Omer Aijazi
Biographic Data
| ID | 897323 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Omer Aijazi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Omer |
| FAMILY NAME | Aijazi |
| SIGNATURE | AIJAZI O |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4798-736X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 11 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 23 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
How to write when you are the problem
Writing from inside the fire, this intervention refuses innocence, expertise, and redemption, asking what it means to keep telling stories from within academic, colonial, and institutional complicity when doing so is implicated in harm.
Speculative sovereignty and militarized ecologies
Colonial rule operates through the reordering of ecological relations. By rendering land legible, measurable, and administratively governable, militarized regimes consolidate control while narrowing political futurity. This article examines how ecological territorialization unfolds in Pakistan-administered Kashmir along the Line of Control, one of the most militarized frontiers in the world. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2014–2022)…
Textures of Violence
What can foraging, cooking, and eating reveal about the conflict in Kashmir? Can they be considered a mode of study? In this essay, through the entanglements of food (and a bloated stomach), I offer a relational praxis that is deeply felt, savoured, corporeal. Food—its preparation, eating, sharing—provides a different scale for intercepting the conflict in Kashmir, a disputed territory shaped by securitised geopolitical narratives. Small, evanesc…
Why technocratic understandings of humanitarian accountability undermine local communities
Current trends in humanitarian accountability are unpacked through the examination of an accountability system put in place after the 2010 monsoon floods in Pakistan. Humanitarian accountability, when narrowly understood as a technical and procedural tool, can undermine local self-advocacy efforts, silence community dissent and supress broader equity claims. Reframing humanitarian accountability as a political and ethical project can inspire inno…
The Ethnography of Collaboration
We came together to write a paper on the devaluation of field researcher labor as an entry point into the broader domain of research ethics to unpack what collaboration may mean in settings of incommensurable inequality. These motivations were grounded in the materialities of our involvement within an international research project focused on post-earthquake reconstruction processes in Nepal since 2015. However, since we started writing this piec…
Affective Politics and Disappearance in Kashmir
During fieldwork along the Line of Control (LoC) -the de-facto border that divides Kashmir into India and Pakistan 1 -I attended a ghaibana janaza.This is a particular type of Muslim funeral (literal translation as a funeral in absence) for those who, in all likelihood, have passed away, but their bodies are not recovered.For example, people who may have drowned or burnt to death, leaving no bodily trace behind.In this instance, it was the ghaiba…
What about Insāniyat
What about insāniyat (humanity)? Or put differently, how are morality and ethics compelled and shaped in the pahars (mountainscapes) of Kashmir? insāniyat is an emotion and ethics that expresses interdependencies between people. Insāniyat is moral and ethical proclivity. It is not enforced by an external authority but inheres in human encounters. I explore the question of insāniyat with the help of Qari Safr, a village Imam in the pahars of Neelu…
Revisiting the Madrassa Question in Pakistan
The association of madrassas as “breeding grounds for terrorists” is problematic, exacerbated by a lack of understanding of how Islamic religious schools function and contribute to cities and urban social life. Our article provides an interpretative examination of the so-called madrassa question by explaining the urban-spatial embeddedness of madrassas and emphasizing the heightened sense and deployment of religious identities in the quotidian “w…
Relationality, Culpability and Consent in Wartime
Rights-based approaches to forced marriage in wartime document forms of harm women experience, to the exclusion of men’s experiences. Such framing problematically reiterates a binary of women/men, victim/perpetrator and consent/coercion. Arguably, this delineation is useful in supporting projects of culpability and legal redress. However, what does such vocabulary obfuscate or render invisible? We draw from the experiences of men demobilized from…
Who Is Chandni bibi
See article
Community development and other extra-religious functions of Islamic schools
Although the nexus between religion, faith-based organizations, and community development is well established in the literature, the potential for change driven by indigenous and grassroots social structures such as Islamic schools (madrassas) is still largely ignored in practice. Against the backdrop of overall educational and political economic reforms affecting Pakistan, this paper examines the community development function and other extra-re…
The Ethnography of Collaboration
We came together to write a paper on the devaluation of field researcher labor as an entry point into the broader domain of research ethics to unpack what collaboration may mean in settings of incommensurable inequality. These motivations were grounded in the materialities of our involvement within an international research project focused on post-earthquake reconstruction processes in Nepal since 2015. However, since we started writing this piec…
Relationality, Culpability and Consent in Wartime
Rights-based approaches to forced marriage in wartime document forms of harm women experience, to the exclusion of men’s experiences. Such framing problematically reiterates a binary of women/men, victim/perpetrator and consent/coercion. Arguably, this delineation is useful in supporting projects of culpability and legal redress. However, what does such vocabulary obfuscate or render invisible? We draw from the experiences of men demobilized from…
