This book explores the post-9/11 relations between the US and Pakistan. The growing divergence between Washington and Islamabad has taken an already uneasy alliance to a point of estrangement. Yet, a complete breakup is not an option. The underlying cause of the tension, within the partnership the two had entered on 13 September 2001, has never been fully understood. What is rarely discussed is how Pakistan's decision to ally itself with the US pushed the country into a war with itself; the cost of Pakistan's tight roping between alignment with the US and old links with the Afghan Taliban; and its long-term implications for the region and global security. This book elucidates implications for Afghanistan in the so-called war on terror while revealing US and Pakistan's foreign policy initiatives. The author explores all this through little known facts and through the players involved in this cloak and dagger game. The book tells the story behind the headlines: how equivocal is ISI's break with the Afghan Taliban fighting the coalition forces in Afghanistan; the shootout in Lahore involving a CIA agent; and the killing of Osama bin Laden.

It is easy to see that the world finds itself too often in tumultuous situations with catastrophic results. An adequate education can instill holistic knowledge, empathy, and the skills necessary for promoting an international coalition of peaceful nations. Promoting Global Peace and Civic Engagement through Education outlines the pedagogical practices necessary to inspire the next generation of peace-bringers by addressing strategies to include topics from human rights and environmental sustainability, to social justice and disarmament in a comprehensive method. Providing perspectives on how to live in a multi-cultural, multi-racial, and multi-religious society, this book is a critical reference source for educators, students of education, government officials, and administration who hope to make a positive change.

When Pakistan was carved out of India in 1947 as a homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent, it was envisioned as a secular state where non-Muslims would be granted freedom of religion and equal citizenship. However, the subsequent historical events led to a fast Islamization of nearly every part of public life and discrimination against the country's religious minorities, who today make up less than 4 per cent of the overall population. Based on extensive field work involving more than 100 non-structured qualitative interviews, this study explores the situation of the religious minorities and the dynamics of interfaith peacebuilding in the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. Primary focus was laid on the practice of interfaith dialogue, which - given the draconic blasphemy laws - differs from interfaith dialogue as conceived of in the West. Additionally, other peacebuilding measures, as offered by various non-governmental organizations, were taken into account, be they advocacy, promotion of human rights and unbiased education, or policy negotiation with the government. Heike Ruhland holds two master's degrees, one in Islamic Studies (University of Zurich) and one in International Information Management (University of Hildesheim). She attained her PhD from the Academy of World Religions, University of Hamburg.

How Pakistan Negotiates with the United States analyzes the themes, techniques, and styles that have characterized Pakistani negotiations with American civilian and military officials since Pakistan's independence.

This timely study surveys the conflict in Afghanistan from Pakistan’s point of view and analyzes the roots of Pakistan’s ambiguous policy—supporting the United States on one hand and showing empathy for the Afghan Taliban on the other. The author, a former foreign secretary of Pakistan, considers a broad range of events and interweaves his own experiences and perspectives into the larger narrative of the Afghanistan-Pakistan relationship. Beginning with the 1989 departure of Soviet troops—and especially since the 2001 NATO invasion—Riaz Mohammad Khan examines the development of Afghanistan and surveys the interests of external powers both there and in Pakistan. He discusses the rise of extremism and religious militancy in Pakistan and its links with ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan. Ultimately, Khan argues, Pakistan reveals a deep confusion in its public discourse on issues of modernity and the challenges the country faces, an intellectual crisis that Pakistan must address to secure the country’s survival, progress, and constructive role in the region.

As in the cascading of water, violence and nonviolence can cascade down from commanding heights of power (as in waterfalls), up from powerless peripheries, and can undulate to spread horizontally (flowing from one space to another). As with containing water, conflict cannot be contained without asking crucial questions about which variables might cause it to cascade from the top-down, bottom up and from the middle-out. The book shows how violence cascades from state to state. Empirical research has shown that nations with a neighbor at war are more likely to have a civil war themselves (Sambanis 2001). More importantly in the analysis of this book, war cascades from hot spot to hot spot within and between states (Autesserre 2010, 2014). The key to understanding cascades of hot spots is in the interaction between local and macro cleavages and alliances (Kalyvas 2006). The analysis exposes the folly of asking single-level policy questions like do the benefits and costs of a regime change in Iraq justify an invasion? We must also ask what other violence might cascade from an invasion of Iraq? The cascades concept is widespread in the physical and biological sciences with cascades in geology, particle physics and the globalization of contagion. The past two decades has seen prominent and powerful applications of the cascades idea to the social sciences (Sunstein 1997; Gladwell 2000; Sikkink 2011). In his discussion of ethnic violence, James Rosenau (1990) stressed that the image of turbulence developed by mathematicians and physicists could provide an important basis for understanding the idea of bifurcation and related ideas of complexity, chaos, and turbulence in complex systems. He classified the bifurcated systems in contemporary world politics as the multicentric system and the statecentric system. Each of these affects the others in multiple ways, at multiple levels, and in ways that make events enormously hard to predict (Rosenau 1990, 2006). He replaced the idea of events with cascades to describe the event structures that 'gather momentum, stall, reverse course, and resume anew as their repercussions spread among whole systems and subsystems' (1990: 299). Through a detailed analysis of case studies in South Asia, that built on John Braithwaite's twenty-five year project Peacebuilding Compared, and coding of conflicts in different parts of the globe, we expand Rosenau's concept of global turbulence and images of cascades. In the cascades of violence in South Asia, we demonstrate how micro-events such as localized riots, land-grabbing, pervasive militarization and attempts to assassinate political leaders are linked to large scale macro-events of global politics. We argue in order to prevent future conflicts there is a need to understand the relationships between history, structures and agency; interest, values and politics; global and local factors and alliances.

