The de facto borderland as a space of uneven ontological insecurity: insights from a village in Poonch, Jammu and Kashmir

De facto border scholarship often foregrounds territorialisation and strategic security, leaving borderlands’ lived social form underexamined. This article argues that the memory-mediated relational process through which co-located Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh residents assign different meanings to remembered Partition, militancy, and resulting displacements contributes to the lived social form of the village-level de facto borderland setting they share. The article conceptualises the non-equivalent implications of this process across residents’ mutually implicated positions as uneven ontological insecurity. This interpretivist study draws on 40 semi-structured interviews and non-participant observation in Sangli Dara, a pseudonymous village adjoining the Line of Control in Poonch, Jammu and Kashmir. Fear, anticipation, and estrangement operate as mnemonic modalities through which residents’ interpretations sustain, strain, or unsettle narrative continuity, routine familiarity, and symbolic coherence. The article advances de facto borderland scholarship by locating remembrance within lived social form and extends ontological security scholarship by theorising insecurity as internally uneven.