ABSTRACT
Few regions of the world have been as unaffected by the end of the cold war as South Asia. The region was rife with intrastate violence and fraught with the possibilities and all too often the reality of interstate violence while the cold war raged around it; the same is true today. Sino-Indian relations remained strained from the 1962 war until recently. In the early to mid-1990s the Indo-Pakistani relationship became particularly acrimonious following the sudden eruption of secessionist sentiment in Kashmir in 1989. A small but growing body of literature exists on the role and utility of CSBMs in South Asia. Mutual security pledges are neither necessary as a basis for making progress in other areas nor sufficient to resolve the security problems of South Asia. For crisis management, some hotline communications exist between ground force headquarters and, in some instances, local commanders, but not yet between air force headquarters or between senior political authorities.
