The volume brings together scholarship on two names associated with ‘conflict’ but what we argue are best described as ‘stateless nations’: Kurds and Kashmiris. They both raise important questions relating to coloniality, sovereignty, statehood, self-determination and human rights and yet have never been studied together. Our intervention does not only challenge ‘sovereignty privilege’ in International Relations but is also an effort to make postcolonial and decolonial studies and endeavours more anti-colonial through a focus on contemporary stateless nations. Kurdish and Kashmiri conflicts are more than contestations of power by states over territories; they are colonialities of power experienced by embodied individuals and mobilised communities of stateless nations with different gendered and political vulnerabilities.

The focus here on is on colonial practices of postcolonial states of Turkey and India vis-à-vis Kurds and Kashmiris. In a world dominated by states and statist knowledge and a world where, for multiple institutional and political reasons, it is rare to speak of more than one stateless nation and there is a neglect of non-Western colonial practices, we call for shifting of the understanding of ‘postcolonial’ from ‘West-non-West’ to ‘colonial-anticolonial’ without apology.

The chapters in this volume showcase the diverse knowledge and expertise of the contributing authors and cover a range of topics from governance to education, nationalism to regionalism, bureaucracy to political mobilisation, from coloniality to solidarity. What comes out clearly from all the contributors is the desire to go beyond conventional studies of conflict and of ‘ethnic’ minorities that take for granted ‘sovereignty privilege’ of existing nation-states and interrogate coloniality of power deployed by colonial nation-states of Turkey and India over Kurds and Kashmiris.