Spotlight on: Mir Wafa Rasheeq

We’re delighted to introduce Wafa Rasheeq as part of our PhD/ECR Spotlight Series. Wafa is a PhD candidate at Jamia Millia Islamia where she researches the intersections of environmental degradation, conflict and governance in Kashmir and the Himalayas.

Find out more about Wafa and connect via LinkedIn and Bluesky.

Tell us a bit about yourself. 

I am a fourth-year PhD candidate in Political Science at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, where my research sits at the intersection of political ecology, environmental security, and conflict studies. My doctoral thesis examines the factors driving environmental degradation in Kashmir, focusing on how ongoing conflict and policy shortcomings interact to intensify ecological vulnerabilities across the region.

Alongside my doctoral work, I have been involved in policy research and journalism — currently working as a Research Associate with multimedia journalist Ahmer Khan and as a Policy and Research Intern at the Jammu and Kashmir Policy and Research Society (JKCPRS). I previously trained at the Centre for Security and Policy Studies (CSPS) in New Delhi, where I produced policy briefs and contributed research on environment, gender, and security. I also hold a Diploma in International Affairs and Diplomacy, which has shaped how I think about the global dimensions of environmental governance.

Outside academia, I enjoy reading widely — literature in particular — and following sports. I grew up in Kashmir, which is not just the site of my research but a place that deeply informs how I understand the relationship between people, land, and power. 

What are your research interests?

My research interests span political ecology, environmental security, environmental geopolitics, and climate governance. I am particularly interested in how conflict shapes environmental outcomes, and how political and institutional frameworks succeed or fail in addressing ecological crises in contested regions. A key thread running through my work is the conflict-environment nexus and the examination of how militarization, resource contestation, and governance failures compound environmental degradation, particularly in the Global South.

My doctoral thesis focuses on Kashmir and the Himalayas. I am also interested in ecofeminism and the gendered dimensions of environmental insecurity, which I explored in a commentary for CSPS on gender-sensitive environmental policies.

My recent publications include book reviews in The Book Review and the LSE Review of Books, covering works on racial ecologies, climate politics, and landscapes at ecological risk.

What are three sources you’d recommend to others related to environment and climate politics?

1. Marginlands: Indian Landscapes on the Brink by Arati Kumar-Rao

Arati Kumar-Rao’s work is unlike almost anything else in Indian environmental writing. Part field reportage, part visual archive, part elegy, it chronicles landscapes across India that are disappearing so gradually we have stopped noticing. What I find most powerful about it is the refusal to separate the ecological from the political — the degraded wetland, the shrinking forest, the silting river are never just natural phenomena but the cumulative result of policy neglect, extractive development, and willful forgetting. For anyone working on environment and politics in South Asia, this book is essential. I reviewed it for The Book Review (Vol. 48, No. 10).

2. The Country Without a Post Office by Agha Shahid Ali (1997)

For those of us who research Kashmir, reading Agha Shahid Ali is less a choice than an obligation. Written in the shadow of the 1990s insurgency, this collection is saturated with Kashmir’s physical landscape (the chinars, the Dal Lake, the mountains) but the land here is never decorative. It witnesses, mourns, and bleeds alongside its people. Ali understood, long before it became an academic framework, that ecology and political violence are inseparable in conflict zones; that what happens to a people happens simultaneously to the land they inhabit. I return to this book regularly, and it quietly shapes how I think about the relationship between place, loss, and environmental grief. This inspired me to research more about the anthropogenic manifestations of protracted social conflict on the physical environment of a vulnerable ecology. 

3. Peepli Live (dir. Anusha Rizvi, 2010)

A darkly comic film about a debt-ridden farmer who becomes a media spectacle, Peepli Live is one of the most incisive treatments of the agrarian crisis in Indian cinema. What makes it so relevant for environment and politics scholars is how it exposes the total failure of the state to address land and livelihood collapse, not through absence, but through a grotesque excess of attention that sees everything except the actual problem. The media, the government, and civil society all swirl around a dying farmer without ever truly seeing him or the degraded land beneath his feet. It is uncomfortable viewing precisely because it is so accurate about how policy and politics function in rural India, and it has stayed with me as a reminder that fieldwork and governance research must always reckon with the human beings at the centre of ecological crisis.

What’s next for you?

I am currently finishing up the last leg of my fieldwork and the immediate next step is bringing those findings together into the final chapters of my thesis. Alongside that, I am working on a paper on environmental federalism (examining how the distribution of governance responsibilities across central and state institutions shapes environmental outcomes in conflict-affected regions) which I hope to develop into a publication.

In terms of conferences, I am looking forward to attending PSA26 at Oxford, which will be a great opportunity to present this work and engage with the broader environment and politics community. Further ahead, I have an ambition that has been quietly taking shape alongside the PhD — a book that binds together my two great interests: environment and literature. I want to explore ecological crises and political landscapes through the kind of literary-analytical lens that my research has led me toward, and I think there is a genuinely underexplored space at that intersection, particularly for South Asian contexts. That is the project I am most excited about for the years ahead.

The ECP WG’s Spotlight Series provides a platform for PhD and early career researchers to introduce themselves and their work. If you are interested in participating, please get in touch at: ecp.group@bisa.ac.uk. 

Top image by Paul Hudson via Flickr. Text has been added to the photo.