Samreen Mushtaq is a Post Doctoral Researcher 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.

Samreen’s work maps the sites of gender-based violence in the context of militarisation in Kashmir, in its bodily, spatial and psychological manifestations, amid the State’s continuous fixing of ‘gender’ and ‘woman’ as stable points of entry for intervention. Her recent work focuses especially on the gendered contours of counter-insurgency in terms of its incursion into homes and women’s subversion of, and resistance to, such control. Currently, at IDS, she 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.

Prior to joining IDS, Samreen worked as a Post Doctoral Fellow at the Centre for Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Ashoka University, India, where she taught a course on Gender and Armed Conflict and led the project Mapping Sexuality in India, a one-stop resource directory in the field of gender and sexuality studies in India. She received her PhD in Political Science from Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, in 2019.