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In the Shadow of Sovereignty
“The world has turned its order upside down; Time has traded one fate for another.” — Ferdowsi, Shahnameh, ca. 1010 CE, trans. Dick Davis, Shahnameh:     The Persian Book of Kings (Penguin Classics, 2006) Vali Nasr's  Iran's Grand Strategy: A Political History arrives not a moment too soon. With a nuclear…
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Why Gilgit-Baltistan Is Rising Against Pakistan’s Land Seizures
India and Pakistan exchanged aircraft and missile fire under the cover of darkness. The short war, which followed the Pehelgam attack in Indian-occupied Kashmir, cast a long shadow—one under which political repression and elite plunder intensified. While attention turned to airstrikes and patriotic soundbites, the Pakistani state used this moment to unleash a brutal crackdown—not…
ART
The Witness and the Wound: Seeing with Sebastião Salgado 
            “I photograph to testify, not to preserve.”                                  - Sebastião Salgado, quoted in Lélia Wanick Salgado (ed.), Genesis                                         (Cologne: Taschen, 2013), 14. It was Fall 2005, and I had made my way to the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris to see Sebastião Salgado: Territories and Lives. More than an exhibition, it was a map…
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Art History’s Unfinished Argument with Itself 
"Which art history should I teach in Khartoum?” —Salah M. Hassan, an art historian, critic, and curator, Cornell University. Art history occupies a unique position in the longue durée of intellectual thought. It is a narrative of images and a history of ideas inscribed in pigment and stone, language, philosophy, and shifting regimes of visibility.…
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ESHAN ALI AND THE GILGIT-BALTISTAN WHEAT MOVEMENT
‘Gandum Subsidy Tehreek’ (Wheat Subsidy Movement) stands as thelargest protest in the history of Gilgit Baltistan region. At its height, it spanned every area and involved hundreds of thousands of people — men, women, children, Shia, Sunni, Ismaili, Noorbakshi, Balti, Burusho, Wakhi, Yasini, Puniali, Astori, Shin, Pathan, Kashgari, Gujjar, Chilasi and Dareli. In Skardu city…
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We Will Not Forget: Feroz’s  Life Matters.
The last three years have been a long wait, and it's not over yet, with countless nights and nightmares. Balochistan has been entrenched in conflict for a long time, where students have been the primary victims of state violence. Throughout the last two decades, starting from the 2000s, students have been the vanguard for a…