Introduction: Explaining Cooperation and Rivalry in China-India Relations

Recent China-India relations have been marked by a puzzling mix of cooperation and rivalry across military, economic, institutional and normative dimensions. Yet despite a large empirical literature on this crucial relationship, existing scholarship has struggled to explain its countervailing trends. This is due in large part to a lack of rigorous theory, which is essential for explanation. This article illustrates the theoretical shortcomings of current scholarship on China-India relations, drawing on the methodological literature on causal inference. It then shows how the four articles that follow in the special issue serve as a much-needed corrective to this problem by developing and applying well-specified theories to explain variation in China-India cooperation and rivalry, and presents a synthesis of their causal claims.