Conflict and Narratives of Hope: A Study of Youth Discourses in Kashmir

Abstract

States that have prioritised conflict resolution and peacebuilding in their foreign policies often under-prioritise the need to have a highly developed capacity to analyse why conflicts erupt and are sustained over long periods. Analysis of causes of conflict is often dominated by geopolitical reasoning, power politics or essentialist views of ideological incompatibility. However, many subjugated communities maintain mass support for social mobilisation or even armed conflict when external expert analysis suggests they have no chance of success. Why do such communities persevere—even inter-generationally against such odds? This article sets out to examine an inconspicuous element, hope, in the context of the Kashmir conflict by looking into a corpus of narratives of Kashmiri youth published in the post2008 period, which witnessed recurrent political unrest and mobilisations around the demand of Kashmiri self-determination. The element of hope, in the context of this paper, is traced in the political narratives which, it is argued, have pragmatic intent and are typically goal-oriented and, therefore, in their cumulative effect engender a discursive reservoir in which a future of possibilities is implicit. When hope is preserved and nurtured through collective memory incorporated into narratives (or ‘organised remembrance’) it undercuts a state’s attempt to present the status quo as a fait accompli. We can conceive of hope in this context as a psychopolitical phenomenon. From the generational perspective, the element of hope (as an accomplice of memory) has an instrumental value for a self-determination movement whose continuity depends on the inter-generational reproduction of a national liberation struggle propelled by hope embodied in political action.