Omer Aijazi’s Atmospheric Violence: Disaster and Repair in Kashmir is a powerful ethnography of the affective dimensions of disaster and the complexities of social life following the 2005 earthquake in the pahars (mountains) of Pakistani-administered Kashmir. The book, however, is more than an account of a single disaster. Aijazi uses the earthquake’s aftermath as an entry point into the everyday lives of people in the pahars to explore how communities navigate disaster in various ways: some grapple with feelings of betrayal by their bodies, friends, or family; others by caring for their community in memory of their loved ones; and some by refusing societal expectations and leaning toward the divine. Central to Aijazi’s argument is a reconceptualization of “repair” not as fixing, restoring, or recovering from disaster, but as “remnant dwelling,” that refers to the active and creative social practices through which people seek to make and remake meaning, sustain life, and open futures that make the present palpable despite the “contradictory, sabotaging, and jagged edges of sociality” (pp. 66–67). For Aijazi, repair is less concerned with resolution and more focused on living with brokenness, navigating uncertainty through “wayward steps and sideways glances, spirals, and cycles” (p. 166) rather than pursuing linear recovery. This understanding of repair is grounded in Aijazi’s reconceptualization of disaster as atmospheric, an ongoing condition that seeps into everyday ethics, relationships, and subjectivities, shaping when repair becomes possible or foreclosed. By using this approach to repair, Aijazi advances the anthropology of disaster and violence toward a poetics of everyday life, foregrounding ambiguity and the messiness of daily existence under structural violence.

My reading of Atmospheric Violence is shaped by my positionality. I am a member of the Islamic minority Zigri sect, within the Baloch community, which is a marginalized group in Pakistan’s densest militarized region, Balochistan. Coming from another militarized periphery, I engaged with Aijazi’s ethnography in search of resonances and found them in concepts such as the musafir (traveler), the militarization of everyday life, and the atmospheric quality of living under constant surveillance. These themes resonate across South Asian borderlands, and the book’s structure encourages such cross-regional analysis. Each chapter functions as a “scene” that resists temporal limitation and allows the complexity of everyday life in the pahars to remain visible in all its richness and contradiction. The book’s five scenes center individual experiences while revealing broader patterns of betrayal, care, spiritual sovereignty, political affect, and opacity. Scene 1 focuses on Niaz’s story of disability and the betrayal by a friend, showing how disasters like the earthquake become entangled with everyday social betrayals. Scene 2 highlights Parveen’s work as a midwife, illustrating how small gestures of kindness serve as acts of moral repair under militarized and precarious conditions. Scene 3 introduces us to Sattar Shah, whose solitude and friendship with Allah represent a spiritual form of sovereignty and refusal of social dependency. Scene 4 turns to Abrar, where Aijazi traces his struggles with frustration, envy, and what he terms “ugly feelings” (p. 134), demonstrating the persistent affective toll of life in and outside the pahars. Finally, Scene 5 introduces Chandni’s story, a woman who becomes, or claims to become, blind after the earthquake, using her experience to argue for opacity as an ethical stance.

I deeply admire these intimate portraits, particularly Aijazi’s attention to how his interlocutors feel, believe, and make meaning amid atmospheres of violence, for instance, how betrayal feels in the body, how care sustains the spirit, and how faith offers sovereignty. However, they also raised critical questions for me, given my own context and positionality. The most significant tension I observed concerns state violence. Aijazi writes clearly about Indian state violence in Kashmir—naming cross-border firing, military operations, and occupation throughout the text—yet as readers, we learn considerably less about Pakistani state violence in the regions under its control. I acknowledge that Aijazi references “agencies” (e.g., p. 141) causing disappearances, documents Abrar’s brother spending fourteen years in jail (p. 142), and reveals how Kashmiris are viewed as panchi (flight birds) by Pakistani society (p. 138), marking them as permanently disloyal citizens. However, the Pakistani military appears in the narrative mostly as a service provider—building bunkers, providing health care, and offering employment. The deeper structures of marginalization and control exercised by the Pakistani military or state seem to recede into the background. Perhaps the military does provide these services in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, but for a reader from Balochistan, where the same institution openly abducts and kills, this asymmetry is striking.

This asymmetry becomes apparent in how the book treats structural violence underlying interpersonal conflicts. In Scene 1, Niaz’s most profound dysphoria stems not from his bodily injury or the earthquake but from a friend’s betrayal over a teaching position—Ahmed sabotaged his teaching certification out of jealousy over scarce jobs (p. 70). In Scene 2, Aijazi turns to care and kindness through Parveen, whose efforts amid crumbling health care infrastructure make her “like the ambulance” (p. 100) for her community. Aijazi’s attention to these material conditions is one of the book’s great strengths: he traces how scarcity reshapes the ethical fabric of everyday life without reducing people to victimhood. What remains implicit in these scenes, however, is the state’s role in producing this scarcity. We learn vividly about empty civilian clinics alongside functional military hospitals, yet not about the military’s role in monopolizing services to create dependency.

Similarly, in Scene 3, Aijazi beautifully captures Sattar and his sister’s refusal of humanitarian aid as a form of spiritual sovereignty, a rejection of worldly dependency in favor of reliance on Allah alone. Sattar’s attention to the sacred as a site of ethical striving is compelling and rare in disaster scholarship. However, this refusal also raises the question of whether it speaks to a fear of the state that Aijazi does not fully name. People in the pahars may depend on military support, but they may also fear it. This may explain why people like Sattar embrace being a “musafir” (p. 121), choosing spiritual sovereignty to preserve self-respect stripped by a state that both feeds and haunts them. Notably, “musafir” is also used by Baloch men to describe displacement and survival under Pakistani state pressure (Ahmad Reference Ahmad and Menon2022, p. 234–37). This parallel is there, yet not quite fully there—a productive opening the book provides without resolving.

In Scene 5 with Chandni Bibi, I was fascinated by Aijazi’s examination of nonlinear time and the refusal of recovery narratives. In militarized contexts, curfews and checkpoints define “normal” life, and the ongoing anticipation of violence shapes these experiences (Misri Reference Misri2020, Reference Misri, Bhan, Duschinski and Misri2023; Puar Reference Puar2017). Learning how Chandni Bibi navigates rupture after the earthquake was especially meaningful. Her practice of sabr (patience) and her temporal refusal demonstrated the ongoing temporal violence of occupation (p. 167), where communities are denied control over their daily rhythms of life through curfews, checkpoints, military operations, enforced disappearances, extrajudicial killings, and families mourning in public spaces.

Despite my concerns about the asymmetric treatment of state violence, Atmospheric Violence is an essential contribution to Critical Pakistan Studies and the broader anthropology of disaster. It provides a nuanced account of lives shaped by generational violence and disaster, without reducing them to a straightforward analytic formula. Atmospheric Violence raises important questions about the intersections of interpersonal, structural, and state violence that resonate with readers from Pakistan’s margins, including Balochistan. At the same time, it leaves us with productive and uncertain questions, such as, How do we write about state violence when certain violences cannot be fully named? How do everyday acts of care both resist and inadvertently sustain structures of power? These questions matter urgently for those of us working in militarized peripheries. Aijazi’s atmospheric approach encourages further exploration of how different forms of violence interact and how the everyday practices he documents might foster unexpected solidarities across Pakistan’s contested borderlands.