Rohingya Refugees in South Asia: An Exploration of Social Borders and the Margins

By reviewing the case of the Rohingya, a marginalized community in the postcolonial state of Myanmar, this article (as part of a special section on South Asian border studies) explores the perspective of Rohingya refugees and conceptualizes social borders from the voices of the refugees. Juxtaposing postcolonial borders with narrations of Rohingya in India brings out the politics of the marginalized communities in the country’s borderlands. The article shows how borderscapes are shaped for refugees that articulate ideas of social justice and recognition. Building on international studies of the Rohingya, I conducted fieldwork into the situation of the Rohingya in India. The resulting interviews add to our understanding of Rohingya refugees and address a scarcity of literature on the Rohingya in border studies. Through the analysis, I discover the history of the Rohingya identity in Myanmar, which contextualizes their statelessness. Social borders and state legislation reinforce barriers to citizenship and sharpen the exclusion of migrants, refugees, and other stateless peoples in South Asia. Keywords: South Asia, Refugees, Rohingya, post-colonial states, boundaries, borders, margins, Southeast Asia, marginal communities.

Racial militarism and civilizational anxiety at the imperial encounter: From metropole to the postcolonial state

In this article, I ask three key questions: First, what is the relationship between militarism and race? Second, how does colonialism shape that relationship to produce racial militarism on both sides of the imperial encounter? And, third, what is the function of racial militarism? I build on Fanon’s psychoanalytic work on the production of racial hierarchies and internalization of stigma to argue that militarism became a means through which the European imperial nation-state sought to mitigate its civilizational anxiety and assert itself at the top of a constructed hierarchy. In particular, I argue that European militarism is constituted by its colonization and historical constructions of the so-called Muslim Orient, stigmatized as a rival, a threat and an inferior neighbour. However, this racial militarism and civilizational anxiety is not only a feature of the colonial metropole, but also transferred onto colonized and postcolonial states. Drawing on examples of racial militarism practised by the Syrian regime, I argue Europe’s racial-militarist stigmas are also internalized and instrumentalized by postcolonial states via fleeing and transferral. Throughout the article, I demonstrate that racial militarism has three main functions in both metropole and postcolony: the performance of racial chauvinism and superiority; demarcation of boundaries of exclusion; and dehumanization of racialized dissent in order to legitimate violence.

Mali

In 2012, Mali began a long slide into insecurity and political instability. This chapter reviews the historical roots of that crisis, beginning in the waning days of French colonialism and continuing through periods of socialist nationalism, military rule, and liberal democracy. Mali’s postcolonial state has faced numerous internal and external threats. Some stemmed from hierarchical structures within the country’s heterogeneous population and the conflicts these structures engendered. Others emanated from heavy-handed government attempts to impose order and national identity on this population. Some were posed by other states in the Sahel and beyond. Still others came in the form of non-state actors exploiting state weakness to advance their own political and social agendas. Critically examining the competing narratives about Mali’s ongoing crisis, which focus on neocolonialism, geopolitics, and political institutions, this chapter demonstrates that the origins of the crisis are neither simple nor monocausal.

Everybody's War

This book explores the history of health care in postcolonial state-making and the fragmentation of the health system in Syria during the conflict. It analyzes the role of international humanitarian law (IHL) in enabling attacks on health facilities and distinguishes the differences between humanitarian solutions and refugee populations’ expectations. It also describes the way in which humanitarian actors have fed the war economy. The book highlights the lived experience of siege in all its layers. It examines how humanitarian actors have become part of the information wars that have raged throughout the past ten years and how they have chosen to position themselves in the face of grave violations of IHL.

Returning to “Asia”: Japanese embraces of Sino–Indian friendship, 1953–1962

As the Cold War prompted anxieties throughout Asia about the status of postcolonial state-building and decolonization, the possibility of friendship and cooperation between China and India despite their differing political and economic systems inspired hope and political repercussions far beyond their borders. This paper reveals how Japanese commenters, in their analysis of Sino–Indian friendship and both countries' respective political trajectories, saw the two countries as providing a rubric for a new type of politics. Utilizing an array of published, unpublished, and archival sources, I will study how diverse individuals, from the historian Uehara Senroku to burakumin activist Jiichirō Matsumoto, believed that Sino–Indian friendship, unlike the failed project of Japanese imperialism, could unite “Asia” in its struggle against imperialism amid the Cold War and accelerating decolonization. In following this model, they also believed that Japan could escape American hegemony and become “Asian” again. Japanese analyses of “China–India” as offering an “Asian” recipe for overcoming imperialism and navigating bloc politics help showcase how ideas of Asia continued to serve as a space for contemplating political possibilities during the early Cold War, transforming Japan from the region's former tutor to its pupil.

