Policy Briefs

The nuclear playground in Southern Asia is marked by an exceptional level of complexity and the consequent regional nuclear dynamics has fair potential for crisis and arms race instability. This Policy Brief explores the Pakistan–India and China–India nuclear dyads along three specific axes: drivers of conflict; points of commonalities, similarities and differences; and implications of these for their nuclear stockpiles. It concludes with policy recommendations to address the concomitant dangers.

Foreign policy is an extension of domestic politics in myriad ways. However, no meta-theory offers a framework of analysis that could explain the nexus between domestic politics and foreign policy within the bilateral relations of three politically and culturally distinct states i.e., India, Pakistan, and China. This Policy Brief explore the nexus between domestic politics and foreign policy to explain what the contemporary domestic political trends in each state indicate about the future of bilateral relations and explains how bilateral relations may in turn affect domestic politics.

Since the second world war, there has been a long-term shift from the power end of the spectrum towards the normative end as the pivot on which history turns, with a steady reduction in societal, national and international violence. This has been accompanied by a geographical shift from Europe to Asia and the Pacific as the new cockpit of world affairs. Bucking these twin trends, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine marked the return of Europe to the centre of world affairs, and the return to Europe of geopolitics, territorial disputes and large-scale force and ground wars not experienced since 1945. This article looks back on the crisis in a longer-term and broader reflective analysis of four intertwined threads: the core issues at dispute, the conflict parties, the possible different endings to the war, and the principal lessons to be drawn from the conflict. It concludes with the question: Where to next?