The question of Kashmir is no longer confined to South Asia, nor can it be understood in isolation from the wider transformations reshaping global power. At its core, Kashmir represents a collision between a universally acknowledged right— self-determination— and a world order increasingly governed by hierarchy, coercion, and selective legality.
The United Nations’ promise of 5 January 1949, affirming the Kashmiri people’s right to freely decide their political future, was anchored in the post-war belief that law could restrain power. Today, that belief is visibly eroding. In its place has emerged a new imperial order— one that does not rely on formal colonies but operates through unilateral recognitions, territorial reengineering, demographic manipulation, and the strategic suspension of international norms.
To speak of Kashmir today is therefore to speak of the future of global order itself. Either self-determination retains meaning beyond rhetoric, or the world openly concedes that sovereignty and justice are privileges allocated by power. Until the Kashmiri people are allowed to exercise the choice promised to them, the new imperial order will continue to reveal itself— not through declarations, but through silence, complicity, and the steady normalisation of the unacceptable. Five January should thus be observed not as a ritual of remembrance but as a moment of reckoning. So long as might continues to masquerade as legality, Kashmir will stand as enduring evidence that justice delayed is not merely justice denied— it is justice consciously abandoned
This order is visible not only in Kashmir but across multiple theatres. The unilateral and legally dubious recognition of Somaliland by Israel, bypassing African Union frameworks and established UN processes, illustrates how sovereignty is now dispensed not through multilateral consent but through strategic endorsement. The relentless expansion of settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, carried out in open defiance of international law yet shielded by geopolitical patronage, demonstrates how occupation is normalised through repetition and diplomatic fatigue. Kashmir fits squarely within this pattern: a territory whose internationally recognised status is steadily rewritten on the ground while the world debates procedure rather than principle. The question, therefore, is not whether self-determination remains a valid norm, but whether it survives at all in an international system that increasingly privileges force, alignment, and fait accompli over law and consent.
Five January does not merely mark an anniversary in the calendar of international diplomacy; it exposes a deep fracture in the moral architecture of the contemporary world order. More than seven decades after the UN’s commitment, the pledge to Kashmir stands suspended between memory and neglect, reduced to ceremonial rhetoric while its substance is systematically denied. What renders this prolonged inertia indefensible is not ambiguity in law, but the deliberate unwillingness of power to submit to it.
From the outset, Pakistan’s position on Kashmir has remained anchored in this very legality. Rather than pursuing unilateral solutions or faits accomplis, Pakistan has consistently insisted that the dispute be resolved strictly in accordance with United Nations Security Council resolutions and the freely expressed will of the Kashmiri people. This stance, often dismissed as rhetorical, is in fact one of the few remaining examples of a state subordinating strategic impulse to an internationally agreed legal framework. In contrast, India has progressively sought to recast an internationally recognised dispute as an internal administrative matter, hollowing out the very premise on which the UN resolutions rest. The asymmetry is not one of narratives but of method: one side invokes law, the other seeks to exhaust it into irrelevance.
Self-determination, enshrined in the UN Charter and binding human rights covenants, was never intended to be an ornamental principle. It was the engine of decolonisation, the mechanism through which subjugated peoples reclaimed political agency. Yet in Kashmir, this right has been steadily smothered by an architecture of control. The revocation of the region’s limited autonomy, the prolonged suspension of political activity, mass detentions, communication blackouts, and the shrinking of civic space have not been isolated measures. They form part of a systematic project to pre-empt consent by erasing the very conditions under which it can be meaningfully expressed. Recent international reports documenting the erosion of religious freedom, the normalisation of majoritarian intolerance, and the instrumentalisation of India’s political system to marginalise minorities provide broader context to what Kashmiris have long experienced in concentrated and intensified form.
The persistence of Kashmir’s unresolved status becomes even more striking when viewed alongside other historical cases where self-determination was eventually honoured once international resolve crystallised. East Timor’s people were allowed a UN-supervised referendum despite decades of repression and geopolitical hesitation. Kosovo’s political future was reshaped through sustained international involvement justified on humanitarian and democratic grounds. Even Western Sahara, though unresolved, continues to occupy a recognised place within the UN’s decolonisation framework. These cases demonstrate that self-determination is neither impractical nor obsolete; but is selectively activated. Where compliance with international law challenges powerful allies or strategic calculations, principles are deferred indefinitely.
The credibility crisis surrounding Kashmir does not arise from Pakistan’s conduct, which has remained consistent in calling for mediation, dialogue, and the implementation of UN mandates. Rather, it stems from the international community’s retreat into convenient abstractions such as “bilateralism” and “new realities”— euphemisms that effectively reward unilateral coercion. India’s post-2019 actions were not merely internal constitutional adjustments; they were acts with unmistakable international implications, designed to foreclose the very option the UN had guaranteed. To frame the dispute as a symmetrical contest of competing nationalisms is to obscure the core violation: the substitution of demographic and administrative force for democratic choice.
This selective enforcement of international law reflects a wider global pattern in which power increasingly eclipses principle. Recent US actions toward Venezuela, justified through expansive interpretations of domestic law and accompanied by overt intimidation of regional actors, illustrate how sovereignty is routinely overridden when it proves inconvenient. What is particularly telling is that such conduct has drawn criticism not only from abroad but from within the USA itself, where senators, mayors, and public representatives have questioned the legality and precedent of exporting domestic authority across borders. When even internal democratic voices are compelled to resist the normalisation of coercion, the claim of a rules-based international order appears increasingly hollow.
In such a climate, Kashmir is not an exception but a warning. It demonstrates that international law survives not through its codification but through the political will to uphold it. Pakistan’s insistence on a UN-mandated resolution stands in stark contrast to the prevailing global drift toward unilateralism, while India’s approach exemplifies how sustained repression can be normalised through diplomatic fatigue. The Kashmiri struggle, therefore, is not merely territorial or regional; it is a test case for whether self-determination remains a living right or has been reduced to a selective slogan.
Kashmir’s unresolved status is not a failure of law but a failure of will— a conscious decision by the international community to accommodate power rather than confront injustice. What unites Kashmir with Somaliland’s contested recognition and the entrenchment of settlements in the West Bank is not geography but method: the redefinition of legality after the act, not before it. Under this emerging imperial order, international law is not abolished; it is selectively activated. Rights are affirmed in principle and denied in practice. Self-determination is celebrated where it aligns with power and indefinitely deferred where it threatens entrenched interests.
To speak of Kashmir today is therefore to speak of the future of global order itself. Either self-determination retains meaning beyond rhetoric, or the world openly concedes that sovereignty and justice are privileges allocated by power. Until the Kashmiri people are allowed to exercise the choice promised to them, the new imperial order will continue to reveal itself— not through declarations, but through silence, complicity, and the steady normalisation of the unacceptable. Five January should thus be observed not as a ritual of remembrance but as a moment of reckoning. So long as might continues to masquerade as legality, Kashmir will stand as enduring evidence that justice delayed is not merely justice denied— it is justice consciously abandoned.
