Anti-imperial feminist geographies: resisting
Vasuki Nesiah has argued that genocide should be thought not so much as an extraordinary event that is spatiotemporally bound, but as a ‘world-making project’. But what kind of a world is being made through genocide, and what enables its possibility? Histories of colonisation and contemporary formations like the War on Terror have constructed large parts of the Muslim world as ‘abject spaces’ where drone attacks, enforced disappearances, forced displacement, dispossession and war become possible, legitimised, and routine. Drawing a link between colonial and contemporary practices of securitisation in Pakistan with the occupation and unfolding genocide in Palestine, we argue that security practices and tools of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency are being utilised to justify and impose forms of imperial governance across these geographies. This not only includes direct imposition of war, but also support for local authoritarian set-ups that crush resistance and embed a politics of security. It creates gendered stereotypes of dangerous Muslim men and instrumentalises Muslim women, while enabling large-scale displacement and dispossession of land and resources. The effects of such security governance thus operate at the scale of the body, territory, and the geopolitical. In turn, women and feminist organisers from Pakistan to Palestine and beyond resist not only patriarchal oppression but also the dehumanisation of men in their communities, and their dispossession from land and the theft of their resources. To take genocide seriously as a feminist issue therefore requires that we pay attention to the geographies of women’s resistance and solidarity across the Muslim world.
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