Development Modernity in India, an Incomplete Project: From Nehru to Modi

Modernity as a set of attitudes based on reason, or as the cultivation of scientific temper, was informed by the imperative of development in a postcolonial state like India. Alongside the rise of democracy, there was the pressing need for removing poverty and ensuring fulfilment of basic needs for the common people. It is in this sphere of addressing poverty and underdevelopment that India became modern in a very material and substantive sense. The paper makes a case for an understanding of modernity that is deeply rooted in the material needs of the people and traces this impulse of development modernity from the time of India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru till the present government led by Narendra Modi. While doing so, it problematises Nehru’s and Modi’s statist understanding of development and brings them to conversation to understand the continuing promise of modernity predicated on development. In the process both Nehru and Modi are interpreted vis-à-vis the times they lived in as well as their responses to what constituted India’s core values, their relationship with modernity and development’s place in it.

The postcolonial migration state

The evolution of migration policymaking across the Global South is of growing interest to International Relations. Yet, the impact of colonial and imperial legacies on states’ migration management regimes outside Europe and North America remains under-theorised. How does postcolonial state formation shape policies of cross-border mobility management in the Global South? By bringing James F. Hollifield’s framework of the contemporary ‘migration state’ in conversation with critical scholarship on postcolonialism, we identify the existence of a ‘postcolonial paradox,’ namely two sets of tensions faced by newly independent states of the Global South: first, the need to construct a modern sovereign nation-state with a well-defined national identity contrasts with weak institutional capacity to do so; second, territorial realities of sovereignty conflict with the imperatives of nation-building seeking to establish exclusive citizenship norms towards populations residing both inside and outside the boundaries of the postcolonial state. We argue that the use of cross-border mobility control policies to reconcile such tensions transforms the ‘postcolonial state’ into the ‘postcolonial migration state,’ which shows distinct continuities with pre-independence practices. In fact, postcolonial migration states reproduce colonial-era tropes via the surveillance and control of segmented migration streams that redistribute labour for the global economy. We demonstrate this via a comparative study of post-independence migration management in India and Egypt, which also aims to merge a problematic regional divide between scholarship on the Middle East and South Asia. We urge further critical interventions on the international politics of migration that prioritise interregional perspectives from the broader Global South.

We Need New Names : A Dirge on Evil

The present article seeks to validate Bulawayo's We Need New Names as a credible alternative to the official national historiography. It attempts to achieve this feat by obtaining answers to two key questions. The first is whether Bulawayo is fair to indict everyone (even perceived victims) for the general malaise that bedevils her nameless dystopian republic. The second question seeks insights on whether the novelist's sex guarantees women some exemption from the finger pointing that Darling otherwise executes with the candor of a death-row judge, albeit in her naive gravity-defying buoyancy. In search for answers to these questions, the researchers first analyze the portrayal of white people in Bulawayo’s unnamed postcolonial state. It then juxtaposes the presentation of the post-independence rulers of the fictional state with that of the suffering masses with the intention to justify, or otherwise, why both perceived victims and culprits are held culpable to the malaise that obtains. Finally, the research examines how women in Africa (and of Africa) are juxtaposed to women in the west. This last part encapsulates problematizing the brand of Darling’s cosmopolitanism as a possible commentary on both the home she abandons and the one she adopts. Since the underlying objective of the study is to test Bulawayo’s We Need New Names as a credible alternative to the metanarrative, parallels are drawn between events and narratives in Bulawayo’s nameless republic and those in the milieu from which her text emerges in its trans-continental settings.

NEW PARTNERSHIP FOR AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT AND POVERTY REDUCTION IN NIGERIA, 2009 - 2019

Development strategies are judged by results. Over the years, Africa’s political leadership adopted and pursued various development initiatives to translate the immense natural resources of the continent into prosperity for the benefits of her teeming population. Unfortunately, the outcomes of these efforts have been abysmal. This study assessed the achievement of the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) in curtailing poverty in Nigeria from 1999-2015. The paper adopted the theory of the postcolonial state of Africa to explain the increasing rate of poverty in Nigeria, despite the NEPAD poverty reduction ambition. The study is anchored on documentary methods of data collection. The paper concludes that genuine poverty reduction can only be realized when Nigeria political leadership sincerely invests in her human resources in terms of genuine empowerment of the populace through skill acquisition.