Paper short abstract:

Kashmir is known mainly as the core of Indopakistani geopolitical issue: through an ethnographic analysis of teenagers' ritual practice of stonepelting against army and related discourses it is possible to reveal the intimate relation lying between a transnational conflict politics and local moral economy

Paper long abstract:

Kashmir is well known as the core issue indopakistani dispute: we should consider it a territorial conflict as well as a dispute over cultural, historical, political landscapes, mostly linked to 1947 Partition and intimate "communal" nature of areal politics. After 20 years of ISI sponsored Islamist militancy, the separatist organizations, whose narratives are intrinsecally linked to Pakistani national discourse, have promoted a non violent protest and "govenamental" strategy. Among informally imposed strikes calendars and army curfews, kashmiri youth stonepelting (kani-jang) against Indian forces has emerged as an institution where moral economy, multiple political identities and paradoxical overlapping powers are staged in a social drama.. Stonepelting has become a microphysical/metaforical coagulate of a broader geopolitical landscape, where teenagers-soldiers violent interactive performances involve a semiotic-normative intimacy which enables an ephemeral space signification. There is a metonymy relation between this bounded practice of violence and the wider political space, which makes it more complex than a mere "focalization" effect. Kani-jang has appeared as an usual protest practice in 2008, when a political campaign was aiming to compare Palestinian and Kashmiri context. After that situation has evolved, and crisis after crisis in 2010 stonepelting has become the "imaginary issue" itself, thanks to mainstream media and social network mobilization. Apparently, the phenomena, has assumed in Kashmiri politics, the function Kashmir itself has in subcontinent politics: it's the bargaining space where overlapping and contrastive forces(economical, political, moral, narratological) establish new strategic configurations.