Uneven Counting

Drawn from research conducted with the families of child victims of a terrorist attack (on Army Public School) in Pakistan, this paper examines how these victim families make sense of contingencies of loss, suffering, and victimhood in their struggle for equal compensation and benefits of care and compassion. Compensating lives in warfare has not received attention in the discussion on the social life of militarism in anthropology. Monetary compensation and benefits of care have fueled modern military conflicts and effective preparation for them, mobilized civilian populations, and justified civilian deaths as collateral loss. This paper suggests that attention to differential grievability of life and restitution shows how biopolitical modes of inclusion and exclusion define citizenship. If militarization pervades the social life of modern states, a study of the politics of compassion and compensation and of the psychic violence of the pecuniary value of human life shows how victims of war do not remain passive subjects but challenge disparity in values accorded to their lives. Uneven compensation of lives lost in war and the masking of this unevenness in the language of debt and willing sacrifice also reflect an unequal citizenship in life, however, providing a way to demand care and justice and disrupting the monetization of life.