Narratives of violence and resistance in Waziristan: examining the Mahsud-State engagement in post-colonial Pakistan

This thesis aims to deconstruct the Pakistani state’s militarisation to secure its western periphery from 2009 to 2023, specifically looking at two temporal developments: the post-conflict displacements in South Waziristan (2009) and the political merger of FATA into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province (2018). It does this by examining the perceptions, experiences, and responses to the state militarisation from the point of view of the Mahsud, a rural community from this region. Understanding security/insecurity, militarisation, and violence in the everyday is furthered by this original research. This research’s central question is: How has the state’s securitisation of South Waziristan impacted the Mahsud? This thesis examines violence and political developments in post-conflict Waziristan through the lens of ‘gendered experiences’ of insecurity, as proposed by Sjoberg (2016a). The gendered experience lens provides a fresh perspective on comprehending the perception and experience of security among individuals, uncovering the role of ‘gender hierarchies’ and ‘gendered hierarchies’ in shaping state policies and personal encounters with security and violence.
It argues that the state’s securitisation of the periphery (Waziristan) resulted in further insecurities and violence, exacerbating the alienation between the state and the Mahsud. The second argument traced across the four empirical chapters is that emotions significantly shape Mahsud-state relations. The emotional aspects are significant in studying state and social behaviour through the case study of the Mahsud. Third, violence by state and local power structures to subordinate people, particularly women, reinforces gendering and the use of honour and shame tied to national pride and culture. It contends that the Mahsud women demonstrate active agency in negotiating with power structures.
The thesis contributes broadly to multidisciplinary scholarship, and more specifically to feminist geopolitics, feminist works in intimate (geo)politics, area studies focusing on post-colonial states in the Global South, and security studies. It takes a spatial perspective of violence and security from the intimate microsites of the body and the home to the more significant national and international sites of militarisation and geopolitics.
The thesis provides a nuanced understanding of Pakistan’s state behaviour beyond traditional security and IR readings, challenging its representation in geopolitical and security literature. Second, it contributes to the geographies of emotions by unravelling emotions and insecurities amidst the Mahsud people’s experiences of the state. Third, the case study of Mahsud women contributes to the understanding of everyday, gendered experiences of the state and women’s agency in facing multiple forms of violence. Fourth, by focusing on women’s perspective, the research examines women-state relations in conflict areas of Pakistan’s borderlands, addressing gaps in the literature on South Asian states. Finally, it advances the understanding of honour’s gendered construct in state-society dynamics characterised by structural and cultural violence.

Keywords: FATA-KPK merger
feminist geo(politics)
Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands
Mahsud women
Waziristan
violence
resistance
women's agency and resistance
geographies of loss and hope
militarisation
emotions and affects
conflict-led displacements
state behaviour
Advisor: Ahearn-Ligham, A
Chaudhury, A