2022 AIPS Book Prize Awardee

Congratulations to Dr. Nosheen Ali for receiving the 2022 AIPS Book Prize for her book titled Delusional States: Feeling Rule and Development in Pakistan's Northern Frontier! The Book Prize Committee writes that Dr. Ali's work "...advanced how the field thinks about the War on Terror, and how citizens in Gilgit-Baltistan negotiate and respond to the unique political economy created by the US and Pakistan in the borderlands." To see the committee's full comments, please see below. Congratulations again to Dr. Ali!

"The committee found Ali’s book a superb ethnography of the nation-state. It advanced how the field thinks about the War on Terror, and how citizens in Gilgit-Baltistan negotiate and respond to the unique political economy created by the US and Pakistan in the borderlands. The book’s theoretical approach—with its careful working of affect theory—and geographical focus to be crucial interventions into Pakistan Studies broadly and, significantly, into the morass of signification surrounding Kashmir. Ali’s inclusion of ecological considerations in part 3 illuminates her book’s central argument re: the region’s ironic position as a ’natural wonder’ and a security concern. Further, the committee appreciated the distinctions Ali makes in the types of belonging her ethnographic subjects seek: not strictly in terms of ‘Muslimness,’ which, in the book’s argument, fits too neatly into a given understanding of the Pakistani nation. This is an original, well-thought out book, offering a novel indigenous explanation of the citizen-state relationship."