Abstract
Colonial rule operates through the reordering of ecological relations. By rendering land legible, measurable, and administratively governable, militarized regimes consolidate control while narrowing political futurity. This article examines how ecological territorialization unfolds in Pakistan-administered Kashmir along the Line of Control, one of the most militarized frontiers in the world. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2014–2022), I trace how afforestation campaigns, conservation regimes, landmine governance, and infrastructural management embed military authority into soil, forests, and futures, aestheticizing occupation as restoration and care. Ecology emerges as a technology of rule: a biopolitical apparatus through which territorial power is naturalized.
Yet militarized enclosure does not exhaust political life. Alongside regimented plantation drives and mined slopes, residents cultivate fugitive ecologies: seed saving, memorial tree planting, foraging, and “flower bombing” that root memory, grief, and futurity in the land. These practices do not mirror state sovereignty nor directly overthrow it. Instead, they enact speculative sovereignty: an anticipatory claim to jurisdiction grounded in relational inhabitation under conditions where direct territorial contestation is foreclosed. Speculation here is not abstraction but material rehearsal, an extension of political horizon through ecological care.
By tracing how authority is both inscribed and quietly replanted from below, the article reconceptualizes sovereignty as an ecological practice shaped through anticipation, uneven risk, and temporal extension rather than exclusively through state form.
Keywords
Introduction
“If colonialism is planetary, then it is an apocalypse.” – Joseph Pierce, Speculative Relations: Indigenous Worlding and Repair 1
Colonial rule has always been ecological (Aijazi, 2023a; Bauer and Bhan, 2018; Ranjbar, 2026). It consolidates power not only through military and political domination but by rendering land an administratively governable domain. Contemporary climate and Anthropocene discourse reproduce a separation between nature and politics, obscuring the colonial relations that structure ecological crisis (Sayre, 2012; Simpson and Pizarro Choy, 2024; Simpson, 2020). Yet the environment is not a bounded sphere, but a web of social, political, and ecological relations constituted through situated ethical obligations and place-based knowledges (Giraud et al., 2018; Hamilton and Gunaratnam, 2018). Invoked as a monolith, “the environment” erases these relations, severing people's political ties to the land and suppressing place-based articulations of life (Whyte, 2018). Geopolitics further reduces place to location, obscuring its epistemological force (Arondekar and Patel, 2016: 152).
In militarized Kashmir, ecological practice is a primary domain through which these dynamics unfold. In this colonized territory, claimed in its entirety by India and Pakistan, the environment is not backdrop but medium: a co-produced terrain structured through military occupation and residents’ practices of cultivation, care, and remembrance. Forests, rivers, and slopes are reorganized through bunkers, mines, and afforestation campaigns, even as residents sustain ecological relations that exceed militarized containment.
This article focuses on ecological life unfolding in proximity to the Line of Control in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, 2 a region often sidelined in scholarship and framed as peripheral to the broader project of azadi: self-determination: sovereignty: freedom. 3 The Line of Control is the de facto border bisecting the former princely state into Pakistan and Indian-held areas. Along this frontier, life unfolds within what Mato-Bouzas (2019: 1) calls an “ambivalent spatiality,” marked by precarity, surveillance, and episodic violence across fortified terrain. Yet, precisely here, in these mountainscapes, Pakistan's military presence operates at its most intense, embedding itself through networks of surveillance and control so pervasive that, as Nosheen Ali (2013) observes, they regulate “discourse, emotions, and ways of being” (85). 4 While governance regimes, legal architectures, and intensities of militarization differ across the Line of Control—most notably in the scale of direct military occupation, counterinsurgency, and settler expansion in Indian-held Kashmir—ecological territorialization remains a structuring logic on both sides, albeit enacted through distinct political configurations.
As Samreen Mushtaq and Mudasir Amin (2021) suggest, militarization offers a critical interpretive framework for understanding coloniality and occupation in Kashmir. Militarized landscapes enforce what might be called border ontologies, compelling people to live in relation to the border rather than the land itself. Ecological governance unfolds within this spatial logic, reorganizing land use, mobility, and belonging around the imperatives of security and surveillance.
Across occupied territories, environmental initiatives increasingly entrench illegal military occupation (Alkhalili et al., 2023). In Kashmir, too, the military secures territory not only through bunkers and checkpoints but also through ecological interventions such as industrial-scale plantation drives. 5 These projects exemplify what scholars term “green militarization” (Masse et al., 2018), “ecological militarization” (Havlick, 2019), or “green colonialism” (Sasa, 2023): environmental governance operating as territorial consolidation (Ali, 2019). As Derek Gregory (2016) argues, the environment is more than a resource whose pursuit can trigger conflict, but the very medium through which military violence is conducted. Military–environment hybrids present the military as a benevolent institution that claims to protect, even as they inscribe power and authority onto people and land (Kim, 2022).
In this paper, I show that ecological relations in Kashmir are central both to sustaining colonial control and to imagining its undoing. I argue that militarized Kashmir is structured through intertwined processes of militarized territorialization and what I call speculative sovereignty, an anticipatory mode of authority enacted through ecological practice under conditions where direct territorial contestation is foreclosed. The Pakistani military consolidates control through ecological ordering—industrial-scale plantation drives, conservation regimes, infrastructural management—that render land legible, surveillable, and governable. Framed as environmental restoration, such projects extend military jurisdiction into civilian ecologies, reorganize grazing and forest use, recalibrate everyday mobility, and naturalize militarized presence as care. Even surveillance checkpoints are reframed as safeguards against illegal logging (Naqash, 2025), embedding security within environmental protection. Ecology thus operates as a technology of rule: a biopolitical apparatus through which territorial power is inscribed in the land.
