Mona Bhan, professor of anthropology and Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies, co-edited and was a contributing author to the “The Palgrave Handbook of New Directions in Kashmir Studies” (Palgrave, 2023).

The handbook provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and transregional perspective on the Kashmir dispute. Spanning South and Central Asia, Kashmir has been at the center of geopolitical conflicts and rivalries among India, Pakistan and China for decades, with members of heterogeneous local communities negotiating the complexities of regional state formations, national power assertions and geopolitical competitions. It examines the struggles of diverse communities to establish processes of democratic accountability in relation to the colonial-era state consolidations, postcolonial military occupations, interstate wars, intrastate armed conflicts and cold war politics that have shaped identities in the region. The handbook further initiates a dialogue on the ways in which state power and border regimes have shaped scholarship and undermined the pursuit of shared intellectual and political projects across physical and epistemological boundaries.

Bhan co-edited the handbook with Haley Duschinski, associate professor at Ohio University, and Cabeiri deBergh Robinson, associate professor at the University of Washington’s Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies. Bhan co-wrote the introduction and two chapters in the handbook: “From Incorporation to Elimination: Interlocution as an Apparatus of Occupation in Kashmir” and  “Critical Interventions: Human Rights and International Justice in Kashmir.”

Bhan’s research focuses on border wars and counterinsurgency, militarism and humanitarianism, race, gender and religion, environmentalism and climate change, and occupation and human rights. She earned a Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 2006.

From the publisher:

The Palgrave Handbook of New Directions in Kashmir Studies provides a comprehensive, interdisciplinary and transregional perspective on the Kashmir dispute. Spanning South and Central Asia, Kashmir has been at the center of geopolitical conflicts and rivalries among India, Pakistan and China for decades, with members of heterogeneous local communities negotiating the complexities of regional state formations, national power assertions and geopolitical competitions. Taken together, the chapters in this handbook examine diverse people’s struggles to establish processes of democratic accountability in relation to the colonial-era state consolidations, postcolonial military occupations, interstate wars, intrastate armed conflicts and cold war and post-cold war politics that have shaped and transformed social and political identities in the region. Contributors chart out varied and bold new directions by attending to local constellations of situated knowledges and practices through which people living in different parts of the disputed region make sense of the conditions and contingencies of their political lives. The handbook further initiates a dialogue on the ways in which state power and border regimes have shaped scholarship and undermined the pursuit of shared intellectual and political projects across physical and epistemological boundaries.