Jammu and Kashmir, a region steeped in enduring political discord, is recognized as one of the most heavily militarized zones globally. The turmoil is usually dated back to the 1947 partition when the British Indian empire was split along religious lines, dividing the erstwhile Himalayan kingdom between the newly independent states of India and Pakistan, with a small portion taken over by China. Beginning in 1989, the Muslim-majority Kashmir valley has witnessed an armed movement for freedom (azaadi) from Indian rule, which was met with violent counterinsurgency. Armed militancy tapered off to make space for civilian protests, and at present daily rhythms in Kashmir are dictated by emergency laws and the pervasive presence of armed troops. In August 2019 the Indian parliament, led by the Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), passed legislation that effectively revoked the nominal autonomy granted to Jammu and Kashmir under the Indian constitution, bringing it under direct central rule. The legislation not only rescinded the state’s constitutional entitlements, but also targeted its regional economy in ways that garnered less media attention. It stripped exclusive rights to acquire property, historically    reserved    for    the “state      subjects” of predominantly Muslim Jammu and Kashmir, opening up land to external corporate ownership and stoking apprehensions of demographic transformation. Moreover, the Indian government ramped up its regulatory measures on regional economic systems and practices by clamping down on cross-border trade, curtailing and prosecuting informal credit, suppressing mercantile associations, and incarcerating local leaders. Several traders were investigated by Indian security agencies for business dealings across the border in Pakistan and allegedly funding “terrorism” in Kashmir. Since Jammu and Kashmir is India’s only Muslim majority state, the conflict in Kashmir is often framed as Pakistan-sponsored Muslim insurgency and extremism. As a site of “Muslim” insurgency, Kashmir has formed part of the landscape of “global jihad,” albeit not at its center. After 9/11, India’s counterinsurgency in Kashmir has been aligned more closely with the Global War on Terror (GWOT) often in superficial ways that obscure the distinctive empirical and political trajectories of the Kashmir conflict. Specifically, modes of financial intelligence and surveillance that emerged out of the GWOT have been deployed to target historical exchange communities that are not granted by warring nations. From 2009 to 2020 – primarily between a two- year period in 2012 and 2013 – I conducted anthropological research in the bazaars of Srinagar, Kashmir’s capital city. I was intrigued by how quotidian activities of buying and selling were publicly and privately sustained during prolonged political violence. Pursuing this query in the marketplace, it became clear that one way of maintaining public lives and relationships amid a perpetual state of emergency was through reliance on historical trade relationships. Credit and market relations cut across communal divides within the diverse mercantile community, including between Muslim and Hindu traders who have been otherwise viewed as antagonists within the religiously polarized dispute. Furthermore, trade and market networks invoked complex geographies that bypassed both India and Pakistan, connecting places in Kashmir to those in Tibet, Xinjiang, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan and beyond. Highland entrepôts of the trans- Himalayas, such as Srinagar, Kabul, Kashgar, Leh, Balkh, and Bukhara have been historically connected by infrastructures for moving goods and persons over difficult highland and cold desert terrains. These infrastructures also included practices for making long-distance payments. Various forms of trust-based informal credit evolved deferred and delayed payments for purchasing goods, so that large volumes of goods could be moved over this landscape without having to carry large amounts of money. During my fieldwork in Srinagar, I   noted how informal credit remained the primary payment infrastructure for wholesale trade. High volume goods were brought on “credit,” that was paid back in installments according to flexible timelines and conditions that depended on the relationship between traders and their clients. These arrangements also helped traders adapt to the delays and uncertainties of a decade long war, and continue circulating provisions amid volatility and violence. Such informal credit is not exotic. Informal commercial credit, comprising interest-free loans for large purchases exist in other contexts of wholesale trade where credit considered too small or risky from a corporate perspective is extended with conditions that are not easy to regularize or reproduce and elude legal enforcement. Such “credit” is layered along multiple transactions in enduring and asymmetrical business dealings. It is also a mode of settling (older) debts, evading tax, or balancing accounts between exchange partners through over and under-invoicing goods. Bypassing formal banking and national laws, such networks may