1 DOI: 10.4324/9780429330810-1 The Routledge Handbook of Critical Kashmir Studies signals the increasing signifcance of Critical Kashmir Studies within the context of India’s heightened Hindu fascism and policies of settler colonial displacement, disenfranchisement, and dispossession in Kashmir. Over the past two decades, the new Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship has emerged, focusing on the implica- tions of the prolonged settler occupation of Kashmir and the everyday efects of war and mili- tarization on Kashmir’s society, economics, and politics. This critical approach centers Kashmiri voices and perspectives to produce a body of knowledge that challenges the conventional statist status quo and provides new ways of thinking about the past, present, and future of the region. As a body of scholarship, Critical Kashmir Studies brings perspectives from literary and cultural studies, feminist studies, cultural anthropology, socio-legal studies, history, and geography into conversation with settler colonial studies and critical indigenous studies. As exemplifed by the chapters in this handbook, the scholarly feld of Critical Kashmir Studies provides new analy- ses and theories of occupation, resistance, sovereignty, and self-determination, establishing the scholarly perspectives needed to conceptualize political, legal, and social developments as they unfold. Our contributors refect on and open up new possibilities for transnational solidarities among movements for self-determination, human rights, and liberation. These contributions resonate beyond Kashmir, inviting scholars and activists more broadly interested in decolonial approaches to think about the transnational connections that sustain occupations – and generate resistance against them – in any particular place. Critical Kashmir Studies scholarship has radically challenged conventional Kashmir scholar- ship that has focused predominantly on international relations and security studies perspectives while largely ignoring the indigenous histories of the Kashmiri freedom struggle. Dominant in South Asian and Western academies since the mid-twentieth century, conventional Kashmir studies scholarship has approached Kashmir as a bilateral dispute between India and Pakistan, framing the Kashmiri movement for self-determination as a proxy war, secessionist movement, and terrorist enterprise within the context of the Global War on Terror. Conventional forms of knowledge production about Kashmir have sustained the national, regional, and global power structures that have suppressed the Kashmiri right to self-determination and institu- tionalized the long-standing legal, military, and political occupation of Kashmir. Through its research agenda on occupation, settler violence, (post)coloniality, and decolonization, Critical Kashmir Studies destabilizes the state-centric perspectives of area studies scholarship, located CRITICAL KASHMIR STUDIES Settler Occupations and the Persistence of Resistance Mona Bhan, Haley Duschinski, and Deepti Misri