After The Cold War South Asian Security

Asymmetries dominate South Asia, explaining much of the region's tension, and complicating the U.S. approach to its major powers, India and Pakistan. Disparities in geographic size, population, military capability, and economic markets leave the Pakistanis feeling inferior to India and reinforce India's view of itself as an emerging major power. For much of the last five decades, South Asia was of episodic strategic interest to the United States. The region's strategic value was measured almost solely in terms of the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union and varied with the mercurial cycles of U.S.-Soviet geopolitical competition. Even at the height of the region's relevance for U.S. global policy, in the 1950s and again in the 1980s, the link between Washington and South Asia was never comfortable.

In mid-March 1992, a group of forty scholars, journalists, strategists, and government officials met in Kathmandu, Nepal, to assess the post-Cold War world. The meeting marked both a summing up and a beginning. Many of the conference participants had been associated at one time or another with the Program in Arms Control, Disarmament, and International Security (A CD IS) at the University of lllinois at Urbana-Champaign. Founded in 1978, ACDIS had from its very first year recruited scholars from South Asia (and scholars working on South Asia). Much of this work was supported by a continuing grant from the Ford Foundation (which also contributed major support for the Kathmandu meeting), but lllinois was also "home" for a number of Fulbright and Asia Foundation grantees.1 The meeting in Kathmandu provided an opportunity for these individuals to again meet with each other and with faculty and staff associated with ACDIS.

This book is a groundbreaking analysis of the India-Pakistan nuclear confrontation as a form of ‘cold war’ – that is, a hostile relationship between nuclear rivals. Drawing on nuclear rivalries between similar pairs, the work examines the rise, process and potential end of the Cold War between India and Pakistan.

"International politics in Southeast Asia since end of the Cold War in 1990 can be understood within the frames of order and an emerging regionalism embodied in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). But order and regionalism are now under siege, with a new global strategic rebalancing under way. The region is now forced to contemplate new risks, even the emergence of new sorts of cold war, rivalry and conflict. Ang Cheng Guan, author of Southeast Asia's Cold War, writes here in the mode of contemporary history, presenting a complete, analytically informed narrative that covers the region, highlighting change, continuity and context. Crucial as a tool to make sense of the dynamics of the region, this account of Southeast Asia's international relations will also be of immediate relevance to those in China, the USA and elsewhere who engage with the region, with its young, dynamic population, and its strategic position across the world's key choke-points of trade. This is essential reading for decision-makers who wish to understand our current situation, looking back to the end of the Cold War thirty years ago, and forward to an uncertain future."--Page 4 de la couverture.

Excerpt: "We at the end of the Cold war can also draw some lessons from that experience. We can take encouragement from the UN Secretary-General Boutros-Ghali's blueprint to make the UN a more effective global security instrument. But the UN cannot do it all. There are vital supporting roles to be played by regional and sub-regional organizations in building a viable world order within the current UN framework. I must emphasize the contribution which these organizations can make to security not only in their own neighbourhoods but also globally though putting forward their own ideas on this subject in the international debate. ASEAN should do this with confidence, bearing in mind its successful record of solving the non-Cold War problems of state development of the post-1945 period.

This edition adds chapters on Burma and Vietnam, and updated material throughout reflects the current economic crisis in the region.

Papers read at a workshop on Internal and External Dynamics of South Asian Security held on December 8, 1996 in Karachi.

The Title Discuss And Analysis A Conceptual Synthesis Of Trends And Directions Vis-A-Vis Traditional And Non-Traditional Security Paradigm-Taking Into Account Of Vast Changes In The Concept Of Security In Contemporary Times.