Abstract
There is no doubt that military occupation of civilian spaces and lives constitutes a fundamental structural violence. This is more easily apprehended in cases where exceptional violence is wrought by security forces on civilian populations, as in the Kashmir Valley in India. How do we grasp the effects of securitization on the political subjectivity of citizen-subjects in the absence of visible violence and overt political critique? This article ethnographically tracks civil-military interactions in Kargil, located on the disputed India-Pakistan borderland, to analyze the normalization of structural violence and the production of affective regimes that defy dichotomies of resistance and submission. These affective regimes are characterized by paradoxical emotions, which are integral to securitized practices of colonization of subject populations. However, it is these very paradoxes that also lend insight into the incomplete hegemony of the military apparatus expressed in ambivalent political subjectivities.
