Conversations on South Asia with Kyle Gardner

For decades, India and China have been uneasy neighbors, wrestling over shared claims to the region of Ladakh. From the war in 1962 that established the line of actual control (LAC) to a recent skirmish in summer 2020, questions over how to draw the India-China border continue to plague national interests and international security.

Digging into the long history of this contested space, in The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India–China Border, 1846–1962 (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Kyle Gardner (Sigur Center for Asian Studies, George Washington University) shows how today’s conflicts resulted, in part, from the cartographic ambiguities of imperial legacies.