Security, Self and Fisheries: Making Sense of Myself

A Hermit Crab my friends and I found in the bycatch from an artisanal fisherman's nets while walking one morning along the Chennai Coast. 

As Ken Booth had noted while talking about feminist theory, “Making sense of one’s own life has been seen as a way of making sense of the lives of others”. Like he suggested, understanding what goes on in our minds is important to make sense of why and how we analyse something. So now let me apply what Booth said to the subject of my previous blog, the Indo-Sri Lankan Fisheries Conflict.

Since I was young, I’d been interested in fish- something that was probably spurred by the first animated movie I remember watching, Finding Nemo. Eventually I would outgrow fish, but my interest in biodiversity remained. Today I’ve come full circle, returning to fish with this blog. Living in Chennai, conflict with Sri Lanka is not really something you can avoid, especially if you read the papers. Maybe if I’d lived in another part of the country, unaffected by the conflict, I may not have taken much of an interest in it.

I do believe that my understanding of the conflict has changed over the years, with exposure to different views and opinions. Earlier, I always used to frame the question as one of ‘us’ vs ‘them’, where ‘us’ referred to Indian fisherfolk and ‘them’ to Sri Lankans. I ascribed the moral high ground to the former and the Indian government simply because they were Indian and viewed Sri Lanka as the ‘enemy’. After all, which 10-year-old wants to believe that the country they identify with could be at fault? I unquestioningly empathised with the Indian trawlers because they lived within the same national and provincial boundaries that I did. It did not matter to me that they came from different backgrounds. I’ve grown up and recognised this as one of the effects of the nation-state. As the well-known feminist theorist Cynthia Enloe demonstrated, nationalism can make people forget their difference to invest in the shared project of a nation state.

I’d say how I made sense of the issue was greatly affected by the experiences I’ve had. My deep love for nature puts me at odds with a practice like trawling, which one can argue is the root cause for the conflict. I’ve read and heard enough talk about the evils of trawling and the destruction it wreaks. I also have friends who, while working on the coastal fauna of the North Tamil Nadu coast, interact regularly with artisanal fisherfolk. The stories and experiences they tell me have made me appreciate the difference between artisanal fisherfolk and trawlers- the latter care little for the environment while the former base their living off their understanding and dependence on nature. Even the reasons behind my disapproval of the SLN’s actions have changed. Before they were due to my ‘Indian’ identity, while later they were because I realised they were violative of international and humane norms.

The discourse I was exposed to also played a key role in how I made sense of the issue. Around the end of the Sri Lankan Civil War in 2009, I remember posters of the LTTE’s supreme commander Prabhakaran coming up on walls and lamp posts around the city. Some called out the Sri Lankan army for killing his teenage son, while others commemorated his death, hailing him as “Tamizh Desiya Thalaivar” or “Leader of the Tamil nation”. Sri Lanka was therefore a country which I was vaguely aware of far before I knew of others, even before I understood the geographical span of my own. I’ve read people on social media expressing their anger over the treatment meted out to Indian Tamil fishermen while the Sri Lankan Navy was portrayed as inhuman and oppressive. For the longest time, my own views reflected these discourses. This I felt was a good portrayal of Shepherd’s assertion that one’s understanding of an individual or form of violence is produced through discourse, but without the gendered angle.   

It’s highly unlikely a young ‘me’ would have considered the conflict as a security issue itself. (emphasis on ‘me’ being the identity that was socially constructed). I was so taken by the idea that security was something restricted to the nation-state. Its not that threats to individuals and communities didn’t matter, they just weren’t questions of “security”. Biodiversity as a referent seemed even less likely. The change in how I viewed the situation can again be explained by Booth. What is considered as security has changed because of changes in my own opinions, rather than with external realities. After all, the fundamentals of the issue have changed little over the past couple of decades. Like Booth had asserted, people don’t come into the world as formed individuals but undergo social process to acquire identity. ‘I’ have decided over the years and due to different social processes, what security means to me. I’ve been influenced by various categories. Early on my identity as an ’Indian’ made me dismiss Sri Lankan concerns over their fisheries, while in later years, my education and exposure to diverse views made me re-evaluate my opinions. My education also allowed me to think beyond the nation state as the sole focus of security and consider smaller but important groupings and helped me overcome the blind categories of “us” and “them”. This I’d say was also a result of the recognition that power relations were embedded in international relations- the Indian trawlers were able to do what they did because of their superior equipment relative to their Sri Lankan counterparts. Over time, defining security in terms of war and peace between nation states started to seem absurd- could the conflict qualify as a security issue only if there were camouflaged soldiers and missiles parked on the shore of the Palk Bay?

Before I end, there’s two questions I’d like to ask. If conceptions of security are so dependent on the self, what does it take to break out of the mould and consider alternate ways of thinking about it? Are those whose surroundings remain static, who rarely get exposed to something that disrupts the way they think doomed to conceive security in only one way their whole lives? For all I know, these questions may have no answers. But I do feel they’re worth asking.

 

Bibliography:

• 1.      Booth, Ken. 1994. “Security and Self Reflections of a Fallen Realist,” YCISS Occasional Paper Paper 26: October 1994.
• 2.      Enloe, C. (2014). Bananas, beaches and bases: Making feminist sense of international politics. Univ of California Press
• 3.      Shepherd, Laura J. 2009. ‘Gender, Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies’. Political Studies Review 7 (2): 208–19.