“Kashmir” carries the burden of being known as one of the world’s biggest flashpoints. If a novel, TV show, or video game wants an easy international crisis, there’s a good chance Kashmir will be the crisis of choice. But while Kashmir is globally known, few understand the roots of the conflict—or what the people that live in Kashmir actually think.
For those that do, Professor Sumantra Bose’s Kashmir at the Crossroads: Inside a 21st-Century Conflict walks readers through the origins, developments, and potential future of the situation in Jammu and Kashmir, going right to the present day with the Modi administration’s turning of the state into two Union territories.
In this interview, we run through the history of Kashmir, and how we should think about recent developments in this part of the world.
Sumantra Bose is one of the world’s foremost experts on the Kashmir conflict. He is the author of seven previous books including Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus and Sri Lanka (Harvard University Press, 2007) and Secular States, Religious Politics: India, Turkey, and the Future of Secularism (Cambridge University Press, 2018).