Kashmir Under Siege: A Twitter Perspective from August to December 2019

The main research objective of this thesis is to analyze the Twitter activity related to the hashtag “Kashmir” over a period of 5 months (August – December 2019). The initial corpus collected contained 30K tweets and a subset of the 1000 most retweeted tweets was used for further analysis using qualitative methods (content analysis). The analysis identified three main thematic dimensions: 1) Pakistani Nationalist Narrative, 2) Indian Nationalist Narrative, and the 3) Humanitarian Narrative. These narratives are being discussed in detail and specific tweets are mentioned to support further the arguments used. The main conclusion from this study is that social media played a significant role in the internationalization of the Kashmir conflict giving visibility to the emerged humanitarian crisis.