Pakistan, which since 9/11 has come to be seen as one of the world’s most dangerous places and has been referred to as “the epicenter of international terrorism,” faces an acute counterterrorism (CT) challenge. The book focuses on violence being perpetrated against the Pakistani state by Islamist groups and how Pakistan can address these challenges, concentrating not only on military aspects but on the often-ignored political, legal, law enforcement, financial, and technological facets of the challenge. Edited by Moeed Yusuf of the US Institute of Peace, and featuring the contributions and insights of Pakistani policy practitioners and scholars as well as international specialists with deep expertise in the region, the volume explores the current debate surrounding Pakistan’s ability—and incentives—to crack down on Islamist terrorism and provides an in-depth examination of the multiple facets of this existential threat confronting the Pakistani state and people. The book pays special attention to the non-traditional functions of force that are central to Pakistan’s ability to subdue militancy but which have not received the deserved attention from the Pakistani state nor from western experts. In particular, this path-breaking volume, the first to explore these various facets holistically, focuses on the weakness of political institutions, the role of policing, criminal justice systems, choking financing for militancy, and regulating the use of media and technology by militants. Military force alone, also examined in this volume, will not solve Pakistan’s Islamist challenge. With original insights and attention to detail, the authors provide a roadmap for Western and Pakistani policymakers alike to address the weaknesses in Pakistan’s CT strategy.

The escalating tensions between India and Pakistan have received renewed attention of late. Since their genesis in 1947, the nations of India and Pakistan have been locked in a seemingly endless spiral of hostility over the disputed territory of Kashmir. Ganguly asserts that the two nations remain mired in conflict due to inherent features of their nationalist agendas. Indian nationalist leadership chose to hold on to this Muslim-majority state to prove that minorities could thrive in a plural, secular polity. Pakistani nationalists argued with equal force that they could not part with Kashmir as part of the homeland created for the Muslims of South Asia. Ganguly authoritatively analyzes why hostility persists even after the dissipation of the pristine ideological visions of the two states and discusses their dual path to overt acquisition of nuclear weapons, as well as the current prospects for war and peace in the region.

This book critically examines the role of think tanks as foreign policy actors. It looks at the origins and development of foreign policy think tanks in India and their changing relevance and position as agents within the policy-making process. The book uses a comparative framework and explores the research discourse of prominent Indian think tanks, particularly on the India–Pakistan dispute, and offers unique insights and perspectives on their research design and methodology. It draws attention to the policy discourse of think tanks during the Composite Dialogue peace process between India and Pakistan and the subsequent support from the government which further expanded their role. One of the first books to offer empirical analyses into the role of these organisations in India, this book highlights the relevance of and the crucial role that these institutions have played as non-state policy actors. Insightful and topical, this book will be of interest to researchers focused on international relations, foreign policy analysis and South Asian politics. It would also be a good resource for students interested in a theoretical understanding of foreign policy institutions in general and Indian foreign policy in particular.

Violence and conflict are two of the greatest challenges the world will face in this millennium. Indeed, since the turn of the century, it is estimated that approximately four million people have died as a result of armed conflict. Ending these seemingly intractable conflicts is a priority for global stability. However, the signing of the peace accord or the ending of formal hostilities does not automatically bring a return to normality in these fractured societies. In practice, it is more likely that these fractured societies will face a period in the twilight between war and peace, a time when the world turns its attention to new problems and seemingly more pressing matters, leaving the country to struggle towards peace and a new social order. The book’s contributors deal with the challenges faced in creating the foundations for the development of a positive peace from a variety of multi-disciplinary perspectives, such as development studies, politics, psychoanalysis, psychology, sports studies and neuroscience. This breadth of perspectives offers innovative insights into the grey space between war and peace, which is home to millions of people across the globe and explores interventions which aim to create the conditions for positive post-conflict reconstruction.