Suchergebnisse

Abstract
How do protests and security regimes engage each other on the question of difference? This question frames this essay's ethnographic portrayal of the expression of dissent and political claims in a borderland site of national security and the Indian security state's management of such dissent to reinforce its legitimacy as a liberal democracy. Border residents in eastern India, predominantly Muslim or depressed caste, are minority citizens. By closely reading the terms through which they articulate their claims and humiliations and how they are rendered suspect, subordinated, and othered from fulsome democratic rights and citizenship, this essay offers a portrait of the slow violence of affective rule in a place of "no conflict." Turning away from spectacular instances of militarism and state violence, this essay illuminates the affective force of militarization whose goal is to disable critique and segment minority citizens into subordinated inclusion. It asks how collective political action might be heard and endure in such constrained conditions. This specific locus is instructive for the logic of contradistinction as a mode of security rule more widely. It demonstrates that the intersection of gender and religious identity is not a "dimension" of contemporary national security regimes but must be seen as foundational to their constitution and legitimacy.

The content of "international affairs" is now mostly the "internal affairs" of still sovereign nations. The imperatives that drive this internationalization of domestic affairs are political, economic, environmental, technological and moral. Nongovernmental people and organizations have a comparative advantage in penetrating the porous membranes of national sovereignty. The governance of a world with nobody in charge seems to require nonresponsible people who anticipate problems that responsible governments will later have to tackle.