Description
In my paper, I challenge head on a dominant story about militarisation that has been told in conventional theorising, even in liberal feminist work, as a benign and subtle process. Thinking with Kashmir’s occupation offers a different story – that we need to conceptualise occupation, and the form of state enforced militarisation in this Global South context as a condition of contemporary postcoloniality. Critical feminist work on militarisation largely from Global North geographies conceives militarisation as an everyday process that structures gendered, social, spatial and affective relations. However, there is an urgent need to read it in concert with conceptualisations of coloniality if we are to understand the nature of military occupation in Kashmir, its underlying gendered and racialised logics and sustained effects on Kashmiris and their life-worlds. Drawing on ethnographic and archival work in Kashmir, this paper presents conceptual rethinking of militarisation as a feminist ethical imperative, pushing us to think through location as a reflexive praxis – from where knowledge is produced, what geopolitical contexts and by whom – as crucial to identifying and resisting the ongoing processes of militarisation and how they are embedded in the logics of coloniality. Overall, I ask what different stories can be told about militarisation from a marginal Global South geography when it is engaged with as an epistemic site beyond its empirical circumstance.
