Contemporary Colonialities: Kurds and Kashmiris

by Dibyesh Anand, Nitasha Kaul

We live in a world dominated by states and statist knowledge; this is a world where, for multiple institutional and political reasons, it is rare to speak of more than one stateless nation, and there is a conspicuous neglect of non-Western colonial practices.


This volume brings together scholarship on two peoples associated with ‘conflict’ but who we argue are best described as ‘stateless nations’: Kurds and Kashmiris. Both these contexts raise important questions relating to coloniality, sovereignty, statehood, self-determination and human rights, and yet they have never been studied together. Our intervention challenges the ‘sovereignty privilege’ in International Relations and calls upon postcolonial and decolonial studies to take anti-colonialism seriously by focusing on contemporary stateless nations. The Kurdish and Kashmiri conflicts are more than power-laden contestations by states over territories; they are colonialities of power experienced by embodied individuals and involve mobilised communities of stateless nations with different gendered and political vulnerabilities.


“This book addresses the complex issue of colonialism and nationalism among the Kurds who live in Turkey and the Kashmiris who live in the valley of Kashmir. For those wishing to understand the respective political, religious and social challenges of both groups, this book is essential reading.”


Victoria Schofield, author of Kashmir in the Crossfire and Kashmir in Conflict

142 pages, Paperback

Published January 30, 2025

Reviews

[Sawsaw · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book shows how power preserves itself long after its origins are forgotten. Turkey and India, once subjects of imperial domination, now reproduce a similar logic toward Kurds and Kashmiris: a political order that treats sovereignty as a privilege reserved for one people, and as a threat when claimed by another.
The authors make clear that what is called "postcolonial" is a rearrangement. Colonial methods survive inside new flags, new constitutions, new speeches about unity. The chapter on the Sunnification of Alevi Kurds is especially revealing: an attempt to reshape a population so they cannot stand outside the state's narrative. A transformation of identity carried out to secure obedience.
What emerges is a story of structures designed to keep a nation unrecognized, to deny it the instruments through which it could govern itself. And yet, the persistence of Kurdish and Kashmiri political life shows that these structures are never total. They strain, they falter, and they expose the distance between the state's claims and the realities it cannot fully control.

[Prem Patel · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting topics covered. Found it quite helpful for my dissertation