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We live in a world dominated by states and statist knowledge; this is a world where, for multiple institutional and political reasons, it is rare to speak of more than one stateless nation, and there is a conspicuous neglect of non-Western colonial practices. This volume brings together scholarship on two peoples associated with 'conflict' but who we argue are best described as 'stateless nations': Kurds and Kashmiris. Both these contexts raise important questions relating to coloniality, sovereignty, statehood, self-determination and human rights, and yet they have never been studied together. Our intervention challenges the 'sovereignty privilege' in International Relations and calls upon postcolonial and decolonial studies to take anti-colonialism seriously by focusing on contemporary stateless nations. The Kurdish and Kashmiri conflicts are more than power-laden contestations by states over territories; they are colonialities of power experienced by embodied individuals and involve mobilised communities of stateless nations with different gendered and political vulnerabilities. "This book addresses the complex issue of colonialism and nationalism among the Kurds who live in Turkey and the Kashmiris who live in the valley of Kashmir. For those wishing to understand the respective political, religious and social challenges of both groups, this book is essential reading." Victoria Schofield, author of Kashmir in the Crossfire and Kashmir in Conflict

An empathetic and eye-opening portrait of Muslim migrants in England that debunks many misperceptions about their music and poetry.
 
In Journeys of Love, ethnomusicologist Thomas Hodgson offers a sensitive corrective to harmful portrayals of immigrants—specifically, Pakistanis living in England—as a self-segregating group prohibited from making music, a stereotype that has often resulted in violent Islamophobia. He argues that, in practice, these migrants—many of whom come from the Mirpur area of Azad Kashmir—occupy rich musical worlds, full of poetic metaphors, that are central to surviving migration and its attendant losses.
 
Hodgson shows how Mirpuris in England, as well as those who remain in Pakistan, carry on traditions of reciting a collection of poetry by the nineteenth-century Sufi saint Mian Muhammad Bakhsh, translated by Hodgson here as Journeys of Love. With its themes of remaining true to one’s home, the oppressed being saved, having patience, and keeping faith in God, this work has become the story of movement and displacement in its narrative arc, as well as through the way it provides spiritual and ethical frameworks for settling in new lands. These hidden poetics of migration transform across generations as young Mirpuris develop new expressions of the connections across continents. These poetics reveal the connections between Kashmir’s rural village life and urban centers abroad, offering a sensitive and illuminating portrait of migration and multiculturalism in Britain and beyond.