Kashmir, Northern Ireland, literature, and the law

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Lalita du Perron: Today, I am joined on the SAS pod by Danny Shanahan, who is a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, working collaboratively between Stanford University and University College Cork.

Lalita du Perron: Ireland. Danny is working on a kind of a comparison between Kashmir and Northern Ireland, and I have to say that until I've read about your work, I hadn't fully thought through how similar those two areas are, although I'm sure they're also very dissimilar. So, that's what we're going to talk about today. I'm so excited. Thank you for making time for me, Danny.

Danny Shanahan: I'm Lolita, no problem, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Lalita du Perron: Let's start by just… I know this is very hard to ask of people, but could you give us the kind of the elevator pitch history of Northern Ireland, and then maybe move into its similarities with Kashmir? I'm just asking that the… because, well, I hadn't actually thought very hard about how similar these histories are, but I think not everybody who wasn't educated in the United Kingdom necessarily knows the history of Ireland and Northern Ireland, so I want to set a little context, if that's okay with you.

Danny Shanahan: I mean, you would be very surprised by how little people in the United Kingdom know the history of Ireland and Northern Ireland, so…

Lalita du Perron: Well, I tried to be generous there.

Danny Shanahan: No, so that's no problem. So…

Danny Shanahan: In terms of regions and demographics, post the Cromwell invasion in the 1600s, there was a massive amount of migration from, primarily Scotland, but all over the UK, to particularly the north of Ireland, particularly Ulster, which is the northern region.

Danny Shanahan: In which, Catholics were… the native Catholics were… their land was taken away and given to Protestant settlers.

Danny Shanahan: This meant that by the time that Irish independence comes about in the late 19-teens and early 1920s, there is a massive Protestant population that feels very strongly that they want to remain in the UK. That's called the kind of loyalist population, broadly, or the unionist population—it's probably a more neutral term.

Danny Shanahan: They, in 1914, I believe, started something called the Ulster Volunteer Force, which was essentially an armed threat to an insurrection if home rule, as it was then, which was kind of still within the British Empire but an Irish Parliament, rather than Ireland being part of the British Parliament, if that didn't go through.

Danny Shanahan: And so there was lots of division and lots of problems in the North, specifically.

Danny Shanahan: So when that became untenable, and after the Easter Rising, when the IRB and then the IRA became much more militant and wanting full independence, the North was still a problem. So during the War of Independence in 1920 and 1921, the eventual peace settlement was based on the partition of the island. So, to keep all parties as happy as possible, it was split between the six counties in what is now Northern Ireland and the other counties in the Republic.

Danny Shanahan: That was never supposed to be permanent. There was supposed to be a border report that was supposed to be much more democratic voting on which counties would fall under which part of the line, and there was even an expectation that constitutionally Northern Ireland would eventually just blend into the Republic. That was—although it wasn't a republic then, it only became that later.

Danny Shanahan: Gradually, or quite quickly, because of the emergency laws instituted in those years, which is my kind of area of interest, those lines became solidified, and those border divisions became permanent quite quickly.

Danny Shanahan: So, that was the status in the 1920s. Part of this consolidation of power from the unionist government there—they had their own parliament called Stormont in Northern Ireland, which had a fair amount of autonomy—one of the ways that they consolidated power was by enacting many emergency laws that negatively affected the local Catholic population.

Danny Shanahan: So, the local Catholic population was the minority, probably about 40–45% of the population living there, and they were seen as a dangerous internal threat.

Lalita du Perron: A population that wanted to be part of…

Danny Shanahan: The Republic, or the Free State, as it was called then. So…

Danny Shanahan: They were kind of systematically discriminated against in terms of housing. Most of the police were Protestants, and so you saw a lot of violence and discrimination when it came to policing, and also there was massive kind of gerrymandering to keep a permanent unionist majority control in the state.

Danny Shanahan: So these were…

Lalita du Perron: Term… isn't that where the term came from?

Danny Shanahan: No, I used to think that too. There was a book on comparative partition, actually, between Ireland, India, and Israel/Palestine that claimed that, but I don't think that's true. I think it comes from a sillier case in America in, like, the 1880s, and I think… Okay. Yeah, I think it's a very… it's a strange word, and I think it's…

Danny Shanahan: The guy who did it was called Jerry, and the district looked like a salamander, so it was called gerrymandering.

Lalita du Perron: Got it.

Danny Shanahan: Strange portmanteau. But no, it is from America, I think. Although the word boycott does come from Ireland, comes from the land war in the 1880s, because Captain Boycott was one of the first people affected by this, what we now understand as a mass boycott.

Lalita du Perron: I love this. Okay, good. So even though my question was a bit of a non-starter, we ended up in a really good place. Okay, thank you. All right, continue.

