Description
My paper calls for a rethinking of militarisation as constitutive of coloniality. Challenging liberal/Global North/Eurodominant militarisation thinking, including critical work that characterises militarisation as ‘banal’ and ‘subtle’, my paper enquires into the constitutive logics, forms and effects of India’s military occupation of Kashmir to argue for an understanding of state-enforced militarisation and occupation as a rationality and logic of coloniality. It shows how militarisation and its interlocking with coloniality and occupation are ongoing processes that deploy colonial technologies of control, violence and coercion and are regulated through intersecting hierarchies of gender and racialisation. That dominant theorisations of militarisation have paid inadequate attention to coloniality is not an innocent prospect, and in thinking with Kashmir, my intervention is not simply a call for paying empirical attention to marginal Global South geographies but insists on their epistemic potentialities in disrupting what we understand of militarisation or how critical and feminist knowledge that is oriented towards justice can be produced. In so doing, I propose that we think of location as a reflexive feminist ethic – how do we theorise, with what methodological and epistemic assumptions, the forms of social, intellectual and institutional capital, from where – if we are to address the depoliticisation of and complicities in militarisation literature, and for anticolonial, antimilitarist feminist possibilities to sustain. My paper engages a range of literatures from feminist political sociology, anticolonial feminisms, militarisation and occupation studies to post/anticolonial feminisms.
