Who Gets to Belong? Gurkha Migrant Warriors and their Transnational Family Lives

Abstract:

Who gets to belong to a nation? Who decides? How and why does the military as an institution of empire recruit migrant soldiers and police and influence their shifting senses of belonging? Drawing from my recently published book on Bracketed Belonging: Gurkha Migrant Warriors and Transnational Lives, this talk addresses how nations and their governance of security determine social constellations and shape socio-political and legal assertions of belonging and allegiance. I examine the contours and limits of belonging that underlie the complex social contract between mobile migrants and nations in the context of a global military-security market. The Gurkhas—whose history of migration and movement from Nepal to Southeast Asia and other regions date back to the period of British colonialism—have established themselves in former British colonies that include Singapore, Hong Kong, and India, as well as the UK itself. In engaging with their everyday lives and their diasporic mobilities and practices of bracketed belonging, my discussion aims to pique renewed conceptualisations of how social actors approach, experience and negotiate migration and various idioms of belonging on several fronts.

Speaker Bio

Kelvin E.Y. Low is Professor and Head of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. His core research interests include sensory studies, migration and transnationalism, foodways and heritage, and social memory and historiography. He is the author or editor of 7 books, with most recent titles being Sensory Anthropology: Culture and Experience in Asia (Cambridge U.P., 2023; Outstanding Academic Title 2024, American Library Association), and Bracketed Belonging: Gurkha Migrant Warriors and Transnational Lives (Cornell U.P., 2025). He contributes as editorial board member of the journals Sociology and Cultural Sociology, and also serves as co-editor of Current Sociology.

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The in-person location is Room D104, Dawson Building, Lower Mountjoy, South Road, Durham , DH1 3LE.