India-Pakistan Conflict :

Abstract

The intractable conflict in Kashmir has spoilt the India-Pakistan equation on multiple planes. This intractability has in fact poisoned the entire spectrum of the bilateral relations throughout history. Repeatedly through history India and Pakistan have taken actions that have led them to mutually unsatisfactory and damaging consequences. International relations literature has generally looked at these events in isolation in a post-facto explanation of the rationality behind such actions. But that fails to account for the repeated failure of these states to avoid the lose-lose scenario typical of the prisoner’s dilemma. This paper will try to account for this lacuna by looking at the psychology of the two actors involved in this intractable conflict. It fills that void in international relations literature by looking at India-Pakistan relationship under the lens of prospect theory exploring how the two states of India-Pakistan made their choices through the history and with each event how their perspectives evolved or did not. Evaluation of their psychological status is followed by an analysis of the India-Pakistan dialogue process. The argument being that the dialogue process has failure in-built in it as it fails to address the perceptual loss of assets for Pakistan.