Journal of African Development

The unresolved territorial disputes along the Himalayan frontier between India and China constitute one of the most consequential flashpoints in contemporary Asian geopolitics. The Galwan Valley clash of June 2020, the most lethal direct confrontation between the two nuclear-armed states since the 1962 Sino-Indian War, exposed deep structural tensions between their respective national security doctrines and the normative architecture of international law. This paper undertakes a rigorous examination of how India and China have each developed, articulated, and deployed national security doctrines in the Himalayan context, and how these doctrines interact with — and frequently circumvent — the binding obligations of international law, including the UN Charter's prohibition on the use of force, the principles of sovereign equality and territorial integrity, and the corpus of bilateral and multilateral treaty commitments. The paper analyzes the key legal instruments governing the India-China border dispute, including the 1993 Agreement on the Maintenance of Peace and Tranquility along the Line of Actual Control (LAC), the 1996 Agreement on Confidence Building Measures, and the 2005 Political Parameters and Guiding Principles, arguing that both states have increasingly subordinated these legal frameworks to the imperatives of strategic competition and domestic nationalist politics. Drawing on international relations theory, international legal scholarship, and case studies from recent Himalayan standoffs, the paper argues that the progressive militarization of the LAC represents not merely a bilateral security failure but a systemic challenge to the capacity of international law to regulate the behavior of major revisionist and status-quo powers. The paper concludes by assessing the prospects for legal and diplomatic mechanisms capable of restoring stability and compliance with international norms in the Himalayan region......