What drives subcontinental insecurity?: a multitheoretic examination of the India-Pakistan conflict dyad

UnrestrictedFor most of the year 2002, the contiguous, nuclear-armed nation-states of India and Pakistan faced off in a circumstance of near-war. During this period, the people of both countries continued to suffer from environmental degradation, extensive poverty, and ethnic and religious strife, as they had for decades. What drives insecurity on the Asian Subcontinent? The field of international relations offers two major theoretic approaches to security: realism and constructivism. This thesis addresses the central research question by presenting four “conceptual lenses”—two security theory variants derived from the realist school and two derived from the constructivist school—and applying these to the case of the India-Pakistan conflict dyad, with a particular focus on regional nuclearization and the Kashmir dispute. It argues that neorealist and neoclassical realist perspectives, with their emphases on the role of material power, offer persuasive, but oftentimes limited explanations of policy outcomes, while also contributing to creating the very insecurity they seek to explain. By focusing on how actor identities and norms emerge and affect behaviors over time, a “cultural constructivist” approach provides valuable insights into the ideational underpinnings of conflict, although its prescriptive powers are less and it, too, shares the confining rationalist assumptions of realism. “Critical constructivism,” with its openly normative assumptions about human security and emancipation, illuminates the ways in which pursuit of (realist) power and a firmer (constructivist) identity by the Indian and Pakistani nation-states can engender insecurity in the actual people who comprise these entities. The central findings of this project strongly suggest a need for international security theorists and practitioners, alike, to resist the temptation of limiting themselves to the confines of a single set of ontological assumptions