Spaces of informal militarism: Analysing violence, resistance, and militarism in contemporary India

This research has two objectives: (1) To use militarism as a conceptual lens to study contemporary violence in India and (2) To develop a provincialized framework for informal militarism in India. This research explores the informalisation of and resistance to militarism in India under the rule of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). It uses the ongoing protest movement against the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) as a case study to analyse this trend. The controversial CAA has been associated with a rise in violence against marginalised populations, especially Muslims, and has given rise to increasingly militarised resistance and counter-resistance movements. However, existing frameworks of militarism, most of which are developed in a narrow set of 'western' contexts are not effective in identifying the full scope of this largely unregulated and informal militarism. These frameworks are drawn from western conceptions of security and military and are based in western socio-political structures, which limits their application in postwestern contexts (Rodriguez, 2018). This research adopts postcolonial and feminist approaches to contextualise militarism and resistance to militarism in the Indian context, focusing on Delhi and Kolkata. It employs rich qualitative methods including participatory observation, focus groups and social media analysis to understand the spatial, material, and discursive impacts of militarism and its resistance in India. It draws from and contributes to critical military studies, critical security studies and feminist geopolitics, bringing these bodies of work together in an important yet underexplored context. The research is timely considering the proliferation of militarised political violence globally.