Danny Shanahan: Okay, so, after about 50 years of this discrimination, and a few attempts by the consolidated IRA that came out of the Irish Civil War—it's a whole other story—to create an insurgency campaign within the North, there was one in the 30s, there was one in the 50s, that didn't really go anywhere.

Danny Shanahan: Eventually, a civil rights campaign in the 1960s, very much based on Martin Luther King's civil rights campaign, attempted to force the issue of civil rights for Catholics within Northern Ireland.

Danny Shanahan: This led to a very heavy response, a very violent response from both the police and from the newly reinstituted Ulster Volunteer Force. So, Protestant paramilitaries dedicated to the continuance of the relationship between Northern Ireland and the UK. And so, this sparked off, in 1969, what was called the Battle of the Bogside in Derry, which was days and days of rioting, which spread to Belfast, and eventually the British Army had to be called in to restore order.

Danny Shanahan: Now, initially, this was to protect Catholic neighbourhoods, because they were quite vulnerable. The IRA at the time was seen to have demonstrably failed to contain the situation and to keep order. And so, the next summer, the IRA split off into what was the old, now called the Official IRA, and the Provisionals, the Provisional IRA, or the provos, as they would become known. They were more politically conservative, but much more militant.

Danny Shanahan: And so they began an active, open insurgency that would battle the British Army on the streets and would lead to the 30 years of civil war known as the Troubles.

Lalita du Perron: Yep, yep, yep.

Lalita du Perron: Wow, that was a very fast overview, but thank you, because I think it's really helpful to set the context for what we're going to talk about. A few words stand out as you were speaking. Partition, obviously—that's a big word that we South Asia scholars associate much more with South Asia, of course. Emergency laws, insurgency—like, the parallels are becoming quite apparent.

Lalita du Perron: You mentioned the law a few times. What's your angle? Are you a legal historian, primarily?

Danny Shanahan: No, I'm primarily a literary critic who kind of dabbles in legal history and kind of does my best, you know?

Lalita du Perron: I love that. Okay, so tell us what your research looks like, and how did you come to it?

Danny Shanahan: Yeah, so the project is called Literature and Emergency Law in Kashmir and Northern Ireland: Disturbed Areas. And this is my kind of primary thing that I feel I'm adding to the conversation, this idea of a disturbed area in both conflicts.

Danny Shanahan: So, it's a legal term that I kind of create a new legal history of. It starts in 1814 in Ireland, and then I trace it going through to India after the 1857 rebellion, and then all the way through to the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which is in force in Kashmir and part of the Northeast.

Danny Shanahan: And why it's important, I feel, is that the disturbed areas provision allows for localization of emergency powers to specific areas. So, as opposed to the political failure of declaring martial law over an entire country, say, it allows governments to localize the use of emergency power and emergency derogation of human rights, for example, to particular areas.

Danny Shanahan: And I think this is really important to the overall politics and the overall claims to Northern Ireland and to Kashmir, because a big part of the UK government's case for Northern Ireland and the Indian government's case for Kashmir is that they are integral parts of the nation state.

Danny Shanahan: And so, that's kind of what they're called. I think in Hindi or Urdu, it’s “Atut ang” that is often the expression.

Danny Shanahan: And so what that means is, while they have this rhetorical claim to inclusion in the nation-state, the disturbed areas laws mean that there are many things that it is legal to do in Kashmir, that it is legal to do in Northern Ireland, that it is not legal to do in the rest of the UK and the rest of India. And so, it creates a legal separation where there is a rhetorical unity.

Danny Shanahan: And so citizens of Kashmir and Northern Ireland have consistently, in the literary sphere that I study, found themselves to be in this kind of no-man's land between this inclusion and exclusion, and find a lot of vibrant artistic responses to that no-man's land that I think is fascinating to study.

Lalita du Perron: So the common denominator, I guess—it feels like it's the British state. Is that what— I mean, is this the same law?

Danny Shanahan: It's the same precedent that's been used in multiple different laws. So it's the same idea, and it's often the same exact phrasing. You know, in the Armed Forces Special Powers Act in Kashmir, they say the phrase “disturbed area.” In 1814, they said the phrase “disturbed area,” so there is this kind of continuity.

Danny Shanahan: The idea that any area that is disturbed by insurgency receives a localized, hyper-localized response. But there's been successions of laws that are responses to particular insurgencies and particular material circumstances.

Danny Shanahan: And that's something that was really important for me to trace as the legal history bit of the project, because I often find it quite frustrating when, especially in the humanities, people talk about emergency law as this kind of binary opposition between normal law and anarchy, and a law which allows the government to do anything.

Danny Shanahan: Whereas what you see—what the historical dynamic is, and this isn't my insight, this is an insight of lots of emergency legal scholars before me—that what you see in successions of emergency laws, when you see it as a long durée, is that it is actually a process of incorporation into normal law, rather than this binary between normal law and emergency law.