Alongside this territorialization, residents cultivate ecological practices that anticipate political futures beyond militarized enclosure. I use the term fugitive ecologies to describe these practices of relational inhabitation through which speculative sovereignty takes root. Cultivation of low yield crops and seed saving, memorial tree planting that binds grief to futurity, and seed dispersal that anticipates land beyond military enclosure are not fantasies of liberation but material interventions into space and time. They rehearse political transformation where direct contestation is foreclosed, a way of inhabiting uncertainty without relinquishing claim.
Speculative sovereignty does not displace militarized control, nor does it guarantee transformation. It persists within constraint, unevenly enacted and differently risked. If emplacement anchors bodies to land through memory, labor, and care, speculation extends that anchoring into futurity. Speculative sovereignty thus names a lived capacity, an anticipatory claim to jurisdiction rooted in ecological relation rather than administrative command, staking differential claims over life and land. It is neither everyday resistance nor prefigurative politics; it does not build parallel institutions nor directly confront the state. Rather it rehearses authority through care, cultivation, and temporal extension. Where militarized sovereignty territorializes through enclosure and surveillance, speculative sovereignty operates through relational inhabitation, asserting not control over land but enduring claim with the land. Its terrain is not the state apparatus but the temporal and ecological conditions through which political futurity becomes imaginable.
Emplacement, fugitive ecologies, and speculative sovereignty name related but distinct dimensions of this analysis. Emplacement refers to the grounded, embodied inhabitation of land through memory, labor, and care, the anchoring of life within specific ecological relations. Fugitive ecologies describe the concrete practices through which such inhabitation persists under militarized constraint. Speculative sovereignty, in turn, names the political horizon enacted through these practices, a jurisdiction rehearsed through relational continuity rather than territorial domination.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork (spread over 2014–2022) with communities along the Line of Control in Pakistan-held Kashmir, I examine how ecological practices both consolidate and complicate military power. Rivers, weather systems, forest corridors, and wildlife movements traverse the militarized boundary with indifference to cartographic finality. 6 Scholars working in Indian-controlled Kashmir demonstrate how environmental governance, from conservation regimes to climate adaptation and resource extraction, becomes entangled with occupation and surveillance (Bhan and Trisal, 2017). In Ladakh, Alka Sabharwal (2022) shows how military logics fuse destruction and salvation of nature, producing a militarized ecology in which “extraction, settlement, [and] conservation co-exist” (56). Similarly, in the aftermath of the 2014 Kashmir floods across the Line of Control, Mona Bhan (2018) observes how women invoke figures of jinns and other non-human forces to cultivate resistant ecological imaginaries that braid together political, cultural, and environmental meanings. Such work underscores that ecological harm and ecological imagination must be understood relationally across divided terrain rather than within administratively partitioned fragments.
This article makes three interventions. First, it reconceptualizes sovereignty in Kashmir as an ecological practice enacted through anticipation rather than exclusively through state form. Second, it demonstrates how militarized afforestation functions as a technology of territorialization that naturalizes military jurisdiction under the language of restoration and care. Third, it theorizes fugitive ecological practices—cultivation, memorial planting, and seed dispersal—as speculative sovereign acts that rehearse futures beyond militarized enclosure.
How might centering ecological practices across Kashmir enable us to reimagine Kashmiri futurities beyond the nation-state and its borders— a sovereignty otherwise? And how might destabilizing “carefully curated geopolitical scripts” open new ways of being in the Himalayas (Bhan, 2023: 40)? These questions animate the analysis that follows.
A highway signboard in Pakistan's capital city, Islamabad, lists major cities in both Pakistan-and Indian-administered Kashmir, suggesting a Pakistan-centric vision of Kashmir (source: Facebook).
Pakistan's flag painted on a hill in Pakistan-administered Kashmir (source: the author).
The illuminated border between India and Pakistan as seen from the international space station (source: Facebook).
An underground bunker (source: Nusrat).
Ahmed, climbing a walnut tree (source: the author).
Maize forming a canopy over a village pathway (source: the author).
Local variety of mushrooms (source: the author).
A pumpkin growing in a field (source: the author).
Herbs drying on a clothesline for winter use (source: Nusrat).
Cattle making their way into the mountainous landscape (source: Rihanna).
Two sides of an informational sheet by the Pakistan Red Crescent Society, warning residents about the dangers of landmines (source: the author).
Post on X (formerly twitter) by a high-ranking army official outlining military involvement in a plantation campaign.
Post on X (formerly twitter) by the office of the DG ISPR, (director-general of the inter-services public relations), the public relations arm of the Pakistan armed forces.
Bright flowers bloom near military infrastructure. I did not have permission to photograph military installations (Source: the author).
Speculation as accountability
Drawing on her work in Ladakh, Radhika Gupta (2023) calls for a hermeneutics of borderlands as “cartographies of ideas, cutting across spatial scales” (9). Moving beyond the entrapment of borders and drawing on Hannah Arendt's notion of freedom, she asks: “How do borderland dwellers themselves negotiate regimes of militarization and their geopolitical location in everyday life?” (4) and “How can we recuperate the category of ‘freedom’ to think about creative and improvisational politics?” (5). These questions orient this essay toward imaginings beyond militarized orders, toward more open and life-affirming geographies.
