By Kate Selker
“I remember one morning waking up with the Times of India and finding a Bollywood wedding splashed on the front page,” says Ameya Kilara. She was just in high school at the time. “And then finding— hidden away in a corner of one of the inside pages—a little story about 30 or 40 people having died that day in Kashmir.”
Kilara, who is from India, had been aware of the conflict in Kashmir. India considers the region a part of its country, as does Pakistan (China also claims ownership of a portion). It’s been contested since the partition of India in 1947, and violence has affected the region for decades. What surprised her was how little coverage the paper had given it. “How is this possible,” she remembers asking, “that a Bollywood wedding is getting more attention than people losing their lives?”
She did something about it. Kilara started a youth movement with her friends to reduce tolerance for violence in Kashmir and ultimately end it. They learned, organized, and pressured leaders to bring peace to the region. “That was when I was 16. And I was 30 when I came to HKS,” she says.
She’d spent the intervening years devoting herself to the conflict. She’d gone to law school to gain negotiation skills and worked at an international organization, Conciliation Resources, that supported peacebuilding among Indian, Pakistani, and Kashmiri people.
Leaving that role to come to HKS was a tough choice. “This kind of work is only possible when you feel very personally invested in it,” she says. “And there were milestones that we had achieved that felt like a real sense of possibility. That made it hard to feel like I was stepping back.”
Her colleagues reassured her, insisting that her time at HKS would serve their aims. She’d gain skills and build relationships that would deepen their collective work. She took their word for it and hasn’t regretted it.
“How is this possible that a Bollywood wedding is getting more attention than people losing their lives?”
Her classes gave her the chance to stretch her skills—like an op-ed course, where she emerged from the “behind the scenes” diplomacy of peacebuilding and advocated in her own voice: “I felt very lucky to get the time to read and write and practice delivering a speech—getting the opportunity to do that was incredible.”
She also built strong relationships that have shaped her career. A close HKS friend, Gulika Reddy MPP 2018, now runs a human rights and conflict resolution clinic at Stanford Law School. The two have collaborated since graduation, with Kilara bringing ideas and colleagues from her work in Kashmir to Reddy’s clinic.
And she was grateful for the mentorship of Hugh O’Doherty, an HKS adjunct lecturer who teaches adaptive leadership and conflict resolution. Kilara admired how he approaches his work, “with almost no sense of ego. It’s a non-transactional approach to people—a very rare thing to find.” O’Doherty had worked in Northern Ireland and saw a common cause in Kilara’s work. He helped her organize a retreat for colleagues from Kashmir, India, and Pakistan to help them reflect on individual and collective leadership challenges. “I remember one of the first conversations we had, he just said, ‘your purpose aligns with my purpose,’” Kilara said.
Kilara took every opportunity to draw awareness to the issue. In 2017, she and a classmate organized the first-ever panel on Kashmir at the annual India conference at Harvard, to which they invited prominent Kashmiri and Pakistani speakers. This involved working across lines of difference and disagreement and managing complex dynamics both within HKS and with external political groups.
After graduation, Kilara set up a new program focused on South Asia at an organization called Inter Mediate (founded by Jonathan Powell, currently the UK’s national security adviser) while continuing to partner with her old colleagues from Conciliation Resources. Now, she advises heads of state and government and other political leaders as they navigate peace processes.
Kilara organizes conversations and facilitates informal channels for dialogue when a conflict prevents formal engagement, building trust and political buy-in between opposing leaders. All the while, she is a model of that humility she admired in O’Doherty. It’s just part of the work, she explains. “The idea is to help inform decision-making, not openly shape it,” she says. “We don’t try and claim credit for things.”
