Abandoned spaces and bare life in the enclaves of the India–Bangladesh border

Based on an ethnography of the enclaves in India and Bangladesh, this paper explores enclave dwellers lived experiences of vulnerability where life is trapped in-between two states. These enclaves are geographically located in one country but politically and legally belong to another. The absence of a home country's rule of law and the irregular presence of the host country's sovereign power and control construct, in Giorgio Agamben's terms, a ‘space of exception’ where everyday life is characterised by exclusion from legal rights, but nonetheless subject to law, socio-political exploitation and gendered violence. By situating Agamben's ‘bare life’ in these enclaves, this paper argues that the conceptualisation of bare life as solely a sovereign production paints an inadequate picture of the zone of abandonment. The paper argues that in addition to the sovereign creation of bare life, social and gendered dimensions are essential for a nuanced approach to this concept.     

4. IMPERIAL SOVEREIGNTY IN MUGHAL AND BRITISH FORMS

Azfar Moin's recent work on millennial sovereignty in Mughal India prompts a consideration of the evolution of sovereignty in modern South Asia more broadly. Although the sovereign principles of the Mughals differed from those of the British Indian empire, which ultimately succeeded it, these empires shared important similarities in their linking of sovereign authority to visions of a cosmos in immanent interaction with human affairs. This article explores these similarities and differences and speculatively considers their implications for both similarities and differences in Mughal and British principles of statecraft. These similarities and differences provide an important backdrop for thinking about the meanings attached to popular sovereignty in modern India as well.     

Hong Kong and Macao under Chinese Sovereignty

A team of Hong Kong-based geographers led by a noted specialist provides a comparative overview of Hong Kong and Macao under Chinese sovereignty (respectively, since 1997 and 1999). The authors outline the historical development of both cities, identifying their common legacies as colonial enclaves as well as shared economic experience as autonomous Special Administrative Regions (SARs) under the "one country, two systems" formula devised in Beijing. The paper includes up-to-date statistical information (some through March 2008) on per capita GDP, visitors from Mainland China and from abroad (for both cities), direct investment, employment in financial services, trade and logistics, and tourism (for Hong Kong) as well as revenues from gambling casinos in Macao that are reportedly surpassing those of Las Vegas. Journal of Economic Literature, O16, O18, O20, R11. Classification Numbers: 11 figures, 4 tables, 46 references.     

The State,the Rebel and the Chief: Public Authority and Land Disputes in Assam,India

Based upon an ethnographic study of two land disputes in the rural Assamese district of Karbi Anglong (India), this article challenges the idea that the entry of new institutional players, with their multiple sets of rules, inevitably leads to open institutional conflict. Although a wide range of political actors are involved in the regulation of land tenure in Karbi Anglong, they cannot be regarded as institutional structures ready to undercut one another. As in other parts of Northeast India, none of the claimants of public power involved —‘the state’, ‘the rebel’ or ‘the chief’— attain full sovereignty, which forces them to exercise authority predominantly through practices of negotiation and accommodation, and only selective contestation. If open institutional conflict does occur, as in the Dhansiri forest and the Singhason plateau cases studied here, this is due to the fact that one of the institutional players has overstretched and attempted to exercise authority beyond its realm of power. This article thus argues for a more agency‐oriented method of analysis in the study of land relations. The focus on everyday interactions between ‘the state’, ‘the rebel’ and ‘the chief’ in Karbi Anglong is a first attempt in that regard.     

Evolving enclave urbanism in China and its socio-spatial implications: the case of Guangzhou

Enclave urbanism has deep historical roots in China, from the earliest forms of enclave residence, i.e. the walled city and courtyard housing, to the contemporary intricate mosaic of enclaves comprising danwei (work unit) compounds, gated commodity housing estates and migrant enclaves. Yet the evolution of enclave urbanism is not simply a convergence with Western urban forms, nor is it a process of historical succession or cultural inertia. The story of enclave urbanism is far more complicated. Exploring China's evolving urban enclaves and their socio-economic implications would add much richness and diversity to the international debates on enclave urbanism. The first half of the paper discusses the evolving processes and dynamics of China's enclave urbanism, with special reference to Guangzhou. The complex dynamics of China's enclave urbanism are evolving around various socio-economic, cultural, institutional and political forces, within which institutional arrangements for urban spatial organisation and social control are playing a fundamental role. To present a fuller picture of the plural socio-spatial connotations of China's enclave urbanism, the second half of the paper unpacks the heterogeneity of urban fabrics and examines how different social groups perceive and represent the social aspects of their lives. Featuring a high degree of heterogeneity within and between different types of neighbourhoods, enclave urbanism in China has entailed a complex relationship between urban form and social fabric. In addition, for various social groups, urban enclave living is endowed with very different social meanings. In gated commodity housing estates, enclave living is an expression of a safe, high-quality and privileged lifestyle. In urban villages, it is a compromise choice involving makeshift urban living resulting from suppressed rights to the city. And, in danwei compounds, it is a lingering lifestyle to which people used to be collectively assigned with no exercise of their own choice and from which they are now emotionally estranged.     

