Proceedings of The 6th Global Conference on Women’s Studies
Year: 2024
DOI:
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Negotiating Military Hegemony: Women’s Everyday Form of Resistance in Balochistan, Pakistan
Kinza Fatima
ABSTRACT:
Baloch women have navigated, negotiated, and resisted Pakistani militarization in Balochistan Province of Pakistan since the inception of Pakistan in 1947. Balochistan is a mineral-rich region with a disputed border with Southern Afghanistan and Southeastern Iran and has one of the largest Baloch ethnic communities. Women have played significant roles in resisting human rights violations and militarization in the region. Historically, women’s agency and everyday resistance in a multi-ethnic country like Pakistan have been overlooked in the scholarship on militarization. Nonetheless, the long-term militarization of the Balochistan region of Pakistan has had significant gendered consequences. The history of political violence in Balochistan is rooted in a complex web of political, economic, and cultural factors, and this shapes the lives and subjectivities of Baloch women. Considering my positionality, who belongs from Balochistan, and pursuing my graduate studies in the USA, my research explores women’s everyday resistance to militarization and securitization in Balochistan through a decolonial and transnational feminist lens. Through the oral history interviews, and ethnographic research methodologies, I address militarized violence, processes of (in)securitization, and how Baloch women create practices of everyday resistance that offer new ways to think about gender-sensitive human security and imagine a democratic liberation.
keywords: Balochistan; Human Rights; Militarization; Women’s Resistance