Background Information
“The Kashmir Conflict” has become a disputed area between India and Pakistan in both the academic and political spheres. International Relations is also tend to generalise the whole disputed territory as “Kashmir”.
Kashmir is one of the five regions of the erstwhile state of Jammu & Kashmir; the other regions are Jammu, Ladakh, Gilgit-Baltistan, and Poonch. All these regions have diverse political interpretations of self-determination following from their particular political and historical contexts. Diverse regional interpretations challenge the widely acknowledged understanding of “the Kashmir Conflict”.
ICO supports Azmat Khan’s (Senior Research Fellow) academic work in order to explore the role of SAARC for economic integration, self-development goals and reconciliation in the contested territory, Kashmir.
The idea is that free trade areas, cross-border investment and business cooperation overlap over a certain territory, the outcomes argue we should consider adding a community development dimension to our understanding of self-development.
Finally, this work will guide practitioners, policy makers and decision makers to adhere to a new way of thinking that can be captured by the concepts, which substantially embrace spatio-temporal
relations between self-development, economic-freedom and territory.
