SIACHEN, SCIENCE, AND THE GEOPOLITICS OF PEACE

"What is a mountain?" asks Salman Rushdie. "An obstacle; a transcendence; above all, an effect."

The Siachen glacier is a perpendicular wilderness in the so-called navel of Asia, where six major mountain systems originating in India, Pakistan, China, Nepal and Afghanistan clash, and civilizations clash along with them. Throughout history these mountains have been the stage for endless human drama, from the nineteenth-century Great Game between British and Russian intelligence forces for control over Central Asia to modern fundamentalist terrorism. The Siachen glacier conflict is simply another chapter in the ongoing saga of men battling men among mountains.

First, though, I should set the record straight: I have never set foot on the Siachen glacier. I have never even laid eyes on its ice. As a multi-generational Canadian, I cannot claim any cultural connections to Kashmir, India or Pakistan. I only learned of the Siachen glacier and the notion of scientific peacekeeping by chance not so long ago. Yet despite this cultural and geographic distance from Siachen, I have devoted years of my life to studying, if never quite understanding, this glacier’s strange story.

Siachen is the world’s largest glacier beyond the polar regions, and it also claims the dubious distinction as the world's highest-altitude battlefield. Since 1984, India and Pakistan have engaged in a military dispute in this remote corner of Kashmir. The conflict can ultimately be traced to post-colonial territorial ambiguities, with science tangled in the origins of the dispute through early surveying and sporting expeditions. The human, environmental, and economic costs of this conflict have been devastating for both nations, and there is rising interest in resolving the dispute by establishing a transboundary scientific peace park on Siachen.

At Oxford I wrote my Master’s thesis on the history of science, exploration, and geopolitics on the Siachen glacier. I learned the lay of the land from ancient maps from the comfortable confines of libraries. I participated in science-for-peace workshops in Kathmandu and Leh, which aimed to spark collaborative research projects among scientists working in the Greater Himalaya. I've even made multiple pilgrimages to Kashmir to groundtruth my studies, but each time failed to reach the Siachen battlefield itself. For a place I have never seen and, depending on the political climate, may not see for years yet, this might seem a disproportionate measure of devotion.

But for reasons inexpressible, I am drawn to the Siachen glacier as though it were the unmappable landscape of my dreams. We live on an increasingly fragmented, bordered and tamed world. The Siachen conflict evokes questions central to the future of not simply this glacier but all wild spaces. What is the value of raw and elemental wilderness? How is a wasteland defined, constructed, destroyed? What is the place and priority of marginal lands in our function-frenzied civilization? How has science been complicit in fomenting conflict, and how can science instead engender peace?

Through research on Siachen specifically, and transboundary conservation generally, I am interested in the relationship between exploration, conflict resolution, and scientific cooperation – how these can work together to conserve our planet’s dwindling wild spaces, and in the process, encourage cooperation and peace across borders.