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Paper short abstract

This paper reads inscriptions on military road barriers as affective injunctions that govern through blame. Drawing on Sara Ahmed, it shows how peace is attached to Kashmiri bodies, making emotional restraint a moral duty while structural and militarized violence recedes into the background.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the inscription “Hello Kashmir! Let Peace Prevail” encountered on movable vehicular barriers at the entrances of security camps in Kashmir. Addressed to those who encounter it, the message functions not simply as signage but as an instrument of affective control through which peace is governed, emotions are regulated, and blame is redistributed in everyday life.

Encountered during routine street movement, the wheeled barrier rests to the side, provisional yet ever-present. Its capacity to halt mobility at any moment produces anticipatory waiting, bodily vigilance, and affective tension, making militarized authority ordinary and atmospheric.

By addressing both place and people, “Hello Kashmir!” and urging them to “let peace prevail,” the inscription displaces responsibility for peace onto Kashmir and its inhabitants. Calmness, patience, and emotional self-regulation are moralized as civic obligations, while dissent, unsanctioned mobility, or overlooking the injunction are implicitly framed as impediments to peace. Structural and spatial forms of violence; curfews, checkpoints, frisking, surveillance fade into the background as routine features of the landscape, while blame for violence and the absence of peace attaches to Kashmiri bodies themselves. In this way, the message reproduces virulent imaginaries of Kashmir as dangerous and disorderly, rendering restriction and surveillance reasonable and justified.

Yet everyday life at the barriers is not reducible to submission. Through waiting, adjustment, shared cues, and collective navigation of streets, Kashmiris endure and negotiate these affective demands. The paper shows how peace operates simultaneously as a technology of emotional blame and as an object of lived, collective struggle.