Decolonizing Deterrence in South Asia
For too long, South Asia has lived under a deterrence framework not entirely its own. Our strategic doctrines, threat perceptions, and even our language of escalation and restraint are often borrowed, sometimes wholesale, from Euro-Atlantic experiences of the Cold War. But what if the logic of deterrence that governs South Asia was never designed for this region in the first place? What if the tools we are using to navigate nuclear stability are inherited relics, misfitting, mistranslated, and misapplied?
The Cold War’s deterrence theories were crafted in a bipolar world by two superpowers with global reach, vast buffers, and mutual assured destruction built into their geographies. I tell my students that South Asia is not that world. Our crises are local, our timelines compressed, our political rhetoric deeply personalized, and our publics dangerously energized. And yet, we continue to assess our strategic behavior through frameworks that assume a certain level of rationality, predictability, and structural symmetry that simply does not exist here.
So what does it mean to decolonize deterrence in South Asia?
Is it about rethinking the escalation ladder when the steps between crisis and conflict feel increasingly collapsed?
Is it about questioning the assumption that nuclear signaling always works when the regional audience is fragmented and sometimes willfully deaf?
Is it about acknowledging that doctrinal opacity in Pakistan is not confusion, but calculated ambiguity and that India’s declared doctrine is not necessarily clarity, but curated perception?
Is it about rejecting the idea that strategic restraint is weakness and reclaiming it as wisdom rooted in civilizational continuity, not just Western strategic calculus?
Or perhaps, more provocatively, is it about asking whether deterrence itself, as we know it, needs to be unpacked, retranslated, and reframed in the languages of our own histories, conflicts, and regional insecurities?
Don’t get me wrong! This is not a call to abandon deterrence. To situate it in our context, on our terms, and through our strategic imagination, not that of the RAND Corporation or Foggy Bottom, we must reclaim how we define it. Or at least, start thinking about it.
South Asia has seen the failure of textbook deterrence models during real crises, Kargil, Mumbai, Balakot, and most recently, May 2025. Each episode defied Western predictions, skipped steps on Kahn’s escalation ladder, and exposed how disconnected existing theories are from lived strategic realities on the subcontinent.
So perhaps the more honest questions are:
Whose deterrence are we practicing?
Whose fears are we managing?
Whose stability are we preserving?
And if the answers don’t start with ‘ours,’ maybe it is time we start writing a new playbook.