ASIAN WAR MACHINES

ABSTRACT

The South Asian security landscape is increasingly dominated by a complex four-way dynamic between India, Pakistan, China, and the United States. The stresses and strains of the relationships between these states directly affect the prospects for peace and prosperity for almost half of humanity. This article describes some of the military contours of this landscape, with a focus on strategic postures, weapon acquisitions, and the role of nuclear weapons. It maps the India–Pakistan arms race over the past decade, the economic constraints on the two states, the role of China and the United States as weapons suppliers, and the risk and consequences for nuclear war. The authors then look at India's relationship with China, which is marked by both cooperation and competition, and the rise of China as a close military, political, and economic ally of Pakistan. While the United States has had long-standing cooperative relationships with both India and Pakistan, these relationships have been undergoing major shifts over the last two decades. U.S. concerns about China's increasing military and economic power have also intensified over this period as well. Of particular significance has been the effort to create a U.S.–India strategic partnership to balance and contain a rising China, which may become a central feature of the emerging global order. This article also offers a brief overview of what is publicly known about the nuclear arsenals of the four countries, ongoing production of weapons-usable fissile materials in Pakistan and India, as well as the race to build longer-range missiles.     

The human right to marry: a refugee’s perspective

In the European Court of Human Rights cases of Muñoz Díaz v Spain in 2009 (Muñoz Díaz v Spain [2009], Application No. 49151/07) and Serife Yigit v Turkey in 2010 (Serife Yegit [2010], Application No. 3976/05), involving unregistered/informal ‘marriages’ of a Roma couple and a Muslim couple, respectively, the Grand Chamber took the position that civil marriages are available to all people in the state without distinction and therefore no breach of Article 12’s right to marry (nor Article 14’s prohibition of discrimination) had occurred when the respective states failed to recognise the informal marriages of the applicants. This article considers these two cases, and asks whether the court’s position is challenged by migrants/refugees, whose access to formal marriages maybe impeded due to a lack of identity and status documentation.     

Dreams of a Secular Republic: Elite Alienation in Post-Zia Pakistan

Since the onset of the “war on terror,” an apparently irreconcilable “secular-religious” divide has come to the fore in Pakistani society with ostensibly deep historical roots. In this article the “divide” is critically interrogated through an historical-sociological analysis, including detailed interviews with a small sample of both “secularists” and leftists who do not subscribe to the “secular-religious” binary. The article emphasises that substantive social changes have taken place over the past four decades, coeval with the erosion of a relatively insular structure of power dominated by the secular, Westernised successors to the British. The concomitant rise of a “nativised” middle class has both been cause and consequence of the old elite’s steady retreat into its private ghettoes. The latter’s growing alienation from wider society – including the realm of formal politics – has been accompanied by growing alarmism about the increasingly illiberal and hyper-religious character of the mass of the population. Elite alienation has intensified since 2001, making the “secular-religious” divide a self-fulfilling prophecy. Notwithstanding its protestations, however, the elite remains the major beneficiary of the prevailing structure of power, and a meaningful transformative politics – both secular and responsive to the material deprivations of ordinary people – remains conspicuously absent.     

Climate mitigation policies and actions: access and allocation issues

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics - As part of the Special Issue on Access and Allocation, this paper explores how reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions...     

Conspiracy and statecraft in postcolonial states: theories and realities of the hidden hand in Pakistan’s war on terror

This paper is a cautiously sympathetic treatment of conspiracy theory in Pakistan, relating it to Marxist theories of the state, structural functionalism and Machiavellian realism in international relations. Unlike moralising mainstream news reports describing terrorism in terms of horrific events and academic research endlessly lamenting the ‘failure’, ‘weakness’ and mendacity of the Pakistani state, conspiracy theory has much in common with realism in its cynical disregard for stated intentions and insistence on the primacy of inter-state rivalry. It contains a theory of the postcolonial state as part of a wider international system based on class-conspiracy, wedding imperial interests to those of an indigenous elite, with little concern for preserving liberal norms of statehood. Hence we consider some forms of conspiracy theory a layperson’s theory of the capitalist state, which seeks to explain history with reference to global and domestic material forces, interests and structures shaping outcomes, irrespective of political actors’ stated intentions. While this approach may be problematic in its disregard for intentionality and ideology, its suspicion of the notion that the ‘War on Terror’ should be read morally as a battle between states and ‘non-state actors’ is understandable – especially when technological and political-economic changes have made the importance of impersonal economic forces driving towards permanent war more relevant than ever.     

Factors influencing individuals' intention to adopt mobile banking in China and Pakistan: The moderating role of cultural values

Rapid development of smartphone technologies in Asian countries has increased the demand of mobile banking in financial services and mobile commerce. Current research is conducted for mobile banking adoption in China and Pakistan. The social influence was added with technology acceptance model to investigate the direct effect on individuals' intention. Moderating role of cultural values was explored in the proposed model. Empirical study was performed for the data received from both countries to examine the developed model. Multiple and hierarchical regression analyses (IBM SPSS software) were carried out to test the proposed hypotheses. We have observed that perceived usefulness, social influence, and perceived ease of use are significant predictors of individuals' intentions to adopt m‐banking in Pakistan, whereas the perceived usefulness is an important predictor in China. The moderating role of cultural values was observed as dampening factor in positive relationship between social influence and individuals' intentions.     

Aboriginal oral testimony,hearsay rule and the reception theory of admissibility

Aboriginal peoples title claims are presumed upon spatial and time connections to the lands of their ancestors. In making their submissions, litigants have to circumvent the rule against hearsay and rely upon oral narratives to substantiate their claims of customary ties to land. The obstacles they face is that evidence based on informal anecdotes can cause problems in common law courts, which have long been dependent on textual evidence for probative value. In many Native cultures the idea of time is cyclical, while in the Judeo-Christian calendar time is linear. There is also the fact that oral narratives cannot be viewed in the abstract and the histories are closely linked to inter-generational continuity. The perspective of a narrator is relevant as the sources are often repositories of observation, knowledge and personal belief rather than clear factual understanding of the issue involved. This paper argues for the receptive theory of oral evidence to be adopted in common law courts, which would lead to a fair hearing of Aboriginal claims to land title in Australian and Canadian courts. The paper will distinguish the courts’ current approach to oral testimony submitted by aboriginal people and raise the possibility of an integrated approach based on the recourse to ‘episteme’, which is the appreciation derived from synthesis that accepts that several methodologies may exist and interact at the same time by being parts of various knowledge systems.