ABSTRACT
The conflict over Kashmir is a highly complex, internationalized dispute involving India and Pakistan reaching immediately back to the design and moment of the partition of British colonial India in 1947, when Hari Singh, Maharaja of Kashmir, decided to accede in India and not seek independence or to join Pakistan; poignantly, Singh made the decision in the face of Pathan tribesmen spilling into the territory from the Northwest Frontier.1 Today, the conflict is synonymous with global concerns about a possible nuclear war in South Asia as both India and Pakistan have welldeveloped capacities for mutual annihilation. Indeed, if Kashmir is seen as anything internationally, it is as the world’s most conflict-vulnerable “flashpoint,” where miscalculation, accident, or uncontrolled escalation could precipitate a nuclear exchange that would have devastating, global implications.2 Three of the four wars fought between India and Pakistan were over Kashmir (1948, 1965, and 1999).
