Introduction: Between Loyalty and Critique Gender, Morality, Militancy

International 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 strengthened this legal status quo in the aftermath of the World Wars and the Cold War. Unresolved conflicts that remain as legacies of colonial governance appear within this framework as intra-state 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 international order, nation-states 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 struggles are routinely cast as “questions” or “issues” hints at the ways in which these geographies and their populations disturb the contemporary status quo. Situated at the margins of the nation-states 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 left ist 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 struggles 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 contested 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 different 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 violence, occupation, and dispossession? How is the political imagined in these contexts, and what forms of militant 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 resistance movements in Kurdistan, Kashmir, and Western Sahara. They explore how these movements’ struggles for alternative sovereignties and against colonial occupation and dispossession are translated into expectations 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 affective 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 interiority as its point of exercise and anchorage, emotions and attitudes of loyalty and allegiance become intensely charged nodes of attention.⁵ The regimes of affective belonging that expectations of loyalty and sacrifice create 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...