Beyond the Protector and the Protected: Lived Experience, Gendered Security and Militarised Violence in Pakistan

Abstract

Feminist security scholarship argues that the ostensibly neutral language of protection is structured by gendered assumptions about agency, vulnerability and legitimate violence. This paper examines what becomes visible when the protector/protected relationship is approached from women's lived experiences of militarised violence in Pakistan's conflict peripheries, principally Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the former Federally Administered Tribal Areas, and Balochistan. Combining feminist security studies, phenomenology, postcolonial feminist theory and affect theory, the paper develops an embodied, relational framework for protection, drawing on Tickner, Enloe, Butler, Das, Ahmed, Spivak and Wibben. It argues that women affected by militarised violence cannot be located as either passive recipients of protection or autonomous agents beyond vulnerability; rather, vulnerability, agency, care and political knowledge coexist. Methodologically, the study combines incident-level documentary evidence with survivor accounts, investigative journalism and conflict datasets, including Airwars, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Global Terrorism Database and the South Asia Terrorism Portal. As the dataset remains under construction, the paper reports emerging analytical patterns rather than definitive casualty estimates. The paper makes three interventions: it reconceptualises protection as a contested, relational practice; it positions women's lived experience as a site from which security concepts can themselves be theorised; and it argues that Pakistan's conflict peripheries reveal the limits of frameworks separating military protection from everyday exposure and care.