Sahana Ghosh’s article ethnographically explores soldiering in independent India, focusing on the Border Security Force or BSF. Drawing on feminist thought and the political anthropology of security regimes and putting them in conversation with a materialist approach to space, Ghosh contends that borderland barracks are critical to the expansionist logic as well as endurance of what she terms “constructive security.” National security geography, Ghosh observes, is not upheld merely by a map of security “threats.” For the soldier, it is lived in and encountered as sites of standardized duty and dwelling, where violence and normative forms of care as social reproduction remain deeply entangled and are simultaneously imagined and experienced in the everyday through time and space. Ghosh writes, “The institutionalized protection and provision for the soldier’s heteronormative family and its reproduction lies at the heart of the expansion of the postcolonial security state.” The logic and architecture of constructive security organizes both (hetero)normative space and (re)productive labor, while managing and governing bodies and relations, in service of the independent Indian state’s security needs. Heteronormative kinship and reproductive care, Ghosh argues, not only constitute the security institution but also significantly contribute to its efficiency, while also laying bare the disruptive and violent potential as well as the mobilization of care itself.

In this interview, Ghosh elaborates on the spatial work that goes behind preserving the national security state and seductions and failures of welfare for those bound to serve it directly. She notes how love, desire, and transgressions associated with them play out in the BSF barracks and housing quarters, which render unstable structures and statist forms of care, and how care and welfare for soldiers is prioritized, and gets materialized, at the cost of borderland civilians’ lives, land, and occupations. At the heart of this conversation is the spatial work that constitutes constructive security, which brings into being a geography of national security, as the author observes, “as much discursively as materially, infrastructurally, and experientially.”

Sohini Chatterjee [SC]: Could you begin by telling us about the process through which you arrived at your research questions, pertaining to care and social reproduction that uphold military function and labour, in the context of the anthropology of security? Your article critically explores the embodied experiences of soldiers and officers in the Border Security Force (BSF) inhabiting India’s borderlands, borderlands turned into barracks, and border outposts. Could you tell us why this was an important ethnographic project to undertake and what motivated you toward it?

Sahana Ghosh [SG]: Thank you for your great questions and this deep engagement with the article!

The seeds of this article are in the most immersive phase of my dissertation fieldwork—now more than a decade ago—when I was living in the borderlands of eastern India. In numerous conversations that I had with soldiers of the Border Security Force (BSF) posted along the India-Bangladesh border—like Sunil or Yash in the article—they emphasized the difficult conditions of their work. They attributed the difficulties both to the borderlands itself (its physical and human geography) as well as to institutional factors (long hours, inadequate leave, stringent disciplinary mechanisms). At that time I was most struck by the profound disjuncture between how borderland residents experienced the presence of the security forces (the subject of my first book, A Thousand Tiny Cuts) and how the soldiers experienced the borderlands as a place of work. But I was not really able to attend to the latter beyond noting the disjuncture and the often harmful consequences it has for residents. However, it attuned me to what are the core ethnographic questions of this article: How do the soldiers and officers in the BSF experience and inhabit places like borderlands? What priorities and perspectives motivate their everyday working lives and in turn animate the visions, claims, and privileged order of security institutions?

Pursuing these questions—and analyzing soldiers’ phenomenological experiences of borderlands as workplaces—over the years revealed to me so clearly the spatial work that goes into consolidating this privileged order of the national security state. So actually I started with the spatial elements of this article’s argument, not those about care and social reproduction. The growing anthropology of policing and security acknowledges the need to study the security state and those who do its work/work in it, apart from the overwhelming and usual anthropological focus on those who are the targets of the security state. It was by putting in dialogue interdisciplinary debates in critical security studies, feminist studies, with political anthropology and political geography that the analysis of socio-spatial infrastructures of care in/through barracks emerged.

In pursuing this ethnographic project, I was keen to develop further some of my ongoing critical engagements with the anthropology of security. I wanted to take seriously the histories, genealogies, political economy, cultural politics, and equally frictions, tensions, and contingencies of security institutions in the majority world, such as postcolonial India (al-Bulushi et al. 2022). Feminist interventions have long pushed us to look beyond masculinist frontlines and conceptions of security expertise to locate, study, and theorize the very many other sites, modalities, and logics in and through which security regimes operate (al-Bulushi et al. 2023). We have a lot of work to do to understand how security regimes are consolidated and maintained if we want to develop solidarities across relational geographies and imagine worlds otherwise.

SC: In your article, you demonstrate that violence of security requires, and is constitutive of, heteronormative, statist initiatives of care, and carefully regulated, delimited forms of homosocial intimacies in the guise of welfare for BSF soldiers, primarily to ensure their longevity in the security force and their effectiveness in the service of national security. However, statist extensions of care and welfarism also accompany punishments or disapprobation for perceived indiscipline and dereliction of duty. Care is dependent on obedience to norms of militarized masculinity as well as loyal service to the security state. If transactional forms of care sustain security states, care, as you very astutely observe, becomes an essential tool of security. Can care also be securitized by states? If so, what consequences does it hold for its highly expendable foot soldiers or those who inhabiting the lowest rungs in security forces?