Danny Shanahan: And so I think that's a very important thing to highlight, and a thing that comes up in the literature a lot.

Lalita du Perron: Okay, let's talk about the literary, then. That’s exactly where I was going to go next, so thank you for that.

Lalita du Perron: I'm failing to see, I guess, so please help me understand—how does the literature play into the legal history? Can you say more? I mean, I guess that's what your project is, but how does that work? What are we learning from that, I guess, is my question.

Danny Shanahan: Yeah, so I…

Danny Shanahan: I'm not only using the legal to interrogate the literary, I also try and use the literary to interrogate the legal. So, one of the kind of clearest aspects is that you see this political dynamic—this localization in disturbed areas—show up in poetry quite a lot.

Danny Shanahan: So, my first chapter looks at the poetry of Seamus Heaney, the famous Nobel laureate poet from Northern Ireland, and Agha Shahid Ali, probably the most well-known Kashmiri Anglophone poet. He’s very revered in Kashmir, and especially in America.

Danny Shanahan: What it does is trace their use of landscape, particularly. Kashmir is very known for its beautiful landscape—it’s up in the Himalayas, often called one of the most beautiful places on Earth. And Irish literature as well is very agrarian, very rural, very tapped into ideas of pastoral and connectivity to nature.

Danny Shanahan: Through their descriptions of landscape, you can see this division start to play out. In Agha Shahid Ali, for example, there are differences in the way he describes the landscape in Kashmir and in the rest of India that go beyond just topographical differences—beyond their literal geographies. You can see political implications embedded in those contrasts.

Danny Shanahan: The same is true with Heaney. Famously, he wrote his 1975 collection North, which included what have become known as the “bog poems.” He talks about bodies being dragged out of the bog—remnants of earlier forms of violence, including tribal violence—which he then links to the sectarian killings going on in Northern Ireland at the time.

Danny Shanahan: For him, the ground is rooted in history—particularly histories of violence and colonialism. But when he talks about the landscape in England, it’s beautified, seemingly without history. It becomes an unproblematically pastoral, natural view, not burdened by that violent past.

Danny Shanahan: So, in both cases, I trace a corruption of unproblematically beautiful pastoral imagery, and I link that to the localization embedded in the disturbed areas legal technique.

Lalita du Perron: That’s incredible. It sounds absolutely fascinating.

Lalita du Perron: How are they different? For instance, what’s Northern Ireland’s Pakistan, if I may phrase it that way?

Danny Shanahan: The closest comparison is definitely the Republic of Ireland, although there are huge structural and political differences. For one, the Republic was not actively sponsoring or facilitating insurgency in the way Pakistan has been accused of doing in Kashmir.

Danny Shanahan: Another major difference is the scale of the conflict. Over the 30-year course of The Troubles, about 3,000 civilians died in Northern Ireland. It’s ultimately a very small place.

Danny Shanahan: That figure is dwarfed by estimates in Kashmir—some of the most wide-ranging figures suggest at least 100,000 dead, with thousands of enforced disappearances. So the scale is vastly different, and that’s important to emphasize.

Danny Shanahan: That’s not to diminish suffering in Northern Ireland. Because it’s such a tightly enclosed space, everyone has a story. Everyone knows someone who was a victim. It’s still very resonant and very real there, even decades after the peace settlement.

Lalita du Perron: Kashmir has been very much in the news because of massive legal changes. How does that compare to where Northern Ireland is now?

Danny Shanahan: I think they’re going in opposite directions. The way the Northern Irish conflict concluded was by bringing the insurgents to the table. Particularly after the 1981 hunger strikes—when Bobby Sands died—there was a concerted effort by the political wing of the IRA, now known as Sinn Féin, to pursue electoral politics.

Danny Shanahan: That process led, in the 1990s, to negotiations culminating in the Good Friday Agreement. One of its key provisions was power-sharing. The government in Northern Ireland can no longer function through domination by one side; nationalist and unionist parties must share power.

Danny Shanahan: It’s imperfect—there have been long suspensions and political breakdowns—but it is a genuine attempt to manage the divide. And crucially, it created a peaceful political route for Northern Ireland potentially to rejoin the Republic of Ireland via referendum—something that did not exist before.

Danny Shanahan: Some argue that when an oppressed population has no political route to emancipation, violence becomes more likely. In Northern Ireland now, there are at least formal, peaceful mechanisms for constitutional change.

Lalita du Perron: So…

Danny Shanahan: So there are structures and mechanisms for a referendum to take place on the constitutional position of Northern Ireland within the UK, including the possibility of rejoining the Republic of Ireland. At some point, Sinn Féin, now the dominant party in Northern Ireland—which they weren’t expected to become for a long time—are likely to trigger that process.

