Ethno-Territorialized Bodies: Necropolitics in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas and Non-violent Organic Resistance

For the last five decades, a neoliberal war has been raging through Pakistan’s Pashtun Tribal Areas bordering Afghanistan. The State of Pakistan has been an active shareholder in this never-ending “war on terror.” The State’s biopolitical and racializing policies continuously reproduce the logics through which the Tribal bodies are conveniently and invisibly subjected to a regime of death and maiming. In an attempt to unsettle the State’s biopolitical mandate, we combine Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Achille Mbembe’s necropolitics to map out the historical genealogy of the imperialist violence in the Tribal borderzone. Next, we delineate and examine three major State-deployed discursive strategies through which the exceptional position of this Tribal borderspace and the expendable status of its inhabitants are constructed and naturalized. Towards the end, we also discuss PTM, a grassroots civil rights anti-war movement which is mounting a notable resistance to the necropolitical regime through a non-violent praxis rooted in Pashtun cultural traditions of resistance. The PTM, we conclude, offers an organic counter Pashtun narrative to the world. The aim of the paper is to stimulate indigenous emancipatory perspectives in the academic literature on the Pashtun Tribal Areas and its people.