Dr K.W Hassan
IASH-SSPS Fellow, November 2024 - February 2025
Home institution: Central University of Kashmir
Dr. K.W Hassan is a Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and Governance in the School of Social Sciences of the Central University of Kashmir, India. Presently, he coordinates the Mahatma Gandhi Centre for Interdisciplinary Research at CUK. Previously, he taught at the P.G Department of Political Science of St. Joseph College, Bangalore, and the School of Undergraduate Studies of Ambedkar University Delhi. His research focuses on political violence, gender & public spaces and intersectionality in South Asia. Dr. Hassan visited the South Asian Institute, SOAS on a Charles Wallace Fellowship in 2017, Sidney Sussex College of the University of Cambridge in 2018 and Birkbeck University (London) in 2020 on a visiting fellowship, respectively. He teaches courses on Political Theory, Peace and Conflict Studies and South Asian Politics at the postgraduate level.
Project title: Autonomy and the Aspirations of Self-determination in Multinational States: Comparative Study of Northern Ireland and Kashmir
My research will focus on the relationship between autonomy and conflict resolution in multinational states by examining the cases of Kashmir and Northern Ireland. Although at different temporal settings, Northern Ireland and Kashmir present comparable cases with a violent history of conflict, contestation over sovereignty, politics of armed groups and the response of respective multination states of the United Kingdom and India. Kashmir has witnessed the movements for autonomy and self-determination, which resulted in a cycle of violence for three decades. Instead of making this constitutional-backed model of autonomy into real practice to resolve the violent conflict, Kashmir experienced the abrogation of autonomy in 2019. Unlike Kashmir, Northern Ireland saw the resolution of its conflict in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, which created a robust regime of power-sharing between the Catholics and Protestants and also created a web of institutions that bound the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland, and Northern Ireland together. Using the theoretical framework of consociational democracy and debates on autonomy, this research will investigate the response of the United Kingdom and India in addressing the demands of autonomy through self-determination. The peace process in Northern Ireland has followed a fragile path, which has produced small but visible results. A broader question that this project aims to answer is whether the same ‘autonomy model’ could be followed to address the demands of political autonomy and sovereignty in Kashmir; could this model create a possibility that people across faiths and de-facto borders, as well as political authority in India and Pakistan, begin to repair the damage caused by this enduring conflict?