Description
In mainstream and more critical IR scholarship, militarisms (and nationalisms) are typically understood, implicitly or explicitly, as bounded sets of relations concomitant with a given nation-state. This paper shifts the analytical frame by emphasizing how diaspora communities can be involved in reproducing militarisms transnationally and how this can occur through directly cooperating with diaspora organizations and lobby groups affiliated with other states whose perceived interests overlap. More specifically, this paper examines how militaristic Hindutva and Zionist organizations in the United States and United Kingdom have cooperated in efforts to advance their violent political projects through attempting to delegitimize criticism of Indian and Israeli practices of colonizing occupied peoples and territories while suppressing armed resistance movements. This has occurred in the context of a deterritorialization of ‘Indianness’ through advancing ‘long-distance nationalism’ as a strategic aim of Hindu nationalists in recent years. While reconceptualizing militarism as constituted transnationally through sites and relations across and between sympathetic diaspora communities, the empirical focus is on forms of organizing which escalated following the August 2019 decision by the government of India to revoke Articles 370 and 35A of the Indian constitution, which furthers domination and colonization of military-occupied Kashmir.
