Bina D'Costa

'You Cannot Hold Two Watermelons in One Hand': Gender Justice and Anti-State Local Security Institutions in Pakistan and Afghanistan

Although religion has been discussed through various disciplinary frameworks, we do not know enough to explain security institutions and their negotiations with interest groups that employ specific religious and traditional ideologies. The ‘global war on terror’ has generated scholarship focusing extensively on extremist groups, the entrenched debates between fundamentalism and Islamism and also between fundamentalism and secularism. However, those discussions have also excluded women, except for their role as mothers of suicide bombers, members of extremist groups themselves and cultural bearers of their religion through clothing choice.