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Between Loyalty and Critique: Gender, Morality, Militancy

2020, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

https://doi.org/10.1215/1089201X-8186115

Introduction to CSSAAME special section on loyalty and critique in resistance movements, with contributions on Kashmir, Western Sahara and Kurdistan

B E T W E E N L O Y A L T Y a n d C R I T I Q U E Introduction Between Loyalty and Critique Gender, Morality, Militancy Marlene Schäfers and Esin Düzel nternational law recognizes sovereignty solely on the basis of territory, thereby legitimizing states’ use of violence to control their territorial borders. Narrowly defined notions of order, peace, and security have only strength­ ened this legal status quo in the afermath of the World Wars and the Cold War. Unresolved conflicts that remain as legacies of colonial governance appear within this framework as intra­state conflicts that can be managed by an amalgam of violent counterinsurgency strategies, ambiguous conflict resolution policies, and fragile peace processes. While current migration flows and environmental and economic crises threaten to unsettle this inter­ national order, nation­states respond with increased securitization and militarization of their borders as well as racialized nationalist rhetoric. These new technologies of sovereignty expand upon previous forms of “occupation and dispossession,”1 creating new sites of exception, violence, and resistance. Despite their historical particularities and geographic distance, contemporary Kashmir, Kurdistan, and Western Sahara share trajectories of conflict that reflect the complexities, contradictions, and dilemmas of this postcolonial order. The fact that all three protracted strugles are routinely cast as “questions” or “issues” hints at the ways in which these geographies and their popu­ lations disturb the contemporary status quo. Situated at the margins of the nation­states that claim hegemony over them, these regions challenge the fantasies of unity, belonging, and coherence on which the nationalisms that rule them are built. Cast as spaces of exception, it is here that the originary violence founding the modern state routinely manifests itself.2 At the same time, however, these are also important spaces of resistance that have exposed the limits of nationalist, colonial, and racial regimes of domination. Nourished by the enthusiasm and urgency of decolonization and lefist militancy, resistance movements in Kurdi­ stan, Kashmir, and Western Sahara came of age in the polarized world of the Cold War. Over the last half century, their strugles have engendered durable organizational structures, authoritative hierarchies, and their own moral codes of conduct. In Western Sahara, the ruling Sahrawi National Liberation Movement of the Polisario Front has established a parastate in exile in Algeria and governs de facto over the territory east of the Moroccan berm that divides the con­ tested territory in two to this day. In Turkey, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) commands a standing guerrilla army and can draw on powerful urban networks, while its sister party, the Democratic Union Party (PYD), is seeking to establish an autonomous zone of governance in Northern Syria. In Kashmir, the azaadi (freedom) movement, made up of diferent organizations including the Hurriyat Conference, the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, and the Hizbul Mujahideen, organizes popular protests and armed resistance against the Indian state’s military occupation.3 How are resistance movements able to sustain political commitment and morale amid continuing state vio­ lence, occupation, and dispossession? How is the political imagined in these contexts, and what forms of militant I Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East Vol. 40, No. 1, 2020 • doi 10.1215/1089201X-8186115 • © 2020 by Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/40/1/115/800649/115schafers.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user 115 116 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • subjectivities, gender constructs, and political values are mobilized? The five articles gathered in this special section take up these questions by ethnographically considering the complex internal dynamics of resis­ tance movements in Kurdistan, Kashmir, and Western Sahara. They explore how these movements’ strugles for alternative sovereignties and against colonial occu­ pation and dispossession are translated into expecta­ tions of loyalty, accusations of betrayal, and practices of critique. They approach the proliferation of anxieties about loyalty and treason in these protracted conflicts as evidence of the fact that conflicts over sovereignty are always also conflicts over afective belonging, moral values, and the shaping of intimate lives and gendered subjectivity. Histories of treason demonstrate that it is only with the emergence of the modern state that subjects’ interior attitudes toward the nation became an issue of