Biography

Dr. Peerzada Raouf Ahmad is an Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law School, O.P. Jindal Global University, whose work sits at the critical intersection of political geography, legal theory, and political economy. He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi, where his doctoral thesis, “The Political Economy of Spatio-Geographical Dimensions of Hydro Politics: A Case Study of the Energy Paradigm of Jammu and Kashmir,” laid the groundwork for his enduring engagement with the material and discursive politics of infrastructure, territory, and sovereignty.

Theoretical Grounding and Research

Dr. Ahmad’s scholarship is distinguished by its theoretical rigour and its commitment to excavating the spatial logics of power. Grounded in Marxist political economy and critical legal geography his work interrogates how capitalist accumulation, state formation, and juridical exceptionalism are co-constituted through landscapes of dispossession, extraction, and surveillance. His theoretical apparatus draws productively on the work of Marx, Engeles, Lenin, among others, to read the contemporary political condition through the lens of space, scale, and territoriality.

His primary research interests converge around Hydro Politics, Big Water Infrastructure, Infrastructural Imperialism, climate change, and Indigenous responses, where he theorizes the dam as a technology of governance and a site of multiplex claims. This work is complemented by critical interventions in the study of:

• Digital Sovereignty and the Politics of Shutdowns: Theorizing Internet shutdowns as a juridico-spatial technology of exception, his work develops a “counter-archive” methodology to map the legal and material geographies of digital blackouts.
• Neoliberalism and Urban Cultures: His research on café culture in Kashmir deploys a feminist political economy lens to expose the classed and gendered contradictions of neoliberal urbanism in a conflict-ridden space.
• Critical Pedagogy and Institutional Resistance: He examines the neoliberal restructuring of the university, theorizing the “saffron neoliberal” moment in Indian higher education and the possibilities of insurgent knowledge practices.

He has published extensively in leading international journals such as Gender, Place and Culture, Journal of Peasant Studies, Projections, Globalizations, Human Geography, and History of the Present. His work has been recognized with a Special Mention at the Red Ink Awards (2019) and shortlisting for the Ramnath Goenka Award for Conflict Reporting (2019).

Scholar-Activism and Public Engagement

Dr. Ahmad's scholarship is animated by a deep commitment to scholar-activism, a reflexive practice that bridges rigorous academic inquiry with political solidarity and public engagement. He understands theory not as an end in itself but as a tool for elucidating the material conditions of marginalized communities and contributing to struggles for justice and emancipation. His field-based research in Kashmir is characterized by an ethnographic attentiveness that foregrounds the voices and agency of those navigating securitized landscapes, producing work that is at once analytically sharp and politically attuned.

He is an active member of the  (CASAS) , a network of scholars committed to decolonial and critical approaches to the study of the societies in the Global South. Through CASAS, he participates in collective intellectual projects that challenge dominant development paradigms and amplify alternative, justice-oriented futures.

Teaching and Mentorship

At Jindal Global Law School, Dr. Ahmad teaches a wide array of courses including Political Theory, Carceral Geographies, and International Politics, Foundations of Social Science, Gender Caste and Society that reflect his interdisciplinary commitments and encourage students to think spatially, critically, and ethically about law, power, and social justice. He is a dedicated mentor to emerging researchers, supervising projects on digital rights, urban development, and conflict geographies.

Grants and Projects

His research has been supported by prestigious national and international bodies, including the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR), the Department of Science and Technology (DST), and the Institute of Human Geography London (IHG), Higher Education Department  Government of Haryana. He currently leads projects on café culture and youth subjectivity, Internet shutdowns in Jammu and Kashmir, and the gendered dimensions of the digital divide in Panchkula Haryana, consistently bridging theoretical inquiry with empirical depth and political relevance.