SG: Yes, absolutely! As I listened to soldiers and officers talk about the challenges of their work and workplaces and documented infrastructures of the BSF expand and improve over the years, I was struck by the fact that complaints were being heard, calls for care were being listened to—many of them, but not all. Carefully following as these materialize across disparate times and places was revealing, examples of which I describe in the article. In my analysis of the security state’s provisions and policing of care and social reproduction, I have been deeply influenced by the brilliant feminist political economy analysis of scholars like Michelle Murphy and Sarah Besky. For instance, Besky’s analysis of the plantation’s outsides (2021) or the provision of housing (2017) demonstrate how these can and should be conceptualized as key sites of plantation capitalism. In a similar fashion, this article invites us to conceptualize infrastructures of care and social reproduction for military labor, and the logics that take shape through them, as key sites of militarism, not its effects nor peripheral.

The dynamic relationships of care and welfare need close engagement: what welfare is, what is demanded, what is withheld, and how its instrumentalization shapes lives of soldiers, families, and the security institution. In the absence of conscription, welfare is one of the important material attractions for young people, and it is the security state’s promise to them. It is also, as I have learned, one of the chief disappointments and arenas of tremendous friction. As such, you would think that welfare—the promise to provide for all manner of care besides wages—makes the security state possible and durable, and yet as the article parses, the violence of care, the securitization of care, and the intermingling of violence and care means that welfare also becomes the ever-receding horizon (yes better food but not enough rest, yes better barracks but not enough leaves, yes more leaves but not enough sex) and so on. In other words, what soldiers demand in care (and they are clearly demanding much more now than, say, a generation or two ago) is not necessarily what the state provides or defines as welfare.

This article is a part of a larger book project on the gendered political economy of soldiering and the security state in postcolonial India, in which I am elaborating on the different ways in which the provisioning and policing of social reproduction becomes the business of the security state, understood even in emic terms to be key to the efficiency and control of its institutions. For instance, as I discuss in the third section of the article, the sexual needs of male soldiers is acknowledged and of great concern as that which has to be provided for and also policed within the heteronormative familial fold. Sex and sexuality are hugely important and contentious subjects—with young women now employed in the BSF, barracks and housing quarters can be sites of love, desire, and transgression, stories of soldiers’ wives having affairs and thereby causing distress to soldiers abound, and so on. These explode as matters of anxiety in their excesses and power to destabilize the very structures and terms of care into which the security state is so invested. These contestations are thus consequential, for they reveal militarism in postcolonial India—and elsewhere—as historically dynamic in unpredictable ways. The national security state is far from stable even in its objectives, and the horizons of what kind of a security regime it is becoming are under construction.

SC: You coin the term “constructive security” to denote how actors of state security impel the “production and consolidation of a national geography of security” (225) through the establishment of material infrastructures “that hinge social and spatial relations within and around the security institution and provision for soldiers’ predominantly reproductive needs” (225). Constructive security, among other things, is also geared toward exhibiting preventive functions, as is evident from your article. Constructive security is an effort toward, for example, preventing suicides, which, as you rightly contend, threaten the capabilities of the state to regulate and reproduce its military power and labor. “Constructive security,” therefore, is constituted by its affective dimensions. It creates infrastructures that can offer affective, sexual, and embodied sustenance to BSF personnel. But constructive security, as you significantly delineate, is also geared toward the consolidation of certain forms of normative intimacies over others, depending on which forms of sociality and intimacy security states deem critical to the proliferation of its military power. It does not just seem to offer infrastructures of affective and material support, it also places limits upon which forms of support can be made available, and which should never be sought. As a result of the complexities associated with constructive security’s highly regulated affective infrastructures and offerings, what does constructive security diminish and take away from the lives of soldiers? How does “constructive security” propel certain forms of relationalities to be bounded and enclosed in the service of the security state, whereas others get evicted, stigmatized, and rendered inconsequential or perilously consequential?

SG: Thank you for this close reading—it’s a treat to expand and clarify through this conversation. My point of departure is to examine “how security regimes occupy and militarize space in times and places democratically, not in war but in war-preparedness” (226). The logic of constructive security centers soldiers’ experiences, reconfiguring borderlands as places of work, privileging national security needs over a long period of time and, intentionally, for durability. Doing so mobilizes an infrastructural investment into the spatial, temporal, and social transformation of borderlands, an investment that I show is explicitly in the name of care and welfare for those who do the work of security, i.e. the soldiers and officers of the BSF. This privileging is most immediately at the cost of borderland civilians, whose land, livelihoods, and daily lives are made subservient to these sociospatial arrangements of work and welfare in the name of national security. But there is selection and an emergent hierarchy even within the institution.

