ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the entire literature on rivalry maintenance and presents two models of rivalry maintenance, namely David Dreyer’s model of issue intractability and accumulation, and Michael Colaresi’s two-level pressure model. It discusses the models’ relative strengths and weaknesses when applied to South Asia. The chapter shows that Colaresi’s focus on the process of ‘rivalry outbidding’ is a particularly useful perspective for illustrating rivalry maintenance in South Asia and that Narendra Modi’s relative resilience against rivalry outbidding pressures improves the prospects for de-escalation. Dreyer focuses on the nature and the number of salient issues contested in the rivalry. Regarding the nature of contested issues, he argues that some issues are more intractable than others, and that rivalry persists as long as these remain unresolved. Michael Colaresi’s dynamic two-level pressure theory provides another promising approach for investigating rivalry maintenance in South Asia. Mobilising support for rivalry termination thus becomes politically risky.
