9 - Imagining Nation-Security in South Asia and Palestine

Summary

South Asian, Palestinian, and Zionist politicians and thinkers also participated in this discourse of national liberation and state-foundation. They too sought to guarantee permanent security for an imagined people by constructing ethnic homogeneity or guaranteeing ethnic dominance over minorities. Permanent security entailed a nation being housed in “its” state; the consonance of the cultural and political nations. In addition to partition and population transfer, another modality of permanent security was “communal hostage taking”: the “occupier” can imagine minorities as potential hostages, objects of possible reprisal for perceived mistreatment of their own nationals likewise “stranded” across the border. These mental operations were necessarily global in projection and meta-reflective in practice, as leaders of states-in-waiting not only studied political dramas in other parts of the world but also scrutinized the lessons that their rivals drew from them. A political history of ideas can show how national security thinking was embedded in practices of analogy making.