding which nuclear proliferation strategies are available to states and how to thwart them is crucial for global security. Analysis of the strategies chosen by potential proliferators, and particularly the history of India’s nuclear program, shows how states choose among four possible proliferation strategies: hedging, sprinting, hiding, and sheltered pursuit. Each strategy has vulnerabilities that can be exploited to prevent proliferation.

Skulls at site of executions ordered by Pakistan military officials, Bangladesh, December 13, 1971.

AP

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Bargaining Away Justice: India, Pakistan, and the International Politics of Impunity for the Bangladesh Genocide

    Author:
  • Gary Bass
| Fall 2016

During the 1971 Bangladesh war for independence from Pakistan, the Pakistan army carried out a genocide that killed hundreds of thousands of Bengalis in what was then East Pakistan. The perpetrators never faced trial. Archival documents reveal how India and Bangladesh sacrificed the opportunity for war crimes trials to gain Pakistan’s agreement on key security goals—the Simla peace agreement and recognition of Bangladesh’s independence. The legacy of this decision continues to blight Bangladesh’s politics.

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Keeping the Bombs in the Basement: U.S. Nonproliferation Policy toward Israel, South Africa, and Pakistan

| Summer 2015

Many accounts suggest that the United States did little to prevent Israel, Pakistan, and South Africa from developing nuclear weapons. These accounts are flawed, however. The United States did attempt to stop all three countries from acquiring the bomb and, when those efforts failed, to halt additional proliferation measures such as further testing and weaponization.

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Correspondence: Secrecy, Civil-Military Relations, and India's Nuclear Weapons Program

    Authors:
  • Anit Mukherjee
  • George Perkovich
  • Gaurav Kampani
| Winter 2014/15

Anit Mukherjee and George Perkovich respond to Gaurav Kampani's spring 2014 International Security article, "New Delhi's Long Nuclear Journey: How Secrecy and International Roadblocks Delayed India's Weaponization."

East Pakistanis, fleeing from their homes to seek safety in India, as they pass through the provisional capital of Chuadanga April 16, 1971.

AP

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Pakistan's Forgotten Genocide—A Review Essay

| Fall 2014

In The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide,Gary Bass argues that both the Nixon administration and the global community purposely ignored Pakistan’s genocide of civilians in East Pakistan. Sumit Ganguly reviews the book and reflects on the significance of the 1971 genocide.

Ethnofederalism: The Worst Form of Institutional Arrangement…?

Getty Images

Journal Article - Quarterly Journal: International Security

Ethnofederalism: The Worst Form of Institutional Arrangement…?

    Author:
  • Liam Anderson
| Summer 2014

Critics of ethnofederalism—a political system in which federal subunits reflect ethnic groups’ territorial distribution—argue that it facilitates secession and state collapse. An examination of post-1945 ethnofederal states, however, shows that ethnofederalism has succeeded more often than not.