11
June
2025
|
10:22
Europe/London
Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute Anthropologist awarded multiple prestigious book prizes
A powerful monograph examining the entangled aftermath of disaster and conflict in Kashmir has received three major literary awards, highlighting its critical impact on contemporary scholarship in anthropology, disaster studies, and South Asian studies.
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Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024) has most recently been awarded Gold in the ‘Social Change and Social Justice’ category at the 2025 Nautilus Book Awards. Recognising books that advance social transformation and conscious living, the Nautilus Awards have previously honoured influential figures such as Thich Nhat Hanh, Malala Yousafzai, and Barbara Kingsolver, placing this work among globally celebrated voices for justice and equity.
The book, written by Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute (HCRI) Anthropologist, Dr Omer Aijazi, has also been awarded the 2024 James Fisher Prize for First Books on the Himalayan Region and received an Honourable Mention in the 2025 AIPS Book Prize, granted by the American Institute of Pakistan Studies.
Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the portion of Kashmir under Pakistan’s control and its surrounding mountainscapes, Atmospheric Violence explores how communities continue to live, relate, and imagine otherwise in landscapes shaped by both environmental disasters and militarised conflict. Through the intimate stories of five protagonists in remote mountain valleys, the book illustrates how people forge lives among violence that is everywhere—or ‘atmospheric’.
Departing from conventional trauma-centric approaches, the monograph frames disaster through the lens of repair. Engaging with Black and Indigenous studies, affect theory, and decolonial thought, the book blurs the boundaries of theory, storytelling, and activism to offer a transformative vision for understanding resilience and care in the world’s conflict zones.
Speaking of the awards, Dr Omer Aijazi, Lecturer in Disaster Management and Climate Crisis, shared:
“These awards testify that scholars are storytellers. We must take risks, experiment with our craft, and work from the heart. Other worlds, other futures, are indeed possible.”
These prestigious awards affirm Atmospheric Violence as a significant and timely contribution to global conversations on justice, survival, and the politics of humanitarian response.