Since 2014, I have conducted ethnographic research with communities living along the borderlands of Pakistan-administered Kashmir. These mountainscapes are often imagined as remote, a category that, as Shafqat Hussain (2015: 191) notes, has long been entangled with exploration and expansionism. Such imaginaries remain infused with colonial-era mountain visions (see Kennedy, 1996); several towns near the Line of Control attract tourists, their landscapes shaped as much by militarization as by leisure economies.
To protect my interlocutors, I cannot disclose the precise location of my field site. The pervasive presence of state intelligence agencies and other everyday mechanisms of surveillance means that identifying the specific site of research along the 740-kilometer Line of Control could expose residents to harm. As Harris Zargar and Osuri (2023) note, surveillance is the backbone of the intersecting practices of colonial logics in Kashmir.
I am not Kashmiri. I grew up in Pakistan, later moved to Canada for academic training, and am now employed in the United Kingdom. This trajectory places me within broader South Asian scholarly engagement with Kashmir shaped by uneven proximities to occupation, a location shaped by its own history of epistemic and material harms. This is not to suggest that non-Kashmiri people, especially South Asians, must refrain from writing about Kashmir (though at times they should as exemplified by Saiba Varma's ethically flawed book “Occupied Clinic”, see Accardi et al., 2021; Aijazi, 2024: 205–207). Rather, it is to acknowledge that writing about colonized peoples is a contested undertaking in which questions of solidarity, accountability, and ethics must remain foregrounded. Too often, scholars, journalists, and practitioners from India and Pakistan have occupied discursive space in ways that marginalize Kashmiri voices or reproduce extractive knowledge practices. Attending to these dynamics requires ongoing reflexivity rather than certainty. Sustaining accountable relationships with interlocutors has reshaped my methodological commitments toward emergent, relational practices, such as cooking, eating, cultivating camaraderie (Aijazi, 2023b). It has also reshaped my citational practices, pulling me away from canonical frameworks and softening the certainty of my conceptual claims in favour of more speculative and imaginative writing and analysis.
Joseph Pierce (2025) describes speculation as imagining the possible within an uncertain present, opening onto what Miriam Ticktin (2022) calls “alter-visions” or “alterpolitics”—parallel alternatives to dominant orders that can render collective imaginaries real. 7 Jacques Rancière (2010) reminds us that political action does not oppose the imaginary to the real but reshapes what counts as real by redrawing the boundaries of what can be perceived and thought. In Kashmir, where narrative control remains central to colonial governance (Zia, 2025), imagination itself becomes politically charged (Aijazi, forthcoming).
The nation-state remains the dominant frame through which Kashmir is rendered legible, reducing political aspiration to subordinate inclusion within Indian or Pakistani historiography, foreclosing recognition of other political and ethical horizons (Figures 1 and 2). Attending to everyday enactments of sovereignty, forms of emplacement and ecological relation that exceed statist recognition, invites a rethinking of freedom not as incorporation, but as grounded relational capacity (Aijazi, 2024).
I bring scholarship from both sides of the Line of Control, resisting the hyphenated framings of Kashmir—Indian-Kashmir and Pakistani-Kashmir. As Mohamad Junaid (2020) writes, Kashmir for Kashmiris is like a house: a shared home in which movement across regions feels like moving from one room to another, despite the cartographic consciousness imposed in 1947. At the same time, Jodi Byrd (2011) reminds us that postcolonial studies has often sidelined Indigenous scholarship, even as Indigenous thinkers have long theorized colonialism from grounded epistemologies. Drawing on work from multiple sites shaped by borders, settler colonialism, militarization, and occupation, I seek to unsettle the geographic, conceptual, and disciplinary borders that continue to divide peoples, places, knowledges—while remaining attentive, as Mabel Gergan (2025) cautions, to the specific histories and lived realities of the South Asian Himalayas.
Militarized border ecologies
Environmental change in Kashmir must be viewed within a longer imperial history (Alghamdi, 2025). From 1846 to 1947, the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir remained under indirect British rule, functioning as a strategic Himalayan frontier valued for its natural resources. Colonial scientific forestry regimes extracted deodar timber for Empire's infrastructure while restricting local communities’ access to firewood, fodder, and grazing lands (Wright, 1931). Transportation corridors and military outposts in adjacent regions tied Kashmir into wider imperial networks of extraction and control.
Partition did not unsettle this logic. War between India and Pakistan in 1947–48 resulted in a ceasefire line in 1949. With minor modifications, the military control line was formalized in 1972 as the Line of Control, following another war between the two nations. Originally intended as a temporary arrangement until the Kashmir conflict could be resolved through a plebiscite, which the Indian government has refused to hold, the Line of Control has instead hardened over time, with militaries on both sides steadily entrenching themselves in the region. Often described as “Asia's Berlin Wall,” it remains a de facto rather than legally recognized boundary.
Today, the Line of Control is so densely militarized that it is visible from outer space (Figure 3). Checkpoints, barbed wire, military barracks, armed personnel, what Javier Arbona-Homar calls “killing mechanisms” (2025, xi), shape the landscape as decisively as forests, mountains, and waterways. 8 These installations do more than occupy space; they concentrate bodies into formations that can be rapidly deployed across imperial geographies (Hoffman, 2007: 402), materializing what Sahana Ghosh (2025: 223) describes as a militarized sociospatial ecological order normalized under the language of care and welfare.
