Globalization, National Identity Violence: Exploring South Asian Masculinities in the New Millennium

As the new millennium arrives, South Asia is once again in a precarious state of instability. Nepal remains wracked by a popular insurgency. India and Pakistan – though as deeply as ever in Kashmir - are still cautiously negotiating talks about Peace talks.


Sri Lanka, on the other hand, stands uncertainly amidst a crumbling cease-fire. Suicide-bombers continue to assassinate selected targets. Peace talks seem as elusive as ever. Still, amazingly, in many ways the cease-fire itself has created a space for the regeneration of civil society, shattered by decades of war. Thus, learning from our national experience, we feel it is imperative to seize this moment of a pause in open hostilities across much of the region, to strengthen all components of civil society-including the independent research community, human rights groups, women’s and student’s organizations, trades unions and political parties – so that they may regroup and invest as intensely as possible in a long-term peace. Since in an age of globalization, what happens in one part of the sub-continent often affects other regions, cross-national efforts to strengthen civil society are perhaps the need of the day. For research organizations such as the ICES, this involves – among other things – identifying the radical changes which have taken place across significant sectors of South Asian society, which, if not adequately understood, would constrain efforts to build a just peace everywhere.


In Sri Lanka, the years 1983-2002 saw the eruption of at least 3 inter-ethnic wars and many lesser skirmishes between the majority Sinhalas and the Tamils and Muslim minorities. It also saw a violent uprising in the Sinhala-speaking south against the (Sinhala-dominated) Sri Lankan state between 1987-90, while Tamil militant groups continue to eliminate each other even today. India faced an uprising by Sikh militants in the late-1980s, which led to the destruction of much of the glorious Golden Temple – a symbol of Sikh identity -by the Indian army. By the 1990s, Kashmir had become a running sore with numerous armed groups advocating everything from Kashmiri independence to ceding to Pakistan. All parties to the conflict – including the Indian army - have engaged in the killing and mutilation of unarmed civilians, and the mass rape of women and children.


Such killings, mutilations, rape and the destruction of collective symbols create a climate where the most impoverished young men and adolescents of all communities become cannon fodder for causes espoused by ideologues of anti-state violence as well as state terror. Frequently built around ‘real’ issues such as religio-ethnic marginalization, class discrimination, and attacks on the Majority-ruled state by anti-state groupings, such ideological projects fuel feelings of acute besiegement of national identity in young militants as well as soldiers.


Such sentiments are heightened by the forces of globalization which were ushered in by the open-door policies of the 1980s and which by the 1990s had infused itself onto diverse localities across South Asia. Such globalization spawns new terrors of the vitiation of culture and collective-identity. Most of all, it creates anxieties about the ability to defend the ‘nation’ – both militarily and ideologically; about manhood, about the ineffectuality and effeteness of local codes of masculinity in the context of a global “War against Terror”, where bodily violence appears to have become something akin to a universal metaphor for ‘manhood.’


Such ideological anxieties pervade not only army barracks and militant camps. Through the influx of small arms, action movies, ‘imbedded’ war correspondents on international news bulletins, combat ‘training’ videos put-out by militant groups and ‘independent’ war documentaries, they also infuse themselves across a spectrum of male-dominated public sites, ranging from underworld gangs in the urban ghetto, student politics on the university campus, to the trade union shop-floor and the political party.


The 1980s and 1990s also witnessed the blossoming of a great deal of interest - particularly in South Asia - in issues such as women’s marginalization within development through what was thought to be the local workings of patriarchal discourses. In Sri Lanka, effects of war such as the continued displacement and the death/disappearance of malebread-winners push women further down the poverty cycle. Efforts by NGOs and INGOs to arrest this situation have indeed opened up spaces for the empowerment of women. At the same time, these decades have also seen a concurrent escalation in the incidence of rape and violence against women and children. Further, the rise of spectacular kinds of bodily male violence against other men espousing opposed causes are also a serious development. These processes cannot be fully understood without factoring-in the effects of patriarchal discourses such as globalization and war on men and the way in which these transform their everyday practice.


Here recent work on the effects of cultural globalization as well as the burgeoning literature on masculinity studies and collective violence offer new insights which are relevant to our understanding of the critical changes at work in South Asian society today.

This project is conceived as a fieldwork-based two-year cross-national study. It will include 5 locations in each country. It will involve a Principal Researcher based in Sri Lanka and a country coordinator in India and Pakistan. Fieldwork on each location will be conducted by research assistants under the supervision of the Principal Researcher and the Country Coordinators. Wherever possible, all interviews will be taped and transcribed in the original language of fieldwork, and subsequently translated into English.

The project will be divided into 5 phases which will be as follows:

1. A preliminary phase which will involve
   
   A literature survey
   
   Key informant interviews to assist in the location of fieldwork sites and respondents
   
   Collection of statistical materials
   
   
   
2. Qualitative fieldwork phase:
   
   This will be the main thrust of the project, which we hope to begin by month 4. Research assistants/fieldworkers will visit each location on 2-3 days a week and gather life narratives from respondents for a period of 9 months. The Principal Researcher/Coordinators will visit all sites for the first eight weeks and then each site as often as can be arranged. As often as possible, interviews will be taped. Where respondents say they do not want to be taped, the fieldworker will write-up the interview as soon after as possible. All names of respondents will be changed to one of their own choosing to protect their anonymity.
   
   
   The media study will involve the taping of all program on a chosen popular channel between 7.00 pm and 10.00 on three days of the week for a period of 4 months.
   
   
   All tapes will be first transcribed in the original language and then translated into English.
   
   
   A series of monthly discussions will be held on the comparative progress on each location, seen against trends identified in the literature and by key informants.
   
   
   
3. Midterm Review meeting of partner organizations to discuss local research findings
   
   
   
4. A write-up of the research findings by the Principal Researcher and country coordinators.
   
   
   
5. South Asian Regional Conference on Masculinities in the New Millennium to discuss the implications of research findings for women’s groups, peace/human rights activists and workers in combat rehabilitation programs.