海外印度移民及印度政府的侨务政策

作为人口大国之一 ,印度与中国一样 ,有着庞大的海外移民群体及其后裔。目前 ,海外印度人已超过二千万人 ,分布在 1 1 0个国家和地区。上世纪 90年代以来 ,随着海外印度人对所在国和印度影响的增强 ,海外印度人在印度及海外都引起了比以前更多的关注。印度政府采取了一系列措施 ,以吸引更多的海外印度人投身印度国内的经济建设 ,为印度的发展作贡献。本文概述海外印度移民的基本情况 ,分析海外印度人与印度的联系及对印度的影响以及印度政府对海外移民的政策 ,希望从中能得到某些启示 ,从而对中国的侨务政策提供某些参考和借鉴。     

The Kuriles: the Geo-political Spanner in the Geo-economic Works

The sovereignty of the bleak Kurile islands, off northern Japan, has long been the subject of a bitter stand-off between Russia and Japan. This has not only prevented their signing a post-1945 Peace Treaty but has retarded the flow of official financial assistance and corporate investment funds across the few hundred kilometre-wide Sea of Japan. As a result the reconstruction of the Russian Far East has been made more difficult, thus exacerbating the economic and social hardship there. Examples like this should cause us to reflect on the dangers of making simplistic explanations about the spatial organisation of economic activity as well as the need to rediscover political geography.     

Maritime territorialisation as performance of sovereignty and nationhood in the South China Sea

The South China Sea (SCS) is a conflict‐ridden international arena of rivalry between China, the USA, India, and the other ASEAN countries over sovereignty, resources and security. In this geopolitical clash China is the dominant force and Vietnam its main challenger. While most analysts assume that the various claims to the mostly uninhabited islands are motivated by the presence of submarine mineral resources, the conflicts evoke strong nationalist feelings in Vietnam and China, fuelled by narratives of the historical presence of fisheries and navies. By analysing the tension between complex territorial claims, new technologies and forms of knowledge applied by these states to delineate their material borders on the sea and vernacular notions of social space, this paper explores how sovereignty and nationality is enacted on a day‐to‐day basis. Thus, I argue that maritime territorialisation is a paradox of treating the sea as ‘land’ produced by the performance of a socially constructed image of the state geo‐body capitalising on strong nationalistic sentiments in China and Vietnam.     

Theocracy,Eschatology, and the Ephemeral Church: Graham Ward and the “Crisis of Democracy”

This article offers a critical assessment of Graham Ward’s political theology and critique of modern democracy. Ward argues that modern democracy expresses a nihilistic metaphysics and lacks an adequate account of the embodiment of sovereignty within the social, with the result that it tacitly harbors totalitarianism. As an alternative, Ward advances a theocratic model of the social, with the aim of providing an account of the social embodiment of sovereignty lacking in democracy. The article argues that Ward is ultimately unsuccessful in this attempt. His eschatological focus separates the church from the world, undermining his account of the embodiment of sovereignty and reinforcing the very emptiness at the heart of the social his theology is intended to counter.     

Questions of minority,agency and voice: student protests in India in 2016

This article takes up issues around questions of minority, agency and voice in relation to the student protests sparked off in the capital city of India, Delhi, in 2016, with other student protests reverberating in the background across India on different campuses – in the east, at Jadavpur University in Kolkata, and in the south, at Hyderabad University. Focusing on the moment at midnight 2 March 2016 when the student leader Kanhaiya Kumar was released on bail and returned to Jawaharlal Nehru University campus to address a large gathering, the question is formulated here with respect to how the students of India, who are citizens of the country but who were in a minority in relation to the reigning political dispensation, were treated by their own government almost as stateless migrants are by the nation-states that seek to contain them. This moment of protest and agitation, beamed across the country on television and carried in newsprint and on social media is read here through song, metaphor and the notion of the stateless, reflecting on how the postcolonial was reconfigured when agency was snatched back by students repudiating the subaltern categories into which they had been corralled by the state.     