This militarized order extends beyond visible infrastructure into the regulation of land and subsistence. In the mountains of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, landholding patterns are shaped by inheritance, customary tenure, and state forest law inherited from the Dogra rule. 9 Ownership is rarely consolidated into a single, contiguous block. A household may cultivate plots in some proximity to home while also holding cultivation and grazing land scattered across upland pastures at varying altitudes and distances. These fragmented holdings, sustained through memory and repetition, disrupt notions of spatial homogeneity. Landscape here is not bounded but fragmented, relational, and mobile (Aijazi, 2018)
Yet such patterns are constrained by the designation of vast surrounding forests as state property, subject to layered bureaucratic and military oversight. Proximity to the Line of Control restricts access: grazing areas may be declared “sensitive zones,” temporarily closed, or rendered unusable due to shelling or landmines. Militarization thus reshapes not only territory but the rhythms of subsistence, unevenly redistributing mobility, vulnerability, and risk across households.
At the same time, militarization is not experienced solely as restriction. The military builds bridges, maintains roads, clears landslides, supports schools and clinics, and provides employment. In doing so, it steps into developmental roles that render the civilian state distant, if not absent. This infrastructural presence reinforces the army's indispensability at the margins, framing militarization as protection rather than domination and naturalizing the Line of Control as necessary and protective. Such service provision does not mitigate occupation but deepens its infrastructural embedment. By portraying the region as volatile, threatened by Indian bombardment and increasingly by climate change, the military justifies its expanding role in governance and environmental management. The border legitimates the army's presence, and the army materializes the border. In effect, the military becomes the border.
The Line of Control functions as an ecological barrier as much as a political one. Landmines, fences, and fortified installations fragment the landscape, injure civilians, obstruct pastures. Fortifications and cross-border shelling further amplify these risks, displacing mines downslope during rains and floods; fragmenting fragile habitats and exploding bodies.
Militarized borders produce significant spatial and ideological effects, transforming landscapes, reshaping language and social norms (Gohain, 2015: 22). Aamir, whose village lies near the Line of Control, explained: “We’ve learned to live alongside the soldiers. We have set times to collect water. When our women go, the soldiers aren’t allowed to be nearby. And when it's the soldiers’ turn, we step aside and stay away.” His account illustrates how borderland dwellers adjust daily rhythms around militarized infrastructures, negotiating both constraint and survival.
Between 1990 and 2003, during the height of the liberation struggle against Indian occupation, the Line of Control was a site of fierce conflict between the Indian and Pakistani militaries. Armies fired long-range artillery and mortar shells at each other, killing and harming civilians, property, and livestock. Even though a fragile ceasefire was established in 2003, skirmishes can erupt unexpectedly. A villager described living near the line as follows: “We are never at ease. The firing can start at any time. It's like having 100 little sleeps every night.”
In anticipation of renewed violence, underground bunkers dot the region: fortified basements, hollowed-out rock shelters, and community-built refuges, where in the past people sheltered for days on end (Figure 4). These spaces are maintained in readiness, tended as carefully as fields. In some locations, the military assists in constructing communal shelters, reinforcing its role as both agent of risk and provider of protection.
At Pakistan's frontier, the army is entrenched in a territorial process that imposes what might be called a border ontology upon Kashmiris on both sides of the arbitrary line. These practices reveal the instability of the state's margins, what Mato-Bouzas (2019) describes as the impossibility of full control at the periphery, and what Das and Poole (2004) identify as the indeterminacy that destabilizes the state's apparent solidity. Environmental ordering is central to this process: by regulating land, water, forests, and movement, the military organizes social life in the name of governance. Yet such ordering also prompts a question: what alternative worlds does such ordering foreclose?
Militarization is not merely a condition but a hegemonic process, organizing both material arrangements and discursive worlds (Lutz, 2002). It structures social, interpersonal, and territorial relations through discipline, control, and exclusion (Daniel and Cacho, 2021). In Kashmir, as Niharika Pandit (2025) argues, militarization is co-constitutive of coloniality, functioning both as a rationale and as a process of (post)colonial rule, and hence, part and parcel of post(colonial) state formation, whose aim is “not to end violence but to possess land and dispossess the people” (Visweswaran, 2013: 14). The question, then, is not whether ecology is militarized, but how militarized ecologies take shape—and what forms of life persist within and against them.
Inhering in the land
The people of this mountainous region are known as the Pahari people, or “people of the mountains”, a nomenclature that reflects deep knowledge of how to live on terrain others might deem inhospitable. Semi-nomadic, hyper-rural, and pastoral, the Pahari people navigate life under the constant gaze of the military while drawing sustenance and solace from the land, its forests, and waterways (Figure 5). As Jamal Nabulsi (2023) writes, indigeneity is “the body inhering in the land and the land inhering in the body” (26), a formulation made vivid in the rhythms of daily life here.
Yet “Pahari” does not denote a homogeneous group. Residents occupy varied social, economic, and political positions. Most households I worked with were smallholding cultivators who combined subsistence agriculture with seasonal wage labor, petty trade, or remittances from relatives employed in urban Pakistan and sometimes the Gulf. Some families had members serving in the Pakistani military; others had kin who crossed the Line of Control during earlier phases of the liberation struggle. As noted earlier, access to land also varies, and the quality and fragmentation of inherited holdings shape how households navigate the terrain, including their reliance on surveilled forest edges and upland slopes, as well as on more dangerous strips closer to the Line of Control.
