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1. Colonizing Kashmir: An interview with Hafsa Kanjwal

Author:
Mahia Bashir and Hafsa Kanjwal
Publication Date:
10-2024
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
Joining a new wave of critical scholarship on global decolonization, Hafsa Kanjwal’s 2023 monograph Colonizing Kashmir: State-building Under Indian Occupation(Stanford University Press) offers a compelling and provocative account of Indian state-building in Kashmir in the aftermath of the British withdrawal and argues that independent India’s attempts at state-building in Kashmir were fundamentally colonial. In recasting the Indian national project in Kashmir as a colonial enterprise and highlighting the role of Kashmir’s client regimes in this process, Kanjwal lays bare the “politics of life” that was central to bringing Kashmir within the Indian national orbit without the popular consent of its people. Ultimately, this account offers a critique of the liberatory character of narratives around decolonization and offers an alternative lens to understand national consolidation in the aftermath of the second World War.
Topic:
History, Decolonization, Interview, and Colonization
Political Geography:
South Asia and Kashmir

2. Kashmir in the aftermath of Partition: An interview with Shahla Hussain

Author:
Mahia Bashir and Shahla Hussain
Publication Date:
09-2023
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
“This dappled dawn injured by the night This is not the dawn we awaited. ” Thus, lamented the poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz in his poem ‘Subh-e-Azaadi’ (The Dawn of Freedom) in August 1947 as the two nation-states of India and Pakistan were created unleashing catastrophic violence and bloodshed. The history of the subcontinent’s partition has been a fecund field of inquiry for decades. Often told as the cleaving of the provinces of Bengal and the Punjab, most studies of Partition and its aftermath have not devoted attention to the region of Kashmir. Treated as an exceptional case in official narratives and consequently in histories, Kashmir has been largely absent from accounts of Partition and its ramifications for the lives of millions of its inhabitants, many of whom faced displacement and violence as the erstwhile princely state was prized apart. Shahla Hussain’s Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition (Cambridge University Press, 2021) offers a corrective to this absence by braiding the history of Kashmir into the history of Partition and by introducing a bottom-up approach to this study. Interweaving official sources with meticulously unearthed vernacular sources, Hussain sets herself to the task of foregrounding people’s experiences of Partition and their aspirations of the future. What ensues is a rich interrogation of the multivalent meanings of freedom and self-determination in Kashmir, the limitations of the myopic model of territorial nationalism adopted by India and Pakistan and the Janus-faced nature of state-sponsored development in the region. Hussain deftly retraces international connections and solidarities between the Kashmiri liberation struggle and movements for decolonization in the mid-twentieth century and underlines the failure of institutions of international governance to accommodate movements for liberation. Kashmir in the Aftermath of Partition therefore brings germane themes of historical inquiry such as anti-colonialism, nationalism, decolonization and development into dialogue. I had the delight of interviewing Professor Hussain about her book, the challenges that this project entailed, and her future research.
Topic:
History, Interview, and Partition
Political Geography:
Pakistan, South Asia, India, and Kashmir

3. The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War: An Interview with Nicholas Mulder

Author:
Nicholas Mulder and Mahia Bashir
Publication Date:
03-2023
Content Type:
Commentary and Analysis
Institution:
The Toynbee Prize Foundation
Abstract:
The 2008 global financial crisis and the dislocations it caused sparked a renewed interest in economic and international histories of capitalism, globalization, and internationalism and produced a new corpus of writings that we broadly know as new economic and new international histories. Nicholas Mulder’s new book The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War is the latest addition to this corpus. It details the history of sanctions, their wartime origins in the economic blockade of the First World War, and their evolution from a deterrent to an actively used tool of modern state warfare. In doing so, it raises and answers important theoretical questions about the limits and contradictions of the interwar liberal international order, state sovereignty, and the legitimacy of a totalising instrument that profoundly and rather devastatingly impacts civilian societies. Through the story of sanctions, the book also offers a fresh perspective on the tragic escalatory spiral of the 1930s—the rise of fascist states but also the Second World War. Straddling regions from Albania, Greece, and Switzerland to Manchuria and Latin America, The Economic Weapon has all the trappings of a gripping international economic history: it blends detail and analysis harmoniously. I had the delightful pleasure of speaking with the author, Nicholas Mulder on a balmy spring day about the book. We talked, inter alia, about Professor Mulder’s scholarly journey, the origins and evolution of sanctions, the ethical dilemmas they posed, and the role of historical memory in the history of sanctions. Professor Mulder was also very generous in giving us a glimpse into his exciting new project on confiscation.
Topic:
War, History, Sanctions, and Interview
Political Geography:
Global Focus