‘We have to tread warily’:East Pakistan, India and the pitfalls of foreign intervention in the Cold War

Abstract

This article examines the East Pakistan crisis of 1971 as a watershed moment in Cold War humanitarian politics. It argues that the absence of an effective international framework of multilateral foreign intervention or peacekeeping forced the key external actors to resort to covert forms of intervention, while publicly pledging adherence to non-interference in the domestic affairs of Pakistan. The article demonstrates that covert intervention by India, the United States and the United Nations not only undermined the credibility of the Cold War international system, but also fuelled the drift to the Indo-Pakistani war that ultimately ended the crisis.

Publication DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/14682745.2022.2102607
Divisions: College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities > Politics, History and International Relations
College of Business and Social Sciences > School of Social Sciences & Humanities
Aston University (General)
Additional Information: Copyright © 2022 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Funding: This work was supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation [AZ 16/F/18].
Uncontrolled Keywords: East Pakistan,Foreign Intervention,Humanitarianism,Human Rights,Indo-Pakistani Conflict
Publication ISSN: 1468-2745
Last Modified: 02 Dec 2024 08:43
Date Deposited: 12 Sep 2022 08:22
Full Text Link:
Related URLs: https://www.tan ... 45.2022.2102607 (Publisher URL)
PURE Output Type: Article
Published Date: 2023-01-02
Published Online Date: 2022-08-28
Accepted Date: 2022-08-01
Authors: Prott, Volker (ORCID Profile 0000-0002-9000-9986)

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