Ecological practice is further shaped by gendered divisions of labor. Women tend household gardens, manage seed saving, forage, and care for livestock, while men more often undertake wage labor beyond the village. “Pahariness,” then, is an uneven and relational condition, structured by class, kinship, gender, and proximity to militarized infrastructure, yet grounded in an ecological consciousness forged through inhabiting the pahars, the mountains themselves.
Access to land and forest is likewise uneven. Households with larger or more fertile plots are less dependent on restricted forest zones, while land-poor families rely more heavily on grazing slopes and forest margins, areas most susceptible to military restriction. Families with members employed in the military or local administration may navigate bureaucratic permissions more easily, usually informally. Ecological agency thus unfolds within hierarchies of landholding, labor, and institutional proximity, complicating any romantic reading of shared belonging or ecological practice as universally available.
Ecological intimacy
Maize, a rainfed crop requiring no irrigation, exemplifies people's intimate relationship to the land. Planted around homes and along winding paths, its tall stalks form living walls that shield courtyards from wind and cast shade in summer. Where growing densely, their green towers merge into tunnel-like corridors that guide movement, shape social interactions, and leave lasting marks upon the land (Figure 6). Cultivation here is not merely productive; it is reverential. Elders remove their shoes before stepping into vegetable gardens, treating each plot as a sacred space of care and sustenance. Ahmed, recalled: “My dadi [paternal grandmother] loves growing vegetables. She cares for them diligently and even removes her shoes before entering the garden as a sign of respect, insisting that others do the same. We often have more produce than we need and share cucumbers, potatoes, and other vegetables with neighbors and relatives, who in turn share theirs with us. Growing our own food strengthens our bond to the land and deepens our sense of belonging.”
Jurisdiction through use
Many households deliberately cultivate local, low-yielding pumpkins and gourds, resisting NGO advice to grow high-yield cash crops like potatoes (Figure 8). They save seeds for the next planting season than relying on commercial packets promoted by development agencies. “It is a discipline to work the land,” Amna Bibi told me “We are the people of the land. This is what our forefathers did. This is what we will do.”
These practices exceed subsistence. They are a claim to land rooted in cultivation, continuity, and care rather than state recognition. By saving seeds, refusing NGO crop prescriptions, and continuing low-yield traditions, residents assert jurisdiction through use. Their authority over land is secured not only through ownership but through sustained relational inhabitation. In a context where military and development regimes alike seek to regulate ecological life, such practices quietly refuse dispossession by persisting in modes of dwelling that exceed statist development imaginaries.
The political force of cultivation resonates elsewhere as well. In Assam, India, Dexita Deka and Dolly Kikon (2025) show how guerrilla fighters resisting the occupying Indian state envision sovereignty through food and return to the land, arguing that self-determination “is entangled with those who work on the land, care for crops, and seeds” (16). Food, in this frame, becomes more than sustenance. It becomes a practice of self-sufficiency, land reclamation, and agrarian assertion.
Winters here are unforgiving. In the months preceding snowfall, households intensify labor—harvesting, drying, and preserving. Milk becomes cheese; spinach, mushrooms, onions, and herbs such as mint and coriander are strung and hung (Figure 9). “Anything that can bring flavor and nourishment is dried,” Laib explained. At higher altitudes, where snow and ice can sever access to the bazaars such preparation is essential. Laib noted that drying vegetables has been a Kashmiri tradition for generations. Fresh food is not always available—or affordable—even when bazaars are open. In some areas, sudden clashes or curfews mean that food must always be on hand, as no one knows when disruptions will strike, whether from cross-border firing or restrictions on movement. Preservation practices thus blend cultural continuity with pragmatic adaptation to uncertainty.
Yet this intimate ecology coexists with constraint. Surrounding forests are designated “protected” under state forest law and monitored by forest guards working along with security forces, who monitor fuelwood collection and fine those deemed to be overharvesting. Grazing slopes near the Line of Control are periodically closed due to shelling or landmine risk. The ecology of fear, uncertainty about when access will be curtailed, becomes as significant as physical barriers themselves. Residents distinguish between “our land”, cultivated plots in relative proximity to home, and “government land” or “army land,” categories that carry both legal and affective resonance. Foraging, fuelwood collection, and livestock movement require constant negotiation of these shifting boundaries.
Checkpoints, walls, and outposts fracture familiar paths and transform lived spaces into zones of stasis (Bhan, 2020). For the Pahari people, such militarization erodes belonging, alienating them from the land they have long stewarded (Bose, 2025). The mountains thus bear layered inscriptions: cultivation and surveillance, care and control. Yet amid restriction, residents continue to plant, forage, preserve, and tend—not only to survive, but to sustain community and affirm their presence in the land that remains, in lived and affective terms, their own.
Armed landscapes
The Line of Control is heavily mined to deter so-called “unauthorized crossings”—a term offensive to Kashmiris who have kin on both sides of the dividing line and have been forcibly separated. Much of this mining aims to prevent Kashmiri freedom fighters and others from crossing to join armed resistance against the Indian occupation, or from returning after fleeing capture. Neither India nor Pakistan has signed the global Mine Ban Treaty, which seeks to eliminate anti-personnel landmines worldwide. According to limited records available, the Indian army first planted landmines along the Line of Control during the 1965 India-Pakistan war and has continued to do so ever since. Pakistan, too, has engaged in large-scale use of mines (Ali and Tehzeeb, 2021). In some “strategic areas,” these devices are planted deep into people's fields and grazing pastures, preventing locals from cultivating crops, collecting fodder for livestock, and grazing. Domestic animals are also killed in large numbers, often a household's primary assets. Rearing livestock is integral to Pahari life. Most households maintain at least some animals, though herd sizes are steadily declining—a reflection of both financial pressures and shifting lifestyles. Over the many years I have worked in the region, residents have frequently cited increasing difficulties in accessing pastures as a key reason why many Pahari households are abandoning livestock altogether (Figure 10).
