The Ethical Ambivalence of Resistant Violence: Notes from Postcolonial South Asia

Srila Roy

doi:10.1057/fr.2008.53

Abstract

In the face of mounting militarism in south Asia, this essay turns to anti-state, ‘liberatory’ movements in the region that employ violence to achieve their political aims. It explores some of the ethical quandaries that arise from the embrace of such violence, particularly for feminists for whom political violence and militarism is today a moot point. Feminist responses towards resistant political violence have, however, been less straightforward than towards the violence of the state, suggesting a more ambivalent ethical position towards the former than the latter. The nature of this ambivalence can be located in a postcolonial feminist ethics that is conceptually committed to the use of political violence in certain, albeit exceptional circumstances on the basis of the ethical ends that this violence (as opposed to other oppressive violence) serves. In opening up this ethical ambivalence — or the ethics of ambiguity, as Simone de Beauvoir says — to interrogation and reflection, I underscore the difficulties involved in ethically discriminating between forms of violence, especially when we consider the manner in which such distinctions rely on and reproduce gendered modes of power. This raises particular problems for current feminist appraisals of resistant political violence as an expression of women's empowerment and ‘agency’.

Highlights

Political violence and militarization have become an indelible part of the narrative of postcolonial south Asia
Should feminists argue for women‟s equal rights to take up arms against repression and injustice or should they champion the democraticisation and demilitarisation of such struggles? Should they celebrate the unexpectedly large numbers of women that have joined the ranks of south Asian insurgencies as a measure of their „agency‟ or should they challenge the militarization of women‟s identities therein? Like Virginia Woolf, should they seek to liberate men and masculinity from militarism or insist on the expansion of the sphere of war and combat to include women? At the heart of these ethical quandaries lie certain assumptions about violence, power and gender that need to be interrogated or at least reflected on
In other words, be concerned with gender or sexual difference alone at the cost of addressing a more complex moral economy of rationalizing and reproducing violence and war to which „woman‟ is central. Even such a limited appraisal should make obvious the complexities involved in articulating a feminist ethics of resistant political violence in contemporary south Asia

Summary

Introduction

Political violence and militarization have become an indelible part of the narrative of postcolonial south Asia. The recent visibility of women as perpetrators and not strictly as victims of armed conflict is partly responsible for this more reflexive stance toward political violence.iv Women‟s active involvement in militarised political cultures such as the LTTE in Sri Lanka and Maoist groups in Nepal (and to a lesser extent, in India) has raised specific concerns for the feminist project; one of acknowledging the possibility of women‟s empowerment in the „crucible of a militarized, hierarchical, authoritarian culture of violent politics‟ (Manchanda 2004:237).

Results

Conclusion