Militant Leadership : Person-Centered Studies from Kashmir

This book uses primary sources that were previously inaccessible to English readers to identify effective deradicalization and counterterrorist interventions from Indian-administered Kashmir that have the potential for global impact. Through person-centered psychological studies, common individual, group, and organizational factors of violence, it proposes evidence-based deradicalization and counterterrorism interventions, bringing the study of political violence in Indian-administered Kashmir into conversation with research trends in Europe and North America.

This book profiles 12 militant leaders responsible for violence in Indian-administered Kashmir to identify effective deradicalization and counterterrorist interventions for global impact. Building off decades of research in cultural psychiatry, political psychology, social psychology, and South Asian Studies, multilingual cultural psychiatrist and psychological researcher Neil Krishan Aggarwal develops a method for analyzing militant leaders by examining their personality traits, motivations, skills and abilities, and significant life events to ask what propels them into violence. He presents person-centered psychological case studies based on primary sources in Arabic, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu to illustrate how leaders frame violence in their own words to recruit others.By comparing and contrasting individual, group, and organizational factors of violence, this book proposes evidence-based deradicalization and counterterrorism interventions, bringing the study of political violence in Indian-administered Kashmir into conversation with research trends in Europe and North America. By developing a method for analyzing militant leadership through state-of-the-art scholarship, the book''s insights can inform the development of case studies for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners across geographic regions and disciplines.