Heavy rains and landslides often wash mines down into communities and villages where they are least expected, causing additional injuries and fatalities. Children and adults alike can be seen using prosthetic legs, arms, and hands, while those without access to artificial limbs make do with crutches. “All the men in my family wear a prosthetic,” Shamima explained. “My grandfather, my father, and now my son—they have all had unfortunate encounters with landmines.”
Eleana Kim (2016), drawing on her research on the Korean Demilitarized Zone, observes that “mines can function effectively as area-denial weapons when their existence is discovered, most tragically after someone has been killed or injured” (177). She conceptualizes mines as “rogue infrastructures,” highlighting the tense interactions between these devices and the humans who must live alongside them (163). In the case of Kashmir, just the mere possibilities of mines, particularly during the rainy season, create fear amongst residents, discouraging them from the land (Figure 11).
Life in these mountainscapes is contingent on topographical mastery. Residents must navigate rugged terrain, forage forests for food, access grazing pastures, and work in the fields. Large swaths of land are traversed daily in pursuit of sustenance and grazing opportunities for livestock, conditions that form the precondition of life here.
The Line of Control, along with its no-go zones, army bunkers, checkpoints, interrupts these movements and flows. While most residents are aware of clearly marked mined areas, this knowledge does not protect them when mines are washed into the heart of their communities. Beyond accidental displacement, there is also deliberate intent: the mines are designed to inflict maximum harm. “Often, they appear as shiny objects, like a gleaming silver item. Our kids think it's a toy or an intriguing curiosity, and without hesitation, they pick them up.” Shamima sighed regretfully.
The Pakistani military moves through the terrain with an ease that rivals that of the locals. They ride horses and donkeys, traverse the mountains in large trucks or armored vehicles, and are never fully concealed by their khaki uniforms. Their green is distinct. Not the vibrant green of Pakistan's flag or Kashmir's—but a duller hue, blended with the color of the earth. For some, these colors signify conquest; for others, they represent an opportunistic yet symbiotic relationship.
Because this section of Kashmir has largely been excluded from the Pakistani state's development plans, the military has stepped in. They maintain roads, build bridges, schools, and hospitals, provide employment, and occasionally warn residents of impending cross-border attacks. When a military convoy moves along the narrow mountain roads, most people step aside, and some even facilitate its passage. In this landscape, survival is intertwined with the presence of the military.
Planting power
A United Nations advisor to Pakistan described climate change as a “national security issue”, urging Pakistan's powerful military to treat it as its priority (Khan, 2025). In Pakistan—including in Kashmir under its control—the military's expanding role in ecological restoration has become largely normalized. This normalization unfolds within nationalist narratives structured through rivalry with India and intensified at the Line of Control, where environmentalism and national security increasingly converge. As Ateeb Ahmed (2023) argues, the Pakistani military has entrenched itself within the national economy to an unprecedented degree, consolidating into a sovereign capitalist power that operates autonomously from other state apparatus while advancing its own economic, political, and territorial agendas.
Seeking control and predictability, the army undertakes industrial-scale ecological restoration projects, most prominently massive tree plantation drives where millions of saplings are inserted into the earth in regimented rows (Figures 12 and 13). Because of their scale, speed, and spectacle, these initiatives are colloquially called “tsunami tree campaigns.” In 2019, for instance, the local government in Pakistan-administered Kashmir announced the plantation of five million saplings—3.8 million by the forest department and 1.2 million by the army across the region (Naqash, 2019). On the other side of the Line of Control, the Indian army engages in similar campaigns (Khajuria, 2021; GK News Service, 2025), underscoring how trees become biopolitical instruments of territorial consolidation across militarized borders.
These campaigns reinscribe the same logics of containment familiar from checkpoints and barbed wire. Plantation drives authorize military presence within civilian terrain under the banner of environmental care. They create ongoing cycles of tending and inspection that tether soldiers to landscapes otherwise beyond routine access. Saplings, as “foreign bodies”, are fixed into the landscape by another “foreign body”—the soldier 10 —initiating cycles of surveillance and care that tether the military to the terrain. Soldiers return repeatedly to monitor and tend the saplings before eventually shifting responsibility to locals, all the while claiming an undeserved stake in the land: “I planted these saplings, so I have to look after them; therefore, the land on which they are planted is under my care (but also under my control).” In this sense, saplings function as vegetal anchors of authority: the act of planting becomes a claim to continued oversight.
These campaigns also reshape rural subsistence. Large-scale afforestation projects can convert multifunctional grazing or foraging terrain into managed forest zones subject to future state control. Residents expressed ambivalence toward these campaigns not only because of their symbolic militarism but material consequences: sapling grids sometimes restrict traditional livestock movement or reclassify land previously treated as communal. Ecological restoration thus doubles as territorial consolidation, transforming flexible rural landscapes into administratively legible space.
The use of trees as instruments of colonial or state power has historical precedents. In occupied Palestine, Israeli plantation campaigns replaced Indigenous olive groves with European pine trees, erasing Palestinian presence while legitimizing territorial control (Braverman, 2008; 2009). In Pakistan-administered Kashmir, the favored chinar tree carries layered civilizational histories—traced variously to fourteenth century Muslim Persian preachers, Hindu sacred geographies, and Mughal aesthetic order. Its contemporary deployment folds these symbolic genealogies into militarized environmental governance. Tourists to Pakistan-administered Kashmir are also invited to plant saplings, their names inscribed on plaques (Naqash, 2019), extending affective claims to land through participatory greening.
