Pakistan's Middle Power Moment and the Re-Internationalization of Kashmir in the 2025 Polycrisis

Abstract

In August 2019, India revoked Article 370, bifurcated Jammu and Kashmir into two Union Territories, and reframed what had been a bilateral dispute under the Shimla Agreement (1972) as a settled internal constitutional matter, a shift from enforced bilateralism to enforced unilateralism that effectively removed Pakistan as a relevant diplomatic party. Six years later, a convergence of five geopolitical crises across 2025-26 appears to have partially disrupted this framing in ways that no amount of Pakistani diplomatic advocacy had managed in the intervening period.

This paper examines whether those developments produced a structurally significant re-internationalization of the Kashmir dispute. Its central argument is that Pakistan temporarily performed middle-power functions, mediation, agenda-setting, and coalition facilitation, during the 2025-26 regional polycrisis, enabling limited re-entry of Kashmir into international crisis-management discourse. However, a 'convertibility paradox' appears to constrain the exploitation of these gains: the neutrality that generated Pakistan's mediatory credibility is incompatible with the partisan posture that sustained Kashmir advocacy demands. Applying the behavioural variant of middle power theory alongside the polycrisis concept and the paper's original concept of 'structural vacancy,' the analysis uses qualitative process-tracing and frame analysis of diplomatic communiques and multilateral forum outcomes from April 2025 to April 2026 to assess this tension. Five policy implications are developed. The paper's original contributions are the structural vacancy concept and the convertibility paradox.