Danny Shanahan: So there are peaceful political routes toward a constitutional solution. That feels very different from the current situation in Kashmir, where the central government has largely ignored local aspirations and instead reduced autonomy and tightened control, rather than incorporating grievances into a negotiated framework.

Lalita du Perron: It sounds like there’s a certain amount of hope in Northern Ireland and less in Kashmir. How is that reflected in the literature you study?

Danny Shanahan: On a basic timeline level, contemporary literature from Northern Ireland is often about the legacy of The Troubles. The large-scale violence has largely subsided, even though many of the structural conditions—segregation, mistrust—are still present. So the writing now is frequently retrospective, concerned with memory, trauma, and aftermath.

Danny Shanahan: In Kashmir, by contrast, novels and films often have a more immediate, activist tone. There’s certainly pessimism, but also a strong sense of obligation—to bear witness, to document events, and, especially in Anglophone writing, to raise awareness among an international readership about what’s happening on the ground.

Danny Shanahan: That difference also connects to global visibility. Northern Ireland was front-page news for decades. Kashmir, by comparison, tends to be sidelined in global media narratives.

Lalita du Perron: Is that a legacy of empire? Is it because Northern Ireland involved white Europeans that it received more attention?

Danny Shanahan: I think that’s part of it. Events in the UK are simply going to receive more sustained global media coverage than political violence in India.

Danny Shanahan: But another key factor was American involvement. There was a large and politically influential Irish-American constituency, particularly within the Democratic Party, and that pressure was crucial in getting the Good Friday Agreement across the line. That kind of international oversight from the United States was integral to the peace process.

Danny Shanahan: That dynamic doesn’t really exist in Kashmir. The UN has limited leverage, and in terms of global geopolitics, India occupies an important strategic position—especially in relation to China—so sustained international pressure has been far more limited.

Lalita du Perron: What can we learn from these conflicts? Are there lessons that apply elsewhere—say, in Palestine—or are the situations too different?

Danny Shanahan: After the Good Friday Agreement, there was a lot of international relations scholarship trying exactly that—drawing lessons from what had seemed like an intractable ethnic conflict and applying them to places like Kashmir.

Danny Shanahan: For me, the central lesson is that the peace process shows violence is not inevitable. When serious diplomatic efforts are made, when legitimate grievances are acknowledged, and when there is a credible political framework for pursuing political goals, armed struggle can give way to electoral politics.

Danny Shanahan: In Kashmir, I don’t think a durable peace is possible without a meaningful political process that allows the population to express its will—whether that means autonomy, independence, or some other arrangement. Without that political horizon, cycles of repression and resistance are likely to continue.

Danny Shanahan: So the lesson I would draw is that negotiated frameworks and democratic mechanisms matter. They don’t solve everything, but they create alternatives to violence.

Lalita du Perron: I mean, what a time to be alive—and for you to be in the United States right now.

Danny Shanahan: Yeah.

Lalita du Perron: We’re seeing so much state-sponsored violence around us at the moment. Is there any hope at all? I’m sorry to put this question on you, but I can’t have this conversation without referencing what’s happening in Minnesota right now. Hopefully, by the time this airs, it will already feel dated—but here we are. Are states becoming more violent?

Danny Shanahan: I think there’s certainly a perception that state violence is intensifying, or at least becoming more visible. In the United States, for example, debates around policing, militarization, and protest responses have made questions of state power much more immediate for many people.

Danny Shanahan: At the same time, it’s important to remember that state violence—especially against minority populations—has a long history. In many ways, what feels new is not its existence but its scale, its visibility, and the speed at which information circulates.

Danny Shanahan: Where I find some hope is in public response. Large numbers of people do mobilize against policies and actions they see as unjust. Civil society, journalism, and electoral politics still matter. Even when institutions are strained, they can create pressure and accountability.

Lalita du Perron: How does that compare, then, to Kashmir?

Danny Shanahan: I come back to the same principle. As long as there are political solutions available to political problems, violence is not inevitable. Where people are given credible democratic pathways—whether toward autonomy, reform, or constitutional change—they often pursue those instead of armed struggle.

Danny Shanahan: In Kashmir, many people express exhaustion with violence in all its forms—state and insurgent alike. The challenge is whether there are meaningful democratic mechanisms through which grievances can be addressed. Without those mechanisms, frustration festers. With them, there is at least the possibility of peaceful transformation.

Lalita du Perron: That feels like a hopeful place to end. I was going to ask you for literature recommendations, but we’ll add those to the show notes so listeners can explore some of the poetry and novels we’ve been discussing.

Danny Shanahan: My reading list grows every day—so I’m happy to contribute to everyone else’s as well.

Lalita du Perron: Danny Shanahan, thank you so much. I’ve learned an enormous amount in half an hour.

Danny Shanahan: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.

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