Global diffusion of pellet gun repression reveals colonial security doctrine convergence between India and Israel
Original framing: “'Non-lethal': How India and Israel's brutal use of pellet guns spread worldwide” — Middle East Eye
Kashmiri and Palestinian traditional healers have developed herbal treatments for pellet wounds (e.g., using saffron, honey, and local herbs to prevent infection and reduce scarring) that complement modern surgery. Indigenous Mapuche and West Papuan communities similarly use plant-based trauma care when state hospitals are inaccessible or dangerous. These knowledge systems embody a philosophy of collective healing that resists the state's attempt to individualize injury. Their erasure from mainstream discourse reflects epistemic violence parallel to physical violence.
The pellet gun is not a weapon but a colonial technology of disablement, refined from British India's 'minimum force' through Northern Ireland's plastic bullets to the India-Israel security axis that now markets maiming as 'crowd management' across the Global South.
Its diffusion follows a trickster logic: the same states that won independence through anti-colonial struggle (India, Israel) become the primary exporters of the colonizer's tools, while the UN's 'non-lethal' taxonomy provides the semantic cover. Indigenous healing practices—from Kashmiri saffron poultices to Mapuche plant medicine—embody a disability justice that resists the state's individualization of injury, while blinded youth in Kashmir, Gaza, and Santiago build transnational networks of mutual aid that the arms trade cannot target. A binding treaty banning multi-projectile kinetic weapons, coupled with reparations funded by manufacturer states and protection for autonomous medical collectives, would disrupt the impunity cycle at its material and epistemic roots. The historical precedent is clear: the 1995 Blinding Laser Protocol proved that even 'useful' weapons can be stigmatized when the humanitarian evidence is centered on survivors' testimony, not state security doctrines.