Destiny Effects: Militarization, State Power, and Punitive Containment in Kashmir Valley

Abstract

This paper examines the juridico-political logic of exception in Kashmir Valley to demonstrate how Kashmiri civilians have been identified as threats to national order and incarcerated, literally and figuratively, as prisoners of the state. Particular attention is paid to how intensive militarization, authorized through legal provision, produces patterns of impunity that exceed and operate beyond the domain of law. The claim is that triangulations of neo-liberalism, nationalism, and militarism in national security states produce a prevailing condition of punitive containment for marked categories of the population, leading to the sedimentation of inequalities through patterns of social suffering and social death.