Techniques of disappearance: Unmaking Baloch worlds in Pakistan
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm
- Venue
- SOAS, University of London
- Room
- Khalili Lecture Theatre (main building)
About this event
This talk builds on over a decade of political and intellectual engagement with the Baloch movement against enforced disappearances and state violence by Pakistan.
In it, I will explore how this movement, primarily led by Baloch women, have theorised state-sanctioned abductions as one of several, entangled techniques of disappearances, including dispossession, displacement, extraction, disenfranchisement, politicide, censorship, epistemicide, destruction, and obfuscation.
Against a hermetic closure which reads this violence and resistance against it as a domestic issue – from the frame of ethnic conflict or serial and individuated human rights abuses – the talk will think about how it is connected to circulating, global techniques of imperial violence. And, against a tendency to look at Balochistan with theory from elsewhere – including critical theory on empire and race from elsewhere – I ask what a plurality of Baloch nationalist and movement theorisations of empire, colonialism, state, violence, and disappearance offers us as we seek to sharpen our intellectual and political analytics.
About the Speaker
Mahvish Ahmad works on shifting techniques of imperial and sovereign violence, the intellectual and political labour of movements targeted in repression, documentary practices in sites of disappearance, fugitive organising under conditions of war, and the material legacies of anti-colonial and left movements, especially in Balochistan and Pakistan.
She’s a co-founder of Revolutionary Papers (with C. Morgenstern, K. Benson), Archives of the Disappeared (with M. Qato, Y. Navaro, C. Morgenstern), and Tanqeed (with M. Tahir). She’s also a UK-based trustee of the South Asian Research and Resource Centre, founded by Ahmad Salim. She’s an Assistant Professor of Human Rights and Politics and a Co-Director of LSE Human Rights at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Mahvish Ahmad & Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur from revolutionarypapers.org