As you note, constructive security selectively provides support and sustenance, in its selection making care and welfare itself a contested, policed, rationed terrain. Studying the management of these affects and intimacies exposes the fragility and the contradictions at the heart of the security state, not least the untenable sociospatial separations of work/home, family/soldier, civilian/BSF, barracks/outsides that undergird it. Holding this everyday sociospatial world of military labor together involves enormous amount of policing and boundary-drawing around proper friendships, marriages, families, intimacies, and longings. In this article I am interested in seeing how this governance of sociality is integral to the expansion, standardization, and durability of security institutions like the BSF. The infrastructures I discuss in the article range in purpose, from dwelling to operational work, but are united in the logic of care for soldiers, so the spatial work of constructive security is significant. Infrastructures in the name of care standardize needs and provisions, make them comparable, and thereby incorporate and connect distinct locales across the country into a geography of national security. This geography does not already exist—constructive security concretizes it as much discursively as materially, infrastructurally, and experientially.

The temporal work of this sociospatial and affective regime is remarkable and easily missed. My starting point is that this is the timespace of war-preparedness, of routine life and work, notably not the duress of war or conflict. Barracks epitomize this twin vibe of mobility and durability: soldiers are constantly passing through, sometimes in routine and expected intervals, sometimes suddenly and without notice while the barracks are steady, permanent, if only growing in size, taking up more and more space around it, improving in design and functionality. All the stuff of life has to be contained here and so the regulation of time is perhaps the severest discipline of all. Intimacies—phone calls with spouses, lovers, family members—and leisure must be fitted into the daily schedules. The non-essential is defined with a heavy hand and expelled. This takes a huge toll on soldiers as well as their families. The bounding of relationalities, as you put it, is more than affective control—and I tease out those interlinked aspects. Military labor is premised and structured on deeply divisive principles, striating within and profoundly separating from compatriots marked as the civilian outside. This article really only scratches the surface of those divisions, separations, and expulsions that make possible, for instance, the soldier to be pitted against the farmer in the borderlands.

SC: In your article, you write that security institutions not only remain notoriously difficult to study and understand ethnographically but how they expand and entrench themselves in a routinized manner in the everyday, various forms of labor and relations required to uphold them, and the material claims that accompany quotidian military work and those that emerge from borderlands-as-workplaces remain inadequately explored. What are some of the ethnographic challenges that explain such inadequacy? And what does such dearth of knowledge pertaining to the seemingly unremarkable and unsensationalized aspects of security institutions and their functioning reveal about security states, in general, and the Indian security state, in particular?

SG: Yes, security institutions are notoriously difficult to study, but some of the dearth of knowledge is also in part due to anthropology’s reluctance to study the powerful, the elites, and particularly those that are the ostensible “bad guys,” combined with a default focus on suffering others. In the anthropology of security, there has been an overwhelming focus on the US national security state and American security empire. I am in conversation with an emergent body of work that expands that scholarship—the inspiring work of e.g. Maria Rashid, Salih Can Açiksöz, Negar Razavi, Narges Bajoghli, Samar al-Bulushi, Madiha Tahir, Jinee Lokaneeta—and pushes us methodologically and analytically toward conceptualizing anew the security state both transnationally and grounded in historically distinct locations of the majority world.

An example I could take is the security state’s enclosure of land—there is no ready-made dataset available for this, nor to parse what it is for. Enclosing, acquiring, and occupying land to house the range of security forces that make up the power of the Indian security is one of the most visible faces of militarization. One simply has to walk through places like Dimapur in Nagaland (Kikon and McDuie-Ra 2021) or Srinagar in Kashmir (Junaid 2020). Schools are regularly used to house security forces—while these are resolutely crisis-oriented and temporary, they can stretch on for long periods of time or, like in India’s occupation of Kashmir, indefinitely. This occurs at the same time as the provision of education for military families is prioritized in any housing project.

In this article I am most interested in the occupation of space that does not occur under the so-called exception of conflict, insurgency, war, but as routine necessity, unremarkable and therefore unquestionable. The aspect that I have ethnographically explored is that of housing of military labor—of both soldiers through barracks and outposts and of soldiers’ families through family quarters. This ethnographic entry-point, combined with examination of the state’s own archives such as parliamentary debates, white papers, press conferences, allows me to build a picture of the BSF’s enormous expansion in the last three decades and I offer a theory of what that reveals about the security state and militarism in India.

I appreciate your question because I think these ostensibly methodological questions are entangled with the politics of knowledge production. Ethnographic challenges are also occasions to reimagine ethnographic and anthropological praxis, ethics, epistemes. So I think the kind of knowledge and debates we have on security states and regimes reflects changing debates, epistemes, praxis, and practitioners in the discipline, as we discussed in a recent Annual Review of Anthropology article (al-Bulushi et al. 2023). We must be creative in our ways of tracking, connecting, and interrogating these very heterogenous forms of expansion and entrenchment of militarism. My work is but one example of the emergent reimaginations of anthropological engagement with security regimes, and I very much hope there is more attention to these unremarkable yet routine and foundational aspects.