Staff

Research Profile

Nadia Ali’s research examines the political, social and ecological transformations of contested and marginalised regions, with a particular focus on Pakistan and Gilgit-Baltistan. Drawing on political ecology, political geography, development studies, and peace and conflict studies, she investigates how state-making, infrastructure development, resource governance, climate change, and market expansion reshape relations between states, communities, and their environments.

A central theme of her work is the contested transformation of frontier regions. Her research on Khalisa Sarkar land in Gilgit-Baltistan examines how legal ambiguity and overlapping customary and state land regimes facilitate territorial control and dispossession while also creating spaces for local resistance. Her recent work extends this frontier perspective to tourism in Hunza, conceptualising the “tourism frontier” as a process through which landscapes, resources, and communities become incorporated into commodification and investment, while generating new forms of contestation and disenchantment.

More recently, Ali has expanded her research to the intersection of climate change, mobility, peace and conflict. As co-project lead, she is working on Climate Mobilities and Peace/Conflict Dynamics in Pakistan: A Comparative Analysis of Gilgit-Baltistan and South Punjab, funded by the German Foundation for Peace. The project examines how Climate Mobilities--adaptive migration, planned relocation, forced displacement, and involuntary immobility--shape conflict dynamics and possibilities for peacebuilding.

Taken together, Ali’s research explores how state policies, external interventions, market processes, and environmental change reshape local power relations and livelihoods, and how communities and local institutions respond to and negotiate these transformations. Her emerging research agenda connects frontier politics, territorialisation, resource governance, climate mobilities, resistance, conflict, and peacebuilding.

Research Topics / Key Expertise

Qualitative Research

Tourism frontier

Territorialisation

Land and Resource Governance

State–Society Relations

Conflict

Local Resistance

Climate Change and Mobilities.

Countries Of Expertise

• Germany,
• Pakistan