Powers of the Gun: On Violence, Frontier and Community

Abstract

ABSTRACT Since the mid-1990s, the Free Burma Rangers (FBR) – a self-defined ‘multi-ethnic humanitarian movement’ operating in Myanmar, Iraq, Syria, and South Sudan – has supported and trained rebel movements and civil society organisations to create spaces of relief and rescue in war zones at the frontiers of their polities. Central to the FBR’s logic and praxis is the use and governing of weapons as military means in order to ‘immunise’ communities of the oppressed from violence. Aside from their politically disputed character, this article takes the activities of the FBR as an entry point to ask: how are the relations between weapons and humans governed in war frontiers? And how does the management of military means reproduce different forms of political community with their political space? Situating these questions in political geography’s literature on frontiers, the article brings in dialogue Roberto Esposito’s analysis on the relationship between violence and (political/impolitical) community with critical approaches on weapons in security studies to show how violence, frontier, and community stand in a co-constitutive relation. Rather than looking at violence and military means as an instrument for the territorialisation of an ideological-political project at the frontier, I analyse the frontier as a politico-military device consubstantial to a political community with its biological body and political space. Drawing from fieldwork methods, I argue that the governing of human-firearms relations constitutes the political community and the human subjectivities part of it by producing frontiers as zones of distinction and encounter between the civilised and the ‘not yet’. The paper contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it empirically substantiates the co-constitutive rather than instrumental relation between violence and the frontier. Second, it shows how the immunitary apparatuses that govern the encounters between humans and weapons, in shaping the political community, shape also ‘the dehumanisation of Man’s human Others’. Third, zooming onto the life experiences of activists taking part to FBR and resistance forces, it differentiates between the political and impolitical forms of community produced by managing violence.