Reordering Society: Vigilantism and Expressions of Sovereignty in Port Elizabeth's Townships

Crime and vigilantism in South Africa are generally seen as a reaction to the breakdown of formal law. Both are constituted outside the state and emerge when the new social contract has been broken — that is, when the state can no longer provide security. This article argues that there is often an intimate relationship between vigilante formations and state structures. It explores this apparent paradox through public discourses on crime and the emergence of twilight institutions such as vigilante groups. It suggests that vigilantism has to be analysed as an attempt to promulgate a new legal‐political order, despite being constructed outside this order. This argument is explored in the context of the Amadlozi, a vigilante group operating in the townships of Port Elizabeth. The article situates this discussion within an examination of discourses on crime, as well as the production of township residents and their protection from crime. Finally, it proffers some ideas on sovereignty and its relationship to twilight institutions.     

Netflix: Canadian (Dis)Content. Competing Sovereignties and the Cultural Politics of Cultural Policy

Netflix has gained significant attention in Canada because it exemplifies the challenge posed by digital technology to Canada’s long-standing cultural policies. It is increasingly evident that such policies are limited in their ability to encourage foreign investment while safeguarding Canadian cultural expression. Indeed, the policies proposed thus far have generated “Canadian discontent” across the political spectrum, notwithstanding their promised benefits. This article uses Netflix to explore the cultural politics of cultural policy: the historical and political underpinnings that drive ongoing discussions about state intervention in culture. These politics include the debates about the effect of foreign investment on Canadian cultural sovereignty, and the ideological tensions within the notion of sovereignty itself, namely those between state and consumer and between center and periphery. Using a historiographical approach, this article investigates the controversy surrounding recent government responses to the disruptive force of foreign digital multinationals, such as Netflix.     

从域外领土到飞地社区：人文地理学中的飞地研究进展

飞地是一个经典的地理学概念,也是一个重要的空间分析视角。目前国内关于飞地的研究日益增多,但对其内涵的梳理仍显不足,多种定义并存,并出现概念泛化的现象。在此背景下,本文对已有的飞地概念及其内涵进行了梳理,指出从域外领土、经济飞地到飞地社区的内涵演变历程,并根据飞地的宗主地-东道地关系,将其划分为行政飞地、经济飞地、飞地社区和飞地国家4种类型。本文研究指出,飞地概念的核心是其宗主地-东道地-飞地的三方构图,依托这一视角可以对当前的异域领土、经济飞地、乃至城市内部的族裔聚居区进行多尺度的空间分析,从飞地的不同功能出发,可以对其展开多维度的地理学透视,为进一步的实证研究和相关政策实施提供参考。     

Social Protection and Class Relations: Evidence from Scheduled Caste Women's Associations in Rural South India

This article argues that the labouring class poor are best able to access social protection when they have sufficient economic autonomy from their village's dominant class to allow them to act politically. To this end, the article analyses the capacity of associations of scheduled caste female labourers in rural Karnataka (south India) to access social protection through collective action. It identifies links between modifications of the material conditions of the labouring class, their capacity to take political action and the social and institutional forms that reflect the social relations of production. Three important variables are identified: the extent of economic autonomy from the dominant class, support from class‐conscious social movement organizers and the political configuration of the local state. The former variable in particular is something that the mainstream social protection policy agenda fails to prioritize.     

