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You Cannot Measure Healing: Institutional Pathways to Resilience
Nahreen Aref, Dept of Political Science, UCI

In the context of international aid, institutional frameworks play a pivotal role in shaping resilience policy. However, these frameworks’ impacts for resilience-building are structurally constrained due to bureaucratic limitations and donor-driven imperatives as well as a lack of institutional capacities; these limitations result in a significant gap between the European Union’s (EU’s) conceptualization of resilience, especially with respect to mental health and psychosocial support (MHPSS) service provision, and its implementation in Türkiye and beyond.

Donor funding conditions, which prioritize short-term programs with measurable outcomes, are the greatest barrier to effective resilience-building. Consequently, successful programs with only preliminary results are undervalued, leaving significant long-term needs unmet. Drawing on psychoanalytic, feminist, and postcolonial theories, this dissertation chapter examines how institutional pathways constrain the potential for effective resilience-building while reproducing colonial and patriarchal dynamics inherent in global aid practices. Through an analysis of interview data and policy frameworks, this research explores how by prioritizing standardized operational frameworks and short-term funding cycles, the EU as an aid institution perpetuates structural violence and cycles of unfulfilled desire. It also exacerbates aid organizations’ and refugees’ dependencies, reflecting a logic of subordination inherent in donor-recipient relationships.

Aref contends that institutional change is necessary for resilience policy to be effective. Addressing these challenges requires reframing resilience as a relational process grounded in long-term investment and an ethical commitment to addressing the root causes of violence and inequality.

Sports Engineering: A Case of Soft-Power, Bio-Politics and Developmentality in Kashmir
Syed Mir Waleed, Dept of Anthropology, UCI 

Indian Administered Kashmir is the site of one of the longest standing conflicts in South Asia. The region has a population of around seven million people. In 2019, the Indian government struck down the semi-autonomous status of Kashmir legalizing the formal union of the long-disputed claims to sovereignty. Post the revocation of Kashmir’s semi-autonomous status as per Article 370 and Article 35-A in the Indian constitution, there have been increased investments by the Indian state in both – military deployment and development programs in the region. The Indian state seems invested in the violent containment of the Kashmiri population on one hand; on the other hand the investments in sports events and sports infrastructures suggests an investment in life. A large number of Kashmiri youth are enrolled in sports activities, sponsored by the Indian state. Under programs such as Khelo India (India Plays), Ab Khelega Kashmir (Kashmir will Play Now), and Positive Kashmir Tournaments, thousands of Kashmiri youth have been mobilized from every district. Paradoxically, sports arenas are the only place where the state enables and allows certain types of gatherings such as of spectators inside a stadium while criminalizing other forms of assemblies such as street protests. The project examines this paradox and is guided by the following central question: How do state-sponsored youth development programs discipline and regulate youth in annexed territories and create new forms of social order through sports?

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Light lunch will be provided.

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