Umer Jan

Ph.D. student at the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster

After finishing my master’s degree in International Relations from Islamic University of Kashmir, I joined the University of Westminster for an M.Phil./Ph.D. degree in Politics, as a Global Challenges Research scholar. My research focuses on the functioning of civil bureaucracies in India-controlled Kashmir, institutions that have been strategically crafted to further enable Indian state’s heavily contested military rule in the region. For my Ph.D. research, I draw from a wide-ranging source of critical theory, from Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony to Arturo Escobar’s post-development theory. Another trajectory of my ongoing research focuses on India’s colonial necropolitics and political resistance in Kashmir. In the latter, I am interested in how people in Kashmir have adopted death as a form of resistance (necro-resistance) and how this adoption transforms the nature of mourning, memory, and social milieu as a whole. I am also a freelance journalist writing for Jacobin, Aljazeera, LA Review of Books and elsewhere.