Speculative sovereignty and militarized ecologies: Flower bombs and political trees in Kashmir

Colonial rule operates through the reordering of ecological relations. By rendering land legible, measurable, and administratively governable, militarized regimes consolidate control while narrowing political futurity. This article examines how ecological territorialization unfolds in Pakistan-administered Kashmir along the Line of Control, one of the most militarized frontiers in the world. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2014–2022), I trace how afforestation campaigns, conservation regimes, landmine governance, and infrastructural management embed military authority into soil, forests, and futures, aestheticizing occupation as restoration and care. Ecology emerges as a technology of rule: a biopolitical apparatus through which territorial power is naturalized. Yet militarized enclosure does not exhaust political life. Alongside regimented plantation drives and mined slopes, residents cultivate fugitive ecologies: seed saving, memorial tree planting, foraging, and “flower bombing” that root memory, grief, and futurity in the land. These practices do not mirror state sovereignty nor directly overthrow it. Instead, they enact speculative sovereignty: an anticipatory claim to jurisdiction grounded in relational inhabitation under conditions where direct territorial contestation is foreclosed. Speculation here is not abstraction but material rehearsal, an extension of political horizon through ecological care. By tracing how authority is both inscribed and quietly replanted from below, the article reconceptualizes sovereignty as an ecological practice shaped through anticipation, uneven risk, and temporal extension rather than exclusively through state form.