Last month, a team of six staff from the Civic Initiative (a business group of the University of Massachusetts Amherst Donahue Institute) were in Islamabad. They held a three-day follow-up conference for alumni from recent cohorts of the Study of the U.S. Institutes Comparative Public Policymaking program that has been held annually by the Civic Initiative since 2010. The SUSI program is funded by the US Department of State Education and Cultural Affairs Office.
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AIPS Book Prize Awarded!
Submitted Saturday, March 21st, 2015
It is with great pleasure that AIPS awards the 2013-14 AIPS Book Prize to Cabeiri deBergh Robinson, Associate Professor of International Studies & South Asian Studies at the University of Washington, for her book, Body of Victim, Body of Warrior: Refugee Families and the Making of Kashmiri Jihadists.
In Body of Victim, Body of Warrior, Cabeiri Robinson locates the lives of Kashmiri refugees within the complex political history of the region and within international definitions of refugees and human rights. Robinson’s book problematizes the term “refugee” in a very productive manner and through the use of an engaging narrative she provides us a rich ethnography of the multiple labels - muhajir, mujahideen, and panah gazin that are interchangeably used for the Kashmiri in Pakistan. In so doing, the book does a very sensitive reading of the “body” in both socio-political and psychological/personal terms. At a broader level, Robinson's focus on the lives of displaced Kashmiris contributes to various fields (anthropology, history, political science, etc.) and provides a corrective to available literature on Kashmir, security studies, jihad, and human rights as well as the study of refugees. This expanded conversation is very useful for broadening the scope of the study of South Asia for a variety of audiences.
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