Aditi Saraf

ADITI SARAF, University of Utrecht, Utrecht, the Netherlands, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in October 2022 to aid research and writing on “Frontier Signatures: Trade, Sovereignty and Political Economy in Kashmir.” The book manuscript, titled “Frontier Signatures: Trade, Sovereignty and Political Economy in Kashmir” chronicles the public life of resistance. It probes why the marketplace, a quotidian — even homely — site of everyday commerce transforms into a space seen as dangerous and threatening by occupying states. While existing scholarship on Kashmir — a site of enduring conflict between India, Pakistan, and China and compelling case for tracing evolving forms of settler colonialism — primarily focuses on state violence, religious wars, militant insurgency, and geopolitical crisis following the British Partition, the manuscript illuminates how bazaar practices create vital spaces where ordinary people forge resistance and imagine collective futures in response to military and industrial threats. Through this lens, the book rethinks political economy in settler-colonial contexts by demonstrating how bazaar formations transcend mere logics of extraction and dispossession. Second, it invigorates the study of frontiers not as peripheries but as generative spaces of political and economic possibilities forged within dialectics of circulation and enclosure. Finally, by blending the study of trade with anthropological examinations of violence and spatial history, the manuscript provides new theoretical tools for understanding how market practices reshape boundaries of trust and belonging in contested terrains worldwide.