Pakistan’s Foreign Policy

The study of Pakistan’s Foreign Policy has fascinated scholars all over the World for numerous reasons since the morrow of its independence. While Anglo-American and Pakistani scholarship pervade the field of its analysis, hardly Indian scholarship engaged in South Asian area studies has produced a comprehensively authoritative book on Pakistan’s Foreign Policy in the way they have written on Indian Foreign Policy. Given the background of unhappy Indo-Pak relationship, Pakistan’s geo-strategic position in world politics and its going nuclear, of late, it is absolutely essential that a cool, dispassionate and substantive analysis of its foreign policy not affected by the web of "Anti-India-Anti-Pak" syndrome will be a major contribution not only to the field of international relation and foreign policy but will also lay bare the inner dynamics of Pakistani Society and Policy that create concomitant compulsions and possibilities for Pakistan to conduct itself in the realm of international system. The present book, Pakistan’s Foreign Policy is a maiden attempt by an Indian scholar to analyze the foreign policy behaviour of Pakistan in an innovative way in the sense that it marks a departure in the traditional mode of analysis. In it’s attitude to enquiry it is quite scientific, though it adopts a unified approach by marrying empirical description with cogent analysis that yields an easy comprehension of analysis that yields an easy comprehension of why Pakistan acts and interacts as it does. An attempt has been assayed to identify, describe and assess the sources of its foreign policy behaviour in both substantively thorough and methodologically rigorous way in a cross-level perspective. This is sought to be done within the framework of an analytical model based on the Systems approach. While it provides a wealth of historical data for the period under study to the lay reader, for the emerging theorist it charts out new pathways, as to how various theoretical innovations in the field of international relations can be applied to the empirical phenomena of the real world with considerable skill and analytical rigor.