Anatomy of a conflict: deconstructing ontological fracture in Jammu and Kashmir

• Main Author: Khaniejo, Natallia
• Other Authors: -
• Format: Thesis-Doctor of Philosophy
• Language: English
• Published: Nanyang Technological University 2023
• Subjects: Social sciences::Political science::International relations
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/168715
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

This thesis undertakes a genealogical analysis of the constructed nature of the Kashmir ‘problem’ and attempts a denaturalization of the discourse that constructs the region into a conflict. Drawing on poststructuralist and postcolonial approaches, the thesis attempts to demonstrate that the Kashmir conflict did not emerge out of a void, but was instead constructed, and perpetuated through the language game of empires, and subsequently, nation states. While I’m not claiming that the region came into existence with the colonial empire, I do argue that the political unit (currently seen as a conflict), is one whose construction is rooted in colonial state-making. I further argue that as long as the region is continually seen through the lens of nation states and referred to through the language game of nations, it will continue to be a conflict arrested within the dyad of being either a victim or a threat. By reinforcing the colonial roots of the conflict and highlighting continuities between the colonial empire and its postcolonial successor states, I attempt to demonstrate that conflict regions such as Jammu and Kashmir are often arrested within a fourfold framework. These four modalities are — constructed cartography, conflated temporality, convoluted epistemology, culminating in conflicted ontology. What I mean by this, is that processes of colonialism and neocolonialism begin by capturing and naming space thereby controlling all that lies within through constructed cartography. They then attempt to impose linear histories on previously fluid regions thereby controlling time through a conflated temporality. This control of time and space and the gathered information regarding the region and its people is then operationalized into an epistemic arrest of sorts and the framing of the region into a problem through convoluted epistemology. This obfuscates, pre-existing knowledge structures within the region creating unitary teleological narratives and framing it into a ‘natural’ problem rather than a constructed one that emerges due to its unfortunate sandwiching between two postcolonial nation states. Finally, I argue that these modalities cause a sort of conflicted ontology resulting in a fracturing of identity within the region, and the creation of new subregional cores and peripheries within the conflict zone.