concern.4 As power takes the subject and its interi­ ority as its point of exercise and anchorage, emotions and attitudes of loyalty and allegiance become intensely charged nodes of attention.5 The regimes of afective belonging that expectations of loyalty and sacrifice cre­ ate may from this perspective be understood as a way of demarcating the boundaries of that crucial signifier “the people” on which modern sovereignty rests. The enemy gives cohesion to the national community as the constitutive exterior threat against which the nation defines itself, and can therefore be killed with impu­ nity.6 The traitor, however, occupies a more ambiguous position as the hidden enemy lurking within. Where the enemy is clearly demarcated, the traitor remains a murky figure, one who feigns loyalty yet betrays it in secret. If treason is the flipside of the allegiance constitut­ ing the sovereign body of the people, then allegations of betrayal may be understood as ways of conjuring that very body and the authority exerted on its behalf. “To make an accusation of treason is to make a claim to power,” Tobias Kelly and Sharika Thiranagama assert.7 Policing the boundaries of loyalty is a move that defi­ nes the political community and at the same time rec­ ognizes that betrayal potentially haunts all intimate relations.8 While enemies constitute a community’s performative exterior, traitors arise from within fami­ lies, or are friends and comrades thought of as trusted allies. Treason thus introduces unbearable ambiguity and doubt into intimate relationships—relationships that, as Michael Herzfeld’s work reminds us, crucially define a political community’s identity.9 Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/40/1/115/800649/115schafers.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user 40.1 • 2020 As resistance movements seek to establish alterna­ tive regimes of belonging to those of the state, notions of loyalty and betrayal are key not only to demarcate the boundaries of the community of loyal followers, but also to uphold political commitment and moral cohe­ sion. The social labor of purging intimate spaces of ambiguity and suspicion represents a key mechanism for resistance movements to ensure the cohesion of their constituencies and uphold legitimacy. As the arti­ cles in this special section of CSSAAME show, colonial occupation in this way lodges binary logics of friend and foe, follower and traitor at the heart of communi­ ties whose loyalty is fiercely fought over, shaping the grounds of everyday interaction and intimate relations. The articles in this issue explore how Kurdish, Sahrawi, and Kashmiri militants, activists, and follow­ ers of resistance movements navigate, challenge, or reinforce the binary logics of loyalty and critique that violent conflict and occupation have rendered central to their lives. Here we would like to highlight three major contributions that this special section makes to anthropological studies of resistance, conflict, and morality. First, we draw attention to resistance as an undertaking that seeks to change not just political but also moral lifeworlds. This means that resistance move­ ments are intensely preoccupied with the contours of militant subjectivity and continuously haunted by the illegibility of subjecthood. Second, we maintain that analytic attention to gender allows us to better compre­ hend how and with what efects the political becomes lodged at the heart of personal, intimate, and familial lives in contexts of violent conflict and military occupa­ tion. Third, we sugest that attention to the morality of political resistance allows us to grasp the anxieties, dilemmas, and conundrums resistance movements face at a moment when rights discourses are increasingly central to the apportioning of political legitimacy and logics of humanitarianism govern the distribution of material resources and financial funds. Let us turn to each of these points in turn. (1) Loyalty, this special section demonstrates, needs to be approached as a question of subject formation, rather than merely a choice between one or another political attachment.10 Contexts of occupation and vio­ lent conflict, we sugest, put under intense scrutiny the interiority of the subject. In all five articles in this special section, the determination of loyalty revolves around attempts at making legible subjects’ “genuine” feelings, convictions, and attachments through their exterior acts. Yet because exterior acts and bodies are Marlene Schäfers and Esin Düzel notoriously difcult to read for what they say about the interiority of subjects, contexts of occupation and vio­ lent conflict become sufused with a hermeneutics of suspicion. This renders the interiority of the subject, her or his “deeper” loyalties and “true” allegiances, a site of immense anxiety, requiring continuous atten­ tion, rigorous disciplining, and relentless surveillance. In Kashmir, for instance, the performance of proper widowhood becomes a linchpin for determining a woman’s political loyalties, without ever being able to