Mona Bhan

Mona Bhan is the Ford Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies and Associate Professor of Anthropology at Syracuse University. She is a political and environmental anthropologist with research specializations in militarization, wars, and border subjectivities; ecology and infrastructure; and resource sovereignty and resistance politics in Kashmir. Over the past two decades, her work with  diverse communities who live along the densely militarized Line-of-Control (LoC) in Gurez, Bandipora, Leh, and Kargil, has shaped her research questions and practice, as well as the ways she envisions anthropological commitments to public and engaged work. She is also deeply invested in building meaningful local and global solidarities and works closely with civil society activists in Kashmir to find synergies between academic and advocacy interventions.  Her current work examines the intersections between India’s water infrastructures on Kashmir’s disputed rivers, the politics of Hindu majoritarianism, and climate anxieties along the LoC between India and Pakistan. Bhan has authored Counterinsurgency, Development, and the Politics of Identity: From Warfare to Welfare? and co-authored with Andrew Bauer Climate without Nature: A Critical Anthropology of the Anthropocene. She is also co-editor of Resisting Occupation in Kashmir, and a founding member of the Critical Kashmir Studies collective. Bhan is co-editor of HIMALAYA, the flagship journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. Her writings and interviews have appeared in several media and print outlets such as the BBC, Al Jazeera, Scholars Circle, CGTN, Scholars’ Circle, Indus TV, TRT, Kindle, Open Democracy, and Outlook.