Writing Stars in the Sky or Decentring the Glocal Discourse of the ‘War(S) on Terror’ through Narratives of Those Displaced

Abstract

ABSTRACTInscribing names into the firmament of symbolic orders is crucial argues Rancière who traces the symbolic distribution of bodies into those that ‘one sees’ and those that ‘one does not see’. The issue of accounted visibility-cum-audibility does not only lie within the specific conflict configuration but also within the geopolitical dynamics of the ‘border’ as well as ‘body-borders’ within individuals and communities concerned. One such case can be found at the borderlands of Pakistan with Afghanistan, of the trans-local post-9/11 ‘Wars on Terror’ as well as at the borderlands of Pakistan itself, subjected to invisibility and rumbling noises of conflict and displacement through hegemonic centring of discourses and exclusionary, violent practices of the ‘Wars on Terror’. This article is a collaborative work on experiences of conflict-induced displacement, political violence and narratives of everyday life negotiations thereof, based on field research and interviews (individual as well as group ones) conducted in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and around the capital of Islamabad with those internally displaced from North Waziristan, South Waziristan and Kurram Agencies. The aim is to juxtapose vociferous and deliberate hegemonic practices of invisibility and de-solidarisation in public discourses and counter-insurgency interventions vis-a-vis certain marginalised communities and citizens with the latter’s own narratives about their experiences and understandings of state-society relations, relevant stakeholders, public discourses and labelling practices used (such as ‘polio threat’ and ‘terrorist’). We attempt to trace and map how people experience and negotiate political violence, (protracted) conflict-induced displacement and the paucity of governance service provisions in a wider context of contested nation-building and transnational high-intensity conflict. Given repeated, cyclic and/or protracted experiences of displacement, flight and migration, combined with emerging narratives of marginalisation, exploitation and sociopolitical exclusion, one needs to ask what are the consequences of such transnational conflict and displacement configurations for individual as well as collective social resilience, withstanding ideological manipulation and cooptation into the conflict theatre, as well as for the capacity to develop and implement (alternative and sustainable) livelihoods in the different spaces one has to move in as an individual as well as a family-cum-community member in times of protracted conflict and displacement.