Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: What does militarism in the timespace of war-preparedness look like in the majority world? Drawing on ongoing research on soldiering in postcolonial India, focused on the Border Security Force, I examine everyday life and labor within security institutions: soldiers’ routines in barracks, prohibited friendships, hardships, and longings. Bringing feminist thought and the political anthropology of security regimes into conversation with a materialist approach to space, this article argues that borderland barracks prove key to the expansionist logic and durability of what I term “constructive security.” The ethnographic study of barracks reveals this logic, i.e., the spatial and social inscriptions by which disparate locales across the country come to be reconstituted as places of work and dwelling for soldiers, privileging and provisioning their social reproduction through violence and care, and stitching together a national security geography. Such a view shows that postcolonial militarism cannot be understood as a coercive project alone; it is simultaneously a constructive one, particularly a reproductive one.
Source: Cultural Anthropology
DOI: 10.14506/ca40.2.02
Author: Sahana Ghosh
Institution: National University of Singapore
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4410949283