The revival of the centuries-old ‘Silk Road at Sea’ into a 21st Century Maritime Silk Road (MSR) is an integral part of China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). The Chinese White Paper on its vision for enhancing maritime cooperation broadly confirms this perception, since it considers maritime security assurance as the lynchpin of MSR initiatives. As its trade and overseas economic interests have been constantly growing, Beijing’s strategic concern about protection of these interests has magnified.

Asian geopolitics currently represents a complex blending of power and paradox, both stable and fluid, with change occurring against an unresolved tension between the direction of economic growth and that of strategic anxiety. With the continent turning into the economic growth engine of the world, regional geopolitics is witnessing friction between Asian powers that had previously kept economic and political separation from one another.

Fighting to the End: The Pakistan Army’s Way of War, by C. Christine Fair, New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, pp. 343, £27.99

Defeat is an Orphan: How Pakistan Lost the Great South Asian War, by Myra MacDonald, London: Hurst & Co., 2017, pp. 328, £25.00‘