As Mona Bhan (2013) argues, such developmental interventions in borderlands operate less as ecological projects than as extensions of state power. They privilege statist priorities of territorial control and nation-building, embedding militarized logics into landscapes under the guise of environmental management. Franklin Ginn and Daanish Mustafa (2021) similarly describe plantation campaigns as enacting a “soft Pakistan” through plants, aestheticizing the military as guardian even as it deepens territorial control. While local approval remains uneven, these projects resonate powerfully with audiences in central Pakistan, consolidating the army's national legitimacy. 11
Fugitive ecologies
“I dream of planting flowers at all places where bombs were dropped.” – Nour al-Din Hajjaj, Palestinian writer 12
“Gardening is experimental. We want bugs that pollinate but not bugs that eat and kill the plants. We want sun, but we don't want the plants to burn. We want rain, but we don't want the seeds to drown. We want plants to grow but we have to pull up weeds … which are also plants, because they drain resources that our movement needs to grow”- Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2008: 153)
Military plantations stand in sharp contrast to the unruly ecological practices cultivated by residents, fugitive practices that reveal a more expansive moral and imaginative horizon. Among the Pahari people, trees are integral to everyday survival, relied upon for wood to heat homes. Because most surrounding forests are designated as “protected” by the Pakistani state, collecting firewood must be done discreetly, away from the vigilant eyes of forest guards who also operate with a militarized logic.
Trees are not only sources of warmth and sustenance; they are forms of rooting. They anchor residents and their loved ones to their community and to the land, materializing emplacement, awarding residents further stakes and claims on the land in a context of encroachment and erasure. They render the landscape familiar and grounding within an atmosphere of alienation where military infrastructure is not only affectively jarring but actively restricts access.
As Maron Greenleaf (2024) argues, planting is not a discrete act but an ongoing relational practice: the slow growth of trees stretches time, linking past loss to future hope. Durrani, who planted an apple tree for his father, missing for over twenty years after crossing the Line of Control with freedom fighters, described it as a “lasting anchor” for his loved one on this earth. “It is not a grave; we already have graveyards,” Durrani clarified. The memorial tree, unmarked and anonymous, embodies what Islamic belief renders a continuous spiritual reward for the dead while reenacting a reconfigured temporality that binds grief to futurity. In planting the tree for his father, Durrani refuses the erasure produced by disappearance and militarized borders. The tree asserts jurisdiction over time, binding past loss to future growth outside the state's archival and territorial logics. It does not contest the border directly; rather, it renders disappearance incomplete by rooting memory in soil. Through such acts, residents claim authority over the temporal horizon, insisting that political futures remain open even where territorial futures appear foreclosed.
Planting also becomes collective care. Residents choose what they can afford: fruit trees whose bounty may be shared by neighbors, or large-canopied trees offering shade. In this way, arboreal memorials extend beyond the family, distributing benefits in what Aoife K. Pitts et al. (2022) describe as “constructive pursuits of freedom, sustainability, and care.” Even in mourning, tree planting disperses generosity outward, embedding loss within broader ecologies of relation.
Another intriguing practice, though not as widespread as planting trees, is seed bombing. Kamaluddin, my host in the community, would scatter flower seeds into the cracks of mountains near military installations, using cloth packets or “seed bombs.” Sometimes, his children would accompany him; otherwise, he would go alone. His extended family would also join him occasionally. This is not a coordinated practice per se. Rather, this is a largely personal practice, subtle and ephemeral, that illustrates what Aoife K. Pitts and colleagues frame as abolition ecologies: interventions that destabilize political-ecological regimes. They argue that seeds suggest “the constructive pursuit of freedom, sustainability, and care” (2022: 302) and are a reminder that “resistance is possible” (305).
Kamaluddin does not consider himself an activist or environmental organizer. He manages a small shop along with cultivating maize and vegetables on a small plot of land. His eldest son works as a daily waged laborer in Lahore. Seed dispersal was not his primary occupation nor an organized campaign. It emerged from everyday proximity to militarized infrastructure and from what he described as “a desire to see something beautiful.” Fugitive ecological practices are not exceptional events but woven into daily life.
Seed dispersal is an anticipatory claim to land beyond its militarized administration. By introducing vegetal life into militarized spaces — into cracks near barracks, beside sandbags, along fortified slopes — Kamaluddin asserts a future-oriented claim to territory without seeking to capture or govern it. The act does not redraw borders; it imagines their obsolescence. In hurling seeds into restricted terrain, Kamaluddin and his family rehearse a Kashmir in which access is no longer mediated by soldiers, a quiet rehearsal of land beyond enclosure.
Seed bombs also illustrate Bennett's notion of “thing-power” (2010: 6): the seed is not merely a symbol deployed by people but an agentic material force capable of reorganizing and animating occupied territory, producing effects dramatic and subtle. Seeds carry genetic potential. They are leaky. Borders cannot control seeds as biological organisms that move, evolve, and carry genetic information across space and time. Seeds resist containment by political and legal systems because of their biological properties and the social ways seeds are shared historically (Kloppenburg, 2005).