link up partners across hostile territorial borders, making trust-based transactions suspicious from the perspective of (inter)national financial and territorial regimes. But these networks do not simply move contraband items like drugs, arms, or terror funds; they also move food, textiles, tea, and manufactured goods on the trans-Himalayan terrain and within its exchange communities. In other words, informal credit allows for exchanges that are regionally and historically specific. This becomes important to consider when such diverse, layered, and informal ways of moving goods and payments have been criminalized and conflated under the umbrella term “hawala,” which entered international counter-terrorism vocabulary after 9/11. The literal meaning of hawala – “to transfer” – is both anodyne and capacious. Fundamentally, hawala means the transfer of money through a network of brokers, often glossed as “money transferred without the movement of cash.” Since 9/11, diverse practices classified under hawala have come under increased international scrutiny as “underground” sources of terrorist funding, even as scholars have called attention to its overlaps with formal banking, trade , and capacity to deliver financial services to underserved    communities of migrant workers and remittance receivers. A global “crackdown” on these informal networks has been a part of the Global War on Terror. Supranational financial surveillance watchdogs – such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) – were strengthened to outline and enforce global anti-money laundering directives. In India, efforts over the last two decades to align with FATF directives have combined with an aggressive national push towards digitalization and the transition from cash to digital payments. This manifested dramatically in the overnight demonetization of November 2016, when the Indian prime minister declared 85 per cent of the circulating currency invalid. Apparently aimed at “breaking the grip of corruption and black money” amassed by anti- national and antisocial elements, demonetization entangled the War on Terror with a war on cash. Since then, money laundering laws and monitoring   agencies   have been    weaponized to target political dissidents and opponents – including international news media and human rights organizations. Hawala accusations also have a specific history in India and Kashmir that predates 9/11 by a decade. In 1991, during the peak of armed militancy in Kashmir, the arrest of a Kashmiri militant revealed that the same informal channels funneling money to armed groups in Kashmir were also being used by Indian parliamentarians for their money laundering activities. Network capacities to host both licit and illicit actors come as no surprise in the post- internet era, but in 1991 it caused a huge national scandal. The “hawala scandal” – hawalakand – effectively shaped “hawala” as a threat to the nation's economy and security in the public imagination. Elsewhere, I   show how the hawala scandal and the legal cases filed and fought in the Indian Supreme Court had lasting consequences—trucking in a broad basis for defining economic crime while introducing discretionary elements for deciding what counts as evidence of economic crime. The stigmatization of hawala has had serious consequences for traders in Kashmir, whose historical practices blur lines between the formal and informal and lie in the gray zone. Discretionary emergency      laws      imposed      in Kashmir were expanded after 2019, making any expression of dissent vulnerable to charges of sedition and terrorism. In this environment, any informal commercial transaction can potentially be prosecuted as a hawala transaction for funding terrorism. Indeed, in recent years many traders, whose accounts needed explaining from the perspective of tightened fiscal laws, have had such charges leveled against them. While these charges may not eventually be proved, the punitive process of arrest, intimidation, and the long trial process is enough to destroy livelihoods. This targeting of the regional economy, as well as cross-border and informal exchanges, as terroristic is foremost a sign of expanding central control. Criminalizing informal credit is a territorializing project that severs historical and non-national connections and geographies to strictly align exchange communities with national boundaries. Second, eviscerating the regional economy and capital circulation has opened up new spaces for the investment of global capital – invoking    old    stereotypes    of frontiers as empty spaces of “untapped” opportunities, a language which has dominated the Indian government’s propaganda in Kashmir after 2019. While I’m not equipped to argue for the guilt or innocence of individual traders, one must be cautious about taking hawala accusations at face value, and examine more closely promises of financial transparency and inclusion. Financial surveillance and financialization after 9/11 has been devastating for ordinary people and livelihoods, in places that are simultaneously marginal to and intimately connected with the global military- industrial complex.