Gender, Race, and Coloniality in Governing Political Violence

• In Event: Gender and Violence in South Asia

Abstract

The existing literature on conflict dynamics and postconflict order tends to focus so much on the observable implications of tangible functions like territorial control, taxation or public service delivery that the intangible intersecting systems of power like coloniality, gender, race, caste, class, ethnicity that also govern violence and peace are inevitably obscured. In this paper, part of a larger project on gathering empirical evidence of intimacy and associated ideas of being and belonging shaping conflict dynamics and outcomes, we (re)centre the idea of intimacy in political violence. Understood as the personalized character of political violence, the role of intimacy is examined in the context of historical and ongoing insurgencies in India and Nepal to explore how state institutions (norms, principles, and practices) deployed to govern insurgency/terrorism activates crosscutting gendered, colonial and racial logics of oppression and violence. Eschewing approaches that prioritize spectacular, visible forms of violence in favor of subtle, invisible, and everyday forms of coercion - focused on managing and organizing emotions and intimacy - can help illuminate (a) how target populations, specifically the most marginalized among them, conceptualize state governance of political violence, and (b) why, where, and how resistance and opposition to this governance manifests. In doing so, we seek to humanize state practices specifically, and the study of political violence more broadly in ways that allows us to extrapolate policy implications for counterinsurgency practices as well.

Author

• Rumela Sen, Columbia University