Why Would a Foreign Soldier Die for You? Baloch Diaspora and the Meaning of Service in the Persian Gulf

Description: 

Can one ever rely on outsiders in times of war and global disorder, with crisscrossing lines of allegiance? What, other than money or self-interest, would make a foreign soldier willing to die for someone else's war? As the recent US–Israeli war on Iran reminded us, motivation wins wars, as much as any precision long-range weapon. This realization has hit the Gulf with force, as Washington prioritizes other theaters while continuing to receive the lion's share of the region's enormous defense spending.

I address this question by turning to the rank and file of security providers in the Gulf states, who have long come from abroad, rather than the top-tier— the Americans now the British before them. Foremost among them are the Baloch, whose soldiers have served in Arabian armies since the sixteenth century, and whom two successive Sultans of Oman recruited across the Arabian Sea to fight the Dhofar War of 1965–1975. While the Western powers secured their role through gunboats and firepower, the Baloch mobilized transnational diasporic ties built over generations that inextricably bound them to Omani society through trade, intermarriage, political power sharing and above all the inherited craft of soldiering.

Working with previously unexplored epitaphs, letters, magazines, vernacular literature, and oral histories produced by Baloch soldiers in service during the war, I ask how they gave meaning to taking and giving blood for a country they may not have claimed in their own name, yet was not foreign to them. The answer, I argue, lies in embedded relations of protection that generate their own moral grammar and durable webs of obligations—relations that bind people across territorial boundaries into an order of protection that operates outside the logic of nationalism, in ways no gunboat-backed contract can reproduce.

Bio: Ameem Lutfi is an Assistant Professor of History and Anthropology at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. His work explores military labor markets and the politics of protection connecting South Asia and the Arabian Peninsula to the wider Indian Ocean world over five centuries.

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