Description
This paper aims to study Pakistan’s use of military force against Afghan migrants and the Taliban-led Afghan state post-2021 as a bordering practice in reinforcing/projecting the ‘border’ along the Af-Pak ‘frontier’. Following Nail (2016), we understand the border as a bifurcating and mobile political form which enacts rather than limits sovereign power of the state. We affirm border as an ontological (Minca & Vaughan-Williams, 2012) generator of political identities. In our framing, militarization is studied as a bordering practice, viewing the border/bordering as active rather than passive. Herein, it is a process aimed at reaffirming state identity and reinforcing national security through violent contestation of spatial ‘transgression’ by ‘enemy’ aliens. Our approach intends to develop an account of bordering practice of violence as tied to stabilisation of national/state identity in a context of rival locus of political obligations. A peculiar situation obtains in the borderland between Pakistan and Afghanistan wherein shared local ethnic ties and historical as well as contemporary legacies of imperial violence bind the affective geographies, people and importantly nation-state narratives. Both states especially since the fall of the republican government in Afghanistan, have emphasised their Islamic identity and in the case of Pakistan tried to assert control over its borderland ethnicities and the frontier by escalating bouts of violence and refugee deportations. The martial practices of Pakistani state to project a border on the Af-Pak borderlands are filtered through colonial modes of organising violence and intersect with post-colonial intensification of assertion of nation-state identity especially since the Cold War and the Global War on Terror. Thus, given the power asymmetry between Afghanistan and Pakistan, we assess the implications of how borderlands transformed into ‘frontier’ (Longo, 2017) tend to intensify bordering practices in cases of intersection and contestation over projection of post-colonial subjecthood in the global South.
