Cosmopolitics in the Hindu Kush Himalaya region

Zahra Hussain explores the dynamics of belonging in a region with a rich heritage
Hunza Valley
© Zahra Hussain

Originally from Pakistan, Zahra Hussain is a 2024 winner of the IIAS-FMSH program. Her recent work focuses on heritage and belonging in the Hindu Kush Himalayas.

My research is basically based on how mountain communities are grappling with the effects of climate change and large infrastructural development in the Hindu Kush, Himalayan mountain region, which is in the northern parts of Pakistan. I'm particularly interested in how mountain communities negotiate their everyday life amidst these challenges, especially by looking at how they're using their land and how they are negotiating their livelihoods. I'm working with multiple communities across the region: in particular the Kalash people, then some communities in Gilgit-Baltistan, and then a community in Hazar Valley.

Mountain communities and climate change

So geologically speaking, the Hindu Kush Himalaya mountain region is considered a very young mountain range, which means that they're continuing to grow and they are fragile spaces where you also encounter a lot of landslides and the land isn't really stable. This fragility is is exacerbated by climate change and rising temperatures, because you also have a lot of glaciers, which are damming these glacial lakes inside them and once you know the temperature rises, the walls become very weak and then you have these lakes that burst, which causes a lot of glacier lake outburst flooding. This flooding has not only destroyed a lot of fields and infrastructure that local communities have developed in their mountain valleys but the rising temperature also affects their orchards and crops that they grow in the area. So climate change is really affecting these mountain communities and their lives and livelihoods as well. With respect to tourism development, since the Covid 19, a lot of domestic tourists have started going up into the mountains and sort of touring in these valleys, which has also affected the built infrastructure in these areas. So a lot of small hotels and guesthouses have come up and people are seen to be selling off their agricultural land in order to build hotels. So the whole sort of way in which people are used to living in these areas is rapidly changing. This has a lot of effects and this is something that I'm looking at in my research, in terms of how people are negotiating their everyday life and how they're trying to make do and live on amidst these changes, which are not just due to climate change, but also the influx of the tourism industry.

Research contribution to the development of public policies

So the research that we do in mountain areas, I also run an organization called Laarjverd. And for the last 15 years we have been working in mountain communities. This research is not only confined to academic research, but also, we try to collaborate with communities to really understand what are the problems on the ground and how can design interventions be done in order to respond to those problems that the communities face. And then in the last couple of years, we've also seen that with design, we also need some policy interventions, which have to be sort of adopted so that the development is done in a more responsible way. With that respect, we worked in Kalash Valley with a government department, and we developed, building bylaws and guidelines, so that the built environment in Kalash Valley is not adversely affected by tourism. So, you know, people don't just start building guest houses and hotels in areas, which are not fit for building construction. So we've tried to do that and we're still sort of trying to see how these are adopted and implemented by the government. It's quite a long journey, but I would say that we've sort of stepped into that terrain and we're still sort of trying to see how it's going to be adopted.

Academy for Democracy project

Back in 2012, I've set up a project called "Academy for democracy" and the idea was to build a platform for Pakistani students to be able to conduct interdisciplinary and cross-curricular research, which is something that you don't often come across in the universities in Pakistan. Under this project, I started the Laajverd Visiting School program, in which you go into a mountain area for about two weeks and you live with the local community and you have workshops ranging from the natural environment geology to human geography, architecture and the arts. Students or the participants really get a chance to holistically understand and encounter the environment and understand the challenges that the local communities face. The whole idea of the project is for students to learn to develop context based solutions to the problems that they see and to see how we need to start asking the right questions and how our research needs to be embedded in the communities and the context that we belong to, rather than just coming up with the Western idea and trying to implemented in the local context, which never really works. And this is something that, I felt, we need to do, because, at the time, a lot of NGOs in Pakistan were really bringing these Western ideas and implementing those on the communities and the projects would fail. So the idea was to really see what is the context at hand and how do we respond to those in a more informed way.
The paths to development need to be those that the communities agree with, but also where the landscape is not compromised, so the exploitation and degradation of the landscape shouldn't happen. That's what the project was really about and this is something that we've been now running for the last ten years. This would be our 10th year of the visiting school that we will conduct in July in Ascoli Valley in Baltistan.


Article published in the second issue of the Journal de la FMSH.

Meeting with Zahra Hussain
Published at 16 December 2024