From Central Europe to the northern Adriatic: Habsburg citizens between Italians and Croats in Istria

Abstract

The subject of this paper are the Central European ‘foreigners’ in Istria between the middle of the nineteenth and the first part of the twentieth century. The article investigates the notion and identity of foreigners and their role in the social, intellectual and political development of the north-Adriatic peninsula in the concluding period of the Austrian sovereignty, until and immediately after the annexation by Italy. The people who settled in Istria during the period of Austrian sovereignty in the nineteenth century came from different areas of Central Europe, from Italy and the Balkan Peninsula. Some of them were foreigners and some were Austrian citizens, although citizenship was not the only attribute that measured the level of integration in the local society, especially in the multinational Habsburg Empire. Looking at the cultural and political developments in Istria, and analyzing the voluntary associations, the schools and the clergy, this article examines the presence of foreigners and the national composition and identifications in the little Adriatic peninsula. It explores the phenomena of negotiation and the capacity of the ‘outsiders’ from Central Europe (mainly Slovenes, Germans and Czechs) to deal with the local dynamics and patterns of nationalization, and verifies how Central Europeans identified with and integrated into Italian or Croatian national groups or produced separate channels of social and cultural interaction.     

Dramatizing sovereignty: the construction of territorial dispute in the Israeli–Egyptian border at Taba

Inter-state territorial conflicts are highly instructive of the complex nature of the concept of sovereignty and its modes of social construction in a world where the politicization of territory has become a highly institutionalized practice. However, more often than not, these conflicts revolve around tiny pieces of land lacking any ostensible value for both partners, thus calling into question the applicability of rational action assumptions in international relations. The dispute between Egypt and Israel all through the eighties over 1 km² of desert called Taba, just after both states signed a peace agreement and Israel restored to Egyptian sovereignty over 60,000 km² of land, is such an example. Drawing on constructivist and neo-institutionalist approaches that treat sovereignty as a social construct, we argue through the case of Taba that the dramatization of sovereignty and the status politics that motivate it, carried out by state and non-state actors in three different but interrelated arenas: the domestic, the regional and the international, are decisive factors in the constitution of sovereignty.     

Islands,extraction and violence: Mining and the politics of scale in Island Melanesia

Set against the backdrop of past, contemporary and possible future mining-related violence on islands in the western Pacific, this article explores how scholarship on the politics of scale, as well as strands of the burgeoning island studies literature, might sharpen our understanding of the political economic and violent effects of extractive resource enclaves in Island Melanesia. Drawing upon field research in Bougainville and Solomon Islands, I argue that just as Melanesian islands were produced as a scale of struggle in the context of the introduction of capitalist social relations under colonialism, so too have they emerged as a critical, albeit problematic, scale of struggle in contemporary contestations around extractive resource capitalism under the current round of globalisation and accumulation by dispossession. I suggest that this politics of scale lens enriches our understanding of how “islandness” can be an important variable in social and political economic processes. When the politics of scale is imbricated with the well-established idea of the island as the paradigmatic setting for territorialising projects, including the nation-state and sub-national jurisdictions, islandness emerges as a potentially powerful variable in the political economic struggles that attend extractive resource enclaves. I also highlight, in the cases considered here, how islands can become containers for internal socio-spatial contradictions that can be animated by extractive enclaves and can contribute to the island scale becoming violent and “ungovernable”. The article advances recent efforts to bring the island studies literature into closer conversation with political and economic geography.     

Dominant ethnicity: from minority to majority

ABSTRACT. This article argues that the world is in the midst of a long‐term transition from dominant minority to dominant majority ethnicity. Whereas minority domination was common in premodern societies, modernity (with its accent on democracy and popular sovereignty) has engendered a shift to dominant majority ethnicity. The article begins with conceptual clarifications. The second section provides a broad overview of the general patterns of ethnic dominance that derive from the logic of modern nationalism and democratisation. The third section discusses remnants of dominant minorities in the modern era and suggests that their survival hinges on peculiar historical and social circumstances coupled with resistance to democratisation. The fourth section shifts the focus to dominant majorities in the modern era and their relationship to national identities. The article ends with a discussion of the fortunes of dominant ethnicity in the West.     

The geopolitics of Antarctic governance: sovereignty and strategic denial in Australia's Antarctic policy

The governance of Antarctica has re-emerged as a geopolitical issue in the past decade due to the increased presence of China, India and Russia; the continent's importance in understanding global climate change; and its economic potential as a source of marine, genetic and mineral resources. This article examines the challenges for the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) in this context and the consequences for Australia's foreign policy in its dual role as both a territorial claimant and supporter of ATS norms of cooperative science and environmental protection. The central argument is that Antarctic ‘bifocalism’ is under pressure as increased commercial activity and problematic jurisdictional interfaces with other regimes create difficult regulatory challenges for the ATS and encourage assertions of sovereignty that cