Conflict resolution and promotion of regional cooperation in South Asia has assumed a new urgency in the aftermath of the nuclear tests by India and Pakistan in 1998, and underlined by the outbreak of fighting in Kargil in 1999, full mobilization on the border during most of 2002, and continued low-intensity warfare and terrorism in Jammu and Kashmir. The stability of nuclear deterrence between the two countries is therefore a matter of great urgency and has found a place on the scholarly agenda of security studies in South Asia.

Several books have been written on Indiaa (TM)s nuclear programme, but these have been mostly analytical histories. The India-Pakistan Nuclear Relationship is a new departure in that it is the first time that a group of scholars from the South Asian subcontinent have collectively tried to apply deterrence theory and international relations theory to South Asia.

Dr Sridharan is Academic Director of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for the Advanced Study of India, New Delhi. He is Ph.D from the same university where he studied political science. He has held visiting appointments at the University of California, Berkeley, London School of Economics, and Institute for Developing Economies, Tokyo. Dr Sridharan's research interests are comparative politics and political economy of development, party systems and coalition politics, and international relations. He is the author of The Political economy of Industrial promotion: Indian, Brazilian and Korean Electronics in Comparative Perspective; and co-editor of India's Living Constitution : Ideas, Practices, Controversies, and India in the Global Software Industry.

1. Introduction: Subcontinental Perspectives on Deterrence Theory, International Relations Theory and South Asia E. Sridharan 2. International Relations Theory and the India-Pakistan Conflict E. Sridharan 3. Deterrence and Nuclear Use: Doctrines in South Asia Rifaat Hussain 4. Conceptualising Nuclear Deterrence: Pakistan's Posture Rasul B. Rais 5. The China Factor in South Asia's Nuclear Deterrence Swaran Singh 6. Theories of Deterrence and Nuclear Deterrence in the Subcontinent Arvind Kumar 7. Operation Vijay and Operation Parakram: The Victory of Theory? W.P.S. Sidhu 8. South Asia: The Irrelevance of Classical Nuclear Deterrence Theory Bharat Karnad 9. International Relations Theory and Minimum Deterrence Rajesh M. Basrur 10. The Threat of Unintended Use of Nuclear Weapons in South Asia Rajesh Rajagopalan 11. The Stability-Unstability Paradox in South Asia Varun Sahni