erase all suspicions of betrayal, as Mohamad Junaid sugests. In Kurdistan beauty practices similarly serve as an embodied barometer for gauging political alle­ giance and belonging while also operating as a space for renegotiating the adroit association between embodied appearance and political positionality (see Esin Düzel’s “Beauty for Harmony”). (2) We sugest that one consequence of this intense scrutiny of subjective interiority is that questions of political loyalty become anchored in intimate, familial, and personal spheres of life. If treason is premised on the existence of intimacy, accusations of betrayal are as much attempts at maintaining the intimate as a space of trust and clarity as they are acknowledgments of the ever­present potentiality of betrayal. As the articles demonstrate ethnographically, life in contexts of con­ flict and occupation is pervaded by moral ambiguities that tightly interlace the political with the personal. In these contexts, it becomes painfully difcult to distin­ guish between friend and foe, follower and traitor, vic­ tim and perpetrator. In such contexts, the search for moral clarity that seeks to punish betrayal in the name of political unity ends up inviting the exclusionary logics of conflict into community life in ways that are always already gendered. As feminist scholarship has shown, women’s intimate and sexual lives are routinely transposed onto the moral respectability of the nation.11 This explains why women are particularly vulnerable to accusations of failed loyalty and transgressing com­ munal norms, and why their bodies and comportment routinely emerge as sites where allegiance is anchored and treason made manifest. Amid greater policing of women’s intimate lives in the name of the collective, women routinely emerge as “loyal critics” who, as Viv­ ian Solana describes in “Between Publics and Privates,” “inhabit the narrow threshold between intimately gen­ dered displays of national loyalty and accusations of betrayal.” As Marlene Schäfers’s contribution, “Walk­ ing a Fine Line,” highlights, women’s gendered cri­ tiques of their own resistance movements have the Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/40/1/115/800649/115schafers.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user • Introduction • Between Loyalty and Critique capacity to reconfigure the moral and gendered bar­ gains on which these movements rely. (3) Finally, the authors contributing to this sec­ tion emphasize how the pressures of loy alty and alle­ giance that flourish in contexts of occupation and counter insurgency become reconfigured in contem­ porary contexts of neoliberal political economies and global human rights regimes. Dispossessed of the legiti­ macy bestowed by territorially based sovereignty, resis­ tance movements feel pressure to turn to the language of human and women’s rights, where they become increasingly dependent on global aid and development industries. These new forms of political activism in the realm of civil society, project administration, and humanitarian intervention pose important dilemmas for resistance movements that rely on the values of radical militancy. Followers of resistance movements actively negotiate the resulting pressures rather than being exposed to global governmental regimes without any agency. As the essays by Schäfers, Düzel, and Solana demonstrate, an international discourse of women’s empowerment, for instance, is a particularly strong source of legitimacy in global political regimes, and resistance contains that discourse while refracting it through its own dynamics of loyalty and critique. Under these conditions, women ofen become “hypervisible” actors within political resistance. As Solana shows, this hypervisibility may serve the reproduction of spaces that allow for the regeneration of militant subjectivi­ ties at the same time that it raises the stakes attached to women’s public presence and multiplies anxieties about their adherence to accepted models of political becom­ ing and to globally circulating notions of legitimate political agency. While navigating such difcult terrains, followers of resistance movements also open up space for new forms of political subjectivity that go beyond nation­ alist binaries. Mark Drury’s article, for instance, shows how the dynamics of humanitarian aid and develop­ ment have reconfigured what used to be a treasonous move from the Polisario­ruled refugee camps in Algeria into Moroccan­occupied Western Sahara into a much more ambiguous subject position that refuses the link between territory and political commitment. The Kurd­ ish female singers in Schäfers’s contribution similarly seek to establish culture as a realm of engagement that evades political binaries, while Düzel highlights how beauty practices become a terrain where new forms of subjectivity are forged. Yet such new forms of political agency remain haunted by the violent contexts of colonial 117 118 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • occupation that bring them forth: forms of disidentifi­ cation