CUNY Academic Commons

PhD Candidate, Anthropology Department

Salman Hussain is a Doctoral Candidate in the Anthropology Department at The Graduate Center, CUNY. His research examines new social and political imaginaries as well as practices of human rights litigation by the middle and professional classes in Pakistan. Specifically, he studies how bourgeois legality has become hegemonic in political and social movements there. More specifically, he examines post 9/11 human rights movements that have emerged to encounter state violence against dissent, especially to politically and legally encounter ‘enforced disappearances’. He has worked and written on the political economy of war in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Currently, he is writing on the legal-political movements in Pakistan and broadly examining the appeals to higher courts, constitutional law and rights that the new confluence between law and politics has given life to. His recent publication, “The ‘‘Ethical’’ Framework for Counterinsurgency: International Law of War and Cultural Knowledge in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual”, which appeared in the journal Anthropologica, is based upon his earlier work on the increasing use of law as a technology of violence in modern wars. His research interests includes social movements, human rights, and political economy of war, violence, and terror.