Love and addiction in Kashmir

What is it about?

This paper is based on research I conducted in a police-run substance abuse clinic in Indian-controlled Kashmir. It looks at the treatment techniques used by police and how some drug users performed what the police wanted to hear while tapping into alternative cultural resources and narratives to reinterpret their addictions for themselves.

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Why is it important?

This paper unpacks important assumptions about militarization and drug addiction. As the first ethnographic account of a substance abuse clinic in Kashmir, it also locates the police-run clinic within the contemporary social and political context and shows how drug users navigate the structures of military humanitarianism.