Barbed Wire in an Agrarian Borderland

Abstract

Militarized borders have increased rapidly in the twenty-first century and come to be a global phenomenon. The high border wall built by the United States at its border with Mexico and the electrified fencing at the Hungarian border with Serbia are examples of the infrastructurally advanced Euro-American borders that have become icons of this phenomenon. Yet this tells only one part of the story of militarized borders: as I find in my research in the agrarian borderlands of India and Bangladesh, where the 4,096-km-long shared border has been steadily militarized over the past three decades, the border fence is only the most visible and spectacular element. Bits of barbed wire, halogen lights that shine all night, roving patrols by border security forces, restrictions on farming and fishing, and the enclosure of cultivable land for security encampments have all steadily turned vast areas of the Indian and the Bangladeshi borderlands into sites of national security. What might attention to the shifting materiality of an agrarian borderland reveal? In addressing such a question, this photographic essay foregrounds forms of militarization in agrarian borderlands and hopes to provoke a broader methodological and analytical debate about the visuality of borders in anthropological inquiry.