2023 Enloe Award Essay

A feminist analysis of
the coloniality of militarization:
thinking with Kashmir at the margins of
the Global South

By Niharika Pandit (she/her, they/them)

This article was named the winner of the 2023 Enloe Award.

The committee commented:

This highly original piece advances underexplored sites for decolonial theorization while embedding evocative methods within its analysis. The result not only presents a critical intervention in feminist scholarship on militarization, but also offers an opportunity for reflection on academic production.

Abstract

This article calls for a rethinking of militarization as co-constitutive of coloniality. Challenging Global North thinking on militarization, including critical work that characterizes it as “banal” and “subtle,” the article enquires into the constitutive logics, forms, and effects of military occupation in Kashmir to argue for an understanding of state-enforced militarization as an aspect of India’s coloniality. It shows how militarization becomes a logic of coloniality that deploys colonial technologies of control and violence, is regulated through hierarchies of gender and racialization, and creates differential vulnerabilities in everyday life. That dominant theorizations of militarization have paid inadequate attention to coloniality is not happenstance and, in thinking with Kashmir, the article does not simply call for empirical attention to marginal Global South geographies; it also insists on their epistemic potentialities in disrupting how militarization is understood in dominant Global North theorizations. In so doing, the article proposes that we attend to location as a feminist methodology if we are to address the depoliticization of and complicities in militarization literature and for anticolonial feminist possibilities to emerge.

Niharika Pandit