The Cruel Optimism of Militarism: A Feminist Curiosity, Affect, and Global Security

This article asks: why do communities located at the periphery of the global security market continue to participate, even when they gain the least economically and politically? To answer this, we explore how militarism—an affectively felt logic, that understands military service as desirable and/or inevitable – manifests through both affective relations and colonial structures. We focus on Gurkha communities in Nepal with a colonial military heritage of 200 years with the British. Feminist and postcolonial research on militaries have demonstrated how war and global insecurity is framed through gendered colonial economies and discursive logics, shaping military systems and subjects. Yet what remains under-explored is the affective dimension of how militarism operates within and in relation to militarised communities outside the ‘West’, whose identities and material conditions are structured through colonial histories. To address this gap, we operationalise Lauren Berlant’s (2011) concept cruel optimism to capture why these communities stay attached to militarism when the costs abounds. We argue that militarism within the Gurkha context, is both affectively felt and structurally experienced in such a way that renders a military pathway to a good life as natural and desirable, despite evidence of the fragility and impossibility in pursuing this path.