Dr Maria Rashid

Maria Rashid is a critical military studies scholar and specializes in gender, militarism and affect theory. She is interested in comparative scholarship on militarism in South Asia and her work has involved researching the lived experiences and meaning making of those closest to the practices of war, soldiers and their families and migrants displaced due to conflict. She draws from feminist and intersectional approaches to militarism and affect with special attention to post coloniality in particular the post-colonial states, society and institutions in South Asia. Maria’s work incorporates geographical as well as social anthropological methods and perspectives in the study of militarism.

Before SOAS, Maria taught at the Department of Gender Studies at LSE on the Gender, Peace and Security, MSc degree. She has also been involved with the Partition of Identity (POI) project, a cross-university (UCL and LUMS) research initiative. The project studied the Bengali community in Pakistan through attention to the politics of memory and citizenship in Pakistan.

Maria completed her doctorate from the SOAS. Her monograph, Dying to Serve, Militarism, Affect and the Politics of Sacrifice in the Pakistan Army was published with Stanford University Press in 2020.  The award-winning book is a political ethnography that examines the nation-states’ ability to rationalise wars through its most poignant burden, the deaths of its soldiers. 

Maria has worked extensively with various national and international non-governmental groups and networks in South Asia including heading a national women and child rights organization for over 14 years in Pakistan. This has included policy advocacy with a particular focus on access to justice and state support services for survivors of gender-based violence (GBV). Maria was the lead team member involved in a NORAD assisted programme aimed at the institutionalization of a sensitization curriculum on GBV across police training institutes in Pakistan. 

Gender and Militarism, Military families, Affect theory, Politics of Memory, Pakistan, South Asia, Nationalism and Belonging.