Community development and other extra-religious functions of Islamic schools
Although the nexus between religion, faith-based organizations, and community development is well established in the literature, the potential for change driven by indigenous and grassroots social structures such as Islamic schools (madrassas) is still largely ignored in practice. Against the backdrop of overall educational and political economic reforms affecting Pakistan, this paper examines the community development function and other extra-re…
Revisiting the Madrassa Question in Pakistan
The association of madrassas as “breeding grounds for terrorists” is problematic, exacerbated by a lack of understanding of how Islamic religious schools function and contribute to cities and urban social life. Our article provides an interpretative examination of the so-called madrassa question by explaining the urban-spatial embeddedness of madrassas and emphasizing the heightened sense and deployment of religious identities in the quotidian “w…
Who Is Chandni bibi
See article
Community development and other extra-religious functions of Islamic schools
Although the nexus between religion, faith-based organizations, and community development is well established in the literature, the potential for change driven by indigenous and grassroots social structures such as Islamic schools (madrassas) is still largely ignored in practice. Against the backdrop of overall educational and political economic reforms affecting Pakistan, this paper examines the community development function and other extra-re…
Who Is Chandni bibi
See article
Relationality, Culpability and Consent in Wartime
Rights-based approaches to forced marriage in wartime document forms of harm women experience, to the exclusion of men’s experiences. Such framing problematically reiterates a binary of women/men, victim/perpetrator and consent/coercion. Arguably, this delineation is useful in supporting projects of culpability and legal redress. However, what does such vocabulary obfuscate or render invisible? We draw from the experiences of men demobilized from…
Revisiting the Madrassa Question in Pakistan
The association of madrassas as “breeding grounds for terrorists” is problematic, exacerbated by a lack of understanding of how Islamic religious schools function and contribute to cities and urban social life. Our article provides an interpretative examination of the so-called madrassa question by explaining the urban-spatial embeddedness of madrassas and emphasizing the heightened sense and deployment of religious identities in the quotidian “w…
Affective Politics and Disappearance in Kashmir
During fieldwork along the Line of Control (LoC) -the de-facto border that divides Kashmir into India and Pakistan 1 -I attended a ghaibana janaza.This is a particular type of Muslim funeral (literal translation as a funeral in absence) for those who, in all likelihood, have passed away, but their bodies are not recovered.For example, people who may have drowned or burnt to death, leaving no bodily trace behind.In this instance, it was the ghaiba…
What about Insāniyat
What about insāniyat (humanity)? Or put differently, how are morality and ethics compelled and shaped in the pahars (mountainscapes) of Kashmir? insāniyat is an emotion and ethics that expresses interdependencies between people. Insāniyat is moral and ethical proclivity. It is not enforced by an external authority but inheres in human encounters. I explore the question of insāniyat with the help of Qari Safr, a village Imam in the pahars of Neelu…
The Ethnography of Collaboration
We came together to write a paper on the devaluation of field researcher labor as an entry point into the broader domain of research ethics to unpack what collaboration may mean in settings of incommensurable inequality. These motivations were grounded in the materialities of our involvement within an international research project focused on post-earthquake reconstruction processes in Nepal since 2015. However, since we started writing this piec…
Why technocratic understandings of humanitarian accountability undermine local communities
Current trends in humanitarian accountability are unpacked through the examination of an accountability system put in place after the 2010 monsoon floods in Pakistan. Humanitarian accountability, when narrowly understood as a technical and procedural tool, can undermine local self-advocacy efforts, silence community dissent and supress broader equity claims. Reframing humanitarian accountability as a political and ethical project can inspire inno…
Textures of Violence
What can foraging, cooking, and eating reveal about the conflict in Kashmir? Can they be considered a mode of study? In this essay, through the entanglements of food (and a bloated stomach), I offer a relational praxis that is deeply felt, savoured, corporeal. Food—its preparation, eating, sharing—provides a different scale for intercepting the conflict in Kashmir, a disputed territory shaped by securitised geopolitical narratives. Small, evanesc…
How to write when you are the problem
Writing from inside the fire, this intervention refuses innocence, expertise, and redemption, asking what it means to keep telling stories from within academic, colonial, and institutional complicity when doing so is implicated in harm.
Speculative sovereignty and militarized ecologies
Colonial rule operates through the reordering of ecological relations. By rendering land legible, measurable, and administratively governable, militarized regimes consolidate control while narrowing political futurity. This article examines how ecological territorialization unfolds in Pakistan-administered Kashmir along the Line of Control, one of the most militarized frontiers in the world. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2014–2022)…
Political science (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · Sociology (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Ethnography (4 works) · Law (4 works) · Psychology (4 works) · Public relations (3 works) · Religion, Society, and Development (3 works) · South Asian Studies and Conflicts (3 works)