At first glance, India and Pakistan today seem closer to peace than at any point in the past several decades. The cease-fire that went into place along the Line of Control in December 2003 has held; terrorist violence in Jammu and Kashmir has been in steady decline since the two nuclear-armed states almost went to war in 2002; and both countries have succeeded in sustaining a wide-ranging and high-level dialogue process. All this appears to suggest that conditions exist for resolution of one of the world’s most intractable and bloody conflicts, the India-Pakistan war over Jammu and Kashmir. Yet the current détente process between India and Pakistan suffers from the same structural infirmities that led past peace initiatives to collapse. Instead of looking for a resolution of the grand historical conflict in Jammu and Kashmir, peacemakers might do well to focus on the problems of the state’s peoples—thus building a base from which creative democratic solutions might eventually emerge.