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South and Southeast Asia continue to be extremely critical regions, deeply intertwined and bound in many ways by centuries of intersecting histories.As the recent experiences of rapid and transformative political and economic changes in several countries in these two regions illustrate, these changes have significant bearing on and are.

During the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent, Kashmir-a Muslim-majority area ruled by a Hindu maharaja-became a hotly disputed territory. Divided between India and Pakistan, the region has been the focus of international wars and the theater of political and military struggles for self-determination. The result has been great human suffering within the state, with political implications extending globally.Imagining Kashmirexamines cinematic and literary imaginings of the Kashmir region's conflicts and diverse citizenship, analyzing a wide range of narratives from writers and directors such as Salman Rushdie, Bharat Wakhlu, Mani Ratnam, and Mirza Waheed in conjunction with research in psychology, cognitive science, and social neuroscience. In this innovative study, Patrick Colm Hogan's historical and cultural analysis of Kashmir advances theories of narrative, colonialism, and their corresponding ideologies in relation to the cognitive and affective operations of identity.Hogan considers how narrative organizes people's understanding of, and emotions about, real political situations and the ways in which such situations in turn influence cultural narratives, not only in Kashmir but around the world.

Rural women's active support for the decade-long Maoist insurrection in Nepal has captured the attention of academics, military strategists, and the development industry. This essay considers two theories that have been proposed to account for this phenomenon. The \"failed development\" hypothesis suggests that popular discontent with the government is the result of uneven, incomplete, or poorly executed development efforts and recommends more and better aid as the route to peace. In contrast, the \"conscientization\" model proposes that, at least in some cases, women's politicization may be the unexpected result of successful development programs that aimed to \"empower\" women by raising their consciousness of gender and class-based oppression. Drawing on the testimonies of women who participated in such programs in Gorkha district—a Maoist stronghold where women are reported to have been especially active—I argue that both of these explanations reflect assumptions about social subjectivity that are critically out of synch with the realities of rural Nepal. Gorkhali women's support for the rebels embodies a powerful critique of neoliberal democracy and the Nepal state, but one that is based on morally-grounded ideas about social personhood in which self-realization is bound up in mutual obligation and entails personal sacrifice—not the culturally-disembedded valorizations of autonomy, agency, and choice that most models presume. Theorists of subaltern political consciousness— and of the relations between development and violence—must engage with the gendered moral economies of the people they aim to empower if they ultimately hope to promote sustainable peace.