Swatches of wildflowers blooming beside ugly sandbags and barbed wire become what Edwards-Schuth and Cerqueira (2022) call insurgent connections to place, guerrilla gestures that remake militarized landscapes into sites of beauty, fecundity, resilience (Figure 14). They are “covert attacks” that alter landscape (Boyd, 2014: 177), recomposing “decaying or unproductive spaces into sites of resilience and fecundity as a practice of spatial justice” (Sackey, 2022: 366). “I just hurl the seeds into the air,” Kamaluddin told me, showing his stash collected from harvests. “Flowers are a show of beauty,” he added. His words echo Kirsten Bradley's reminder that “the poetry of the seed ball is simple, yet immense” (2010: 65). 13
These seedings, often unseen by those who cast them, are anticipatory gestures. They welcome strangers into spaces the sower may never revisit, offering hospitality that exceeds the self. They also point toward a future Kashmir, where crossing the Line of Control no longer means confronting armed soldiers but being greeted by blossoms. In this sense, flower bombing embodies Ruth Wilson Gilmore's (2022: 93) suggestion that “freedom is a place,” reclaiming landscapes through small acts of care that elude surveillance yet accumulate into visions of another political horizon.
Seeds, as Christian Brooks Keeve (2025) observes, are “botanical touchstones” that compel return to the soil, their fugitivity offering strategies for evasion and disruption. She contends that “vegetal and political life are in constant coordination.” In Kashmir, scattering seeds exemplifies what Mohamad Junaid (2020) describes as insurgent cultural imaginaries carried by ordinary people, imaginations often denied official recognition but lived daily in quiet acts of resistance. Through these modest practices—planting a tree, hurling a seed ball—residents, such as Kamaluddin, cultivate a fugitive ecology: one that resists militarized containment by rooting memory, care, futurity into the soil itself.
As Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2008) writes, “alternate routes are embracing each other underground; bursts of truth are flowering to the surface” (145). Plants, trees, seeds carry political will. Fugitive by nature, they slip across borders and germinate in cracks, rehearsing futures beyond enclosure. In Palestine, Manal Shqair and Mahmoud Soliman describe how small acts of regeneration form an “agro-ecological structure of sumud,” anchoring existence through land (2022: 43). Shayma Nader (2025) describes insurgent agriculture as precisely this kind of challenge to colonial commodification—rerooting people in earth and rerouting them toward liberated futures. In contexts of colonial violence, even seeds become targets, as the destruction of seed banks by Israel in Hebron and Gaza demonstrates (El Houri, 2025).
It is important not to overstate the reach of such fugitive ecologies. Not all residents engage in seed dispersal, and not all possess equal freedom to do so. Households more dependent on military employment or more exposed to surveillance may avoid practices that could be misread as subversive. Others lack the mobility to frequent militarized slopes. These acts, while symbolically potent, unfold within a tightly regulated political economy in which risk is unevenly distributed.
Concluding thoughts
“The oppressed dig deep in the earth, looking for a living root, a viable shoot, a tree that may one day grow.” - Mourid Barghouti, I was born there, I was born here
In militarized Kashmir, sovereignty is not secured only through checkpoints and bunkers. It is cultivated through ecological design. Plantation drives, infrastructural service provision, and conservation regimes embed military authority into soil, forests, and futures, aestheticizing control as restoration and care. Militarization thus extends as an inscription of power into the land itself.
Yet political life is not exhausted.
Across mined slopes and regimented sapling grids, residents continue to plant and forage. These ecological practices do not mirror state sovereignty, nor do they dismantle it. They operate on another terrain. Through memorial trees that refuse disappearance, through seed saving that sustains relational continuity, through flower bombs cast into restricted ground, residents enact what I have called speculative sovereignty: an anticipatory claim to jurisdiction grounded in ecological relation where direct territorial contestation is foreclosed.
Speculative sovereignty does not displace the border. It works otherwise. Where militarized territorialization seeks to fix space and secure permanence, speculative sovereignty stretches time. It roots disappearance in living matter. It extends relation beyond enclosure. These fugitive ecological practices are uneven and differently risked, unfolding within surveillance, unequal land regimes, and constrained mobility. They do not promise liberation. But they persist.
The environment in Kashmir is not backdrop but medium: a terrain through which colonial authority is secured and alternative horizons are quietly rehearsed. If militarized ecologies naturalize occupation by embedding it in landscapes of restoration and protection, fugitive ecologies insist that land remains a site of moral and political relation irreducible to administrative control.
The struggle over Kashmir is therefore also a struggle over its temporal horizon: whether the border will define the limits of political imagination—or whether imagination will transgress those limits.
Highlights
Militarized afforestation in Kashmir functions as a technology of territorialization that embeds military authority within ecological restoration. Pahari Kashmiris cultivate fugitive ecologies—seed saving, memorial planting, and flower dispersal—that rehearse political futurity in militarized terrain. Fugitive ecological practices root speculative sovereignty in the land as anticipatory jurisdiction enacted through ecological relation where direct territorial contestation is foreclosed. Sovereignty is reconceptualized as an ecological and temporal practice rather than solely a statist form. Militarized borders seek to fix space, while fugitive ecologies stretch political time.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I thank the four anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful engagement and the journal editor for their patience throughout the revision process. Special thanks to Libby Lunstrum and Lisa Brady for inviting me to a generative workshop on militarized ecologies that laid the groundwork for this special issue. The article also benefited from generous feedback at the Critical Kashmir Studies conference.
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: Funding for this research was provided by the Hallsworth Conference Fund, the University of Manchester, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.