Introduction: Between Loyalty and Critique: Gender, Morality, Militancy

Abstract

How are resistance movements able to sustain political commitment and morale amid ongoing state violence? How do conflicts over sovereignty find articulation in contestations over affective belonging and moral values, thereby shaping intimate lives and gendered subjectivities? The five articles gathered in this special section take up these questions by ethnographically considering the complex internal dynamics of resistance movements in Kurdistan, Kashmir, and Western Sahara. They explore how these movements' struggles for alternative sovereignties and against colonial occupation and dispossession are translated into gendered expectations of loyalty, accusations of betrayal, and practices of critique. Investigating how Kurdish, Sahrawi, and Kashmiri militants, activists, and followers of resistance movements navigate the binary logics of loyalty and critique that violent conflict and occupation have rendered central to their lives, this special section shines new light on the morality of resistance and the gender of militancy.