Samreen Mushtaq is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies. Her research builds on her lived experiences as a Muslim Kashmiri woman and her ethnographic work in Kashmir at the intersections of gender, nationalism, violence, and militarism. A recent strand of her research investigates settler colonialism, surveillance, and memory.

Samreen’s work maps the sites of gender-based violence and everyday forms of resistance in the context of militarisation in Kashmir. In critically engaging with narratives on women’s empowerment in fragile and conflict affected contexts, her work shows how the categories of gender and development are weaponised to justify (settler) colonial interventions. Her recent publication, Refusal to disappear: the layers of violence, erasure and dissonance in occupied homelands, is a piece reflecting on the discomfort of academic writing in a time of incomprehensible violence in Palestine, as well as holding on to personal and collective memories amid state-sponsored erasure.

Currently, at IDS, Samreen is working on SuPWR, a five-year ESRC-funded research project that investigates women’s struggles in Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan and how they retain power and sustain gains in the face of backlash from varied sources.