Between Development and Dispossession: Baloch Women's Labor and Resistance in Balochistan, Pakistan

Gwadar is a focal point of geopolitical interest in the Balochistan province of Pakistan, a province that has been exploited and has been experiencing insurgency since the advent of Pakistan. The geostrategic importance of Gwadar port, which is a maritime hub linking Asia with the Middle East, has precipitated foreign capital and development projects such as the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and legitimized the state-backed security apparatus. The ostensibly nation-building projects are growing the discontent among the Baloch masses, because of the “peripheralization” of Balochistan. These contemporary development projects and the militarization in Balochistan reconfigure social and spatial hierarchies that privilege non-local stakeholders. The foreign investment in Gwadar, Balochistan, orchestrates the gendered and racialized social reproduction of Baloch women. My research thus explores how Baloch women in Balochistan have created a new momentum of women-led movement in Balochistan against human rights violations, abductions, forced disappearances, and dispossession of the Baloch people. The everyday interaction of Baloch with military personnel and living in a militarized space creates a political economy that is tied to the port's development, which pushes women to the peripheries of a new social order. Through an ethnographic approach and oral history interviews, Baloch women disrupt and refuse to participate in the neoliberal political economy and state-centric development projects. Instead, women have created a transnational resistance movement and participate in informal local economies. These women thus create the nuances of resistance in Balochistan despite being inextricably caught in gendered labor—shaping the complexities of their social reproduction. I also address military hegemony by expanding on the concept of “coloniality of militarization" by Niharika Pandit (2024) and understanding how it shapes Baloch women's subjectivities and agency, drawing from transnational feminist and feminist political economy scholarship that is often overlooked in the context of Balochistan, Pakistan.