and ambiguity are yet to shif the binds of loyalty and critique into new forms of doing politics. Marlene Schäfers holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Cambridge and is currently a British Academy Newton International Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Her research focuses on the impact of state vio­ lence on intimate and gendered lives, the politics of memory and history, and the intersections of afect and politics. She specializes in the anthropology of the Kurdish regions and modern Turkey. Her work has been published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Society, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, and Social Anthropology. She is associate editor of Kurdish Studies. Esin Düzel is a socio/cultural anthropologist with a PhD from the University of California, San Diego, and a teaching fellow in the European Institute, at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her work is concerned with radical, utopian, and peace movements and their moral universe, transnational feminist analy­ sis of female empowerment and agency in militarized environments, and moral and emotional dimensions of the transnational justice projects. She has worked and lived in Turkey, Turkey’s Kurdistan, Finland, the USA, and the UK. Her ar ticle on the Kurdish female guerrillas’ diaries and memoirs won the 2016 Cynthia Enloe Award from the International Feminist Journal of Politics. Notes We would like to thank the authors of this issue for the lively con­ versations we have had starting with our panel at the 2016 Ameri­ can Anthropological Association’s annual meeting in Minneapolis and continuing online in our disparate locations across the world. We also would like to thank the senior editors of CSSAAME, Marwa Elshakry and Anupama Rao, editorial assistant Zeinab Azarbadegan, and managing editor Liz Beasley for their support in seeing this pro­ ject through to finalization. As all of the authors point out, the arti­ cles benefited greatly from the feedback ofered by anonymous peer reviewers; we thank them sincerely. Also special thanks to Sophie Richter­Devroe and Veronica Bufon for their contributions to the panel and later conversations. 1. Visweswaran, Everyday Occupations. 2. Lowe, “The Gender of Sovereignty.” 3. For the numerous women’s organizations, both violent and nonvi­ olent, in Kashmir, see Parashar, Gender, Jihad, and Jingoism. 4. See, for instance, Cunningham, Imaginary Betrayals; Eichensehr, “Treason in the Age of Terrorism”; Orr, Treason and the State. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/cssaame/article-pdf/40/1/115/800649/115schafers.pdf by UC SAN DIEGO LIBRARY user 40.1 • 2020 5. Foucault, The Will to Knowledge. 6. Agamben, States of Exception. 7. Kelly and Thiranagama, “Introduction,” 3. 8. Geschiere, The Modernity of Witchcraft. 9. Herzfeld, Cultural Intimacy. 10. Compare Humphrey, “Loyalty and Disloyalty.” 11. Nagel, “Masculinity and Nationalism”; Stoler, “Making Empire Respectable.” References Agamben, Giorgio. States of Exception. Chicago: University of Chi­ cago Press, 2005. Cunningham, Karen. Imaginary Betrayals: Subjectivity and the Discourses of Treason in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: Uni­ versity of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Eichensehr, Kristen. “Treason in the Age of Terrorism: An Explana­ tion and Evaluation of Treason’s Return in Democratic States.” Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 42, no. 5 (2009): 1443– 507. Foucault, Michel. The Will to Knowledge. Vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality. London: Penguin Books, 1998. Geschiere, Peter. The Modernity of Witchcraft: Politics and the Occult in Postcolonial Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1997. Herzfeld, Michael. Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State. New York: Routledge, 1997. Humphrey, Caroline. “Loyalty and Disloyalty as Relational Forms in Russia’s Border War with China in the 1960s.” History and Anthropology 28, no. 4 (2017): 497–514. Kelly, Tobias, and Sharika Thiranagama. “Introduction: Specters of Treason.” In Traitors: Suspicion, Intimacy, and the Ethics of StateBuilding, edited by Sharika Thiranagama and Tobias Kelly, 1–23. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Lowe, Lisa. “The Gender of Sovereignty.” The Scholar and Feminist Online 6, no. 3 (2008). Nagel, Joana. “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21, no. 2 (1998): 242–69. Orr, D. Alan. Treason and the State: Law, Politics and Ideology in the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Parashar, Swati. “Gender, Jihad, and Jingoism: Women as Perpetra­ tors, Planners, and Patrons of Militancy in Kashmir.” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 34, no. 4 (2011): 295–317. Stoler, Ann L. “Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth­Century Colonial Culture.” American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (1989): 634–60. Visweswaran, Kamala, ed. Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.