Contemporary Colonialities

The volume brings together scholarship on two names associated with ‘conflict’ but what we argue are best described as ‘stateless nations’: Kurds and Kashmiris. They both raise important questions relating to coloniality, sovereignty, statehood, self-determination and human rights and yet have never been studied together. Our intervention does not only challenge ‘sovereignty privilege’ in International Relations but is also an effort to make postcolonial and decolonial studies and endeavours more anti-colonial through a focus on contemporary stateless nations. Kurdish and Kashmiri conflicts are more than contestations of power by states over territories; they are colonialities of power experienced by embodied individuals and mobilised communities of stateless nations with different gendered and political vulnerabilities. The focus here on is on colonial practices of postcolonial states of Turkey and India vis-à-vis Kurds and Kashmiris.