Prof. Mattoo: Four Ds for a new Kashmir

Prof. Amitabh Mattoo has a new essay on the India-Pakistan-Kashmir tangle in the Times of India.

Prof. Mattoo argues that "For all Kashmir's apparently complex problems, there are in reality only four principal challenges that need to be addressed": dialogue, devolution/de-centralisation, demilitarisation and development.

Read his full essay here.
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Prof. Swaran Singh on the nuclear disconnect

Prof. Swaran Singh has written an essay on the need for India, particularly the Indian strategic community, to consider a different nuclear vision.


Prof. Singh argues that 'as India moves from victimhood to a stakeholder profile in the nuclear sweepstakes, several fundamentals need to change as well', most importantly, the lack of coordination between decision-makers and the strategic community.

Read his essay here.
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Prof. Mattoo attends Pugwash CTBT consultation

Professor Amitabh Mattoo recently attended the Pugwash consultation on the status of the CTBT and prospects for its entry into force in New York.

Clearly, there is a lot of focus on CTBT, given President Obama's Prague speech on nuclear disarmament and the expectation that he would make another attempt at getting the US Senate to ratify the CTBT. The meeting, organized by Pugwash, was held on October 12, under the Chatham House Rule. Invitees were primarily from th Annexe-2 countries. The programme included a presentation by Ambassador Sergio Duarte, UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs and remarks from Ambassador Tibor Toth, Executive Secretary of the Preparatory Commission of the CTBTO.
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Rajagopalan attends the Regional Powers Conference at Sciences Po, Paris

Cross-posted from Rajesh Rajagopalan's The Real World


I recently attended the third conference of the Regional Powers Network (RPN) project, organized by the Sciences Po, Paris (8-9 October 2009).

The RPN is a multi-year project that aims to examine, both theoretically and substantively, the role of various regional powers in the global system. The project brings together the German Institute of Global and Area Studies (GIGA) of the University of Hamburg, the University of Oxford, and Sciences Po, Paris. The first conference, titled "Ideas, Interests, Resources and Strategies of Regional Powers – Analytical Concepts in Comparative Perspective" was held in Hamburg last September. Professors Alka Acharya and Ummu Salma Bava from SIS attended that conference. The second conference, Regional Powers and Global Orders, was held in Rio de Janeiro was held in April this year. The one I attended was titled "Regional Powers and Regional Order" and I presented a paper on Pakistan as a regional power and a global problem. I stuck to to the first part: Pakistan as a regional power. I argued that unlike much of the literature on regional powers, which saw regions and regional powers as subjects and victims of global powers and processes, regional powers (indeed, smaller powers in general) are quite adept at pursuing their regional agenda by using and shaping global power interests. The paper is still in draft form, though . . .
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Jacob says India should start talking to Pakistan, "Now".

Happymon Jacob has written a new essay in Greater Kashmir arguing that India should start talking to Pakistan, now.

Jacob argues that India has been overusing coercive diplomacy and that New Delhi has reaped all the possible benefits it can out of refusing to talk to Pakistan.

Read his full essay in the link above or here.


Edited 15/10/2009 late evening: Hmm . . . the Greater Kashmir website seems rather uncooperative. The link to the essay keeps going to the wrong op ed section, so please read the essay directly from Happy's blog archive here.
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Patrick Bratton on 'Coercive Signalling'

Patrick Bratton gave an interesting talk at CIPOD on September 30, 2009 on 'the effects of governmental structure on coercive signalling'.


Bratton is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Program Chair for Political Science and International Relations at Hawaii Pacific University. He has done a considerable amount of work on coercion in international politics. He provided the abstract of the presentation pasted below:

The Effecs of Governmental Structure on Coercive Signalling

How does governmental structure affect the ability of a state to send clear coercive messages and to orchestrate those signals into coherent messages? This presentation shall review the concept of coercion and previous studies done by the author and his collaborator on the effects of governmental structures on coercion. Several studies indicate that democracies, in particular presidential democracies with a division of powers like the United States, are poor at sending clear signals and orchestrating those signals into coherent messages. There has been an assumption that both authoritarian and parliamentary governments are more effective. The presentation will compare the effects of these three types of governments on signaling and orchestration: (1) Presidential divided/shared powers systems; (2) Westminster parliamentary democracies; and (3) authoritarian governments. It uses examples from: the US War with Vietnam, the 1982 Falklands War, and the 1995-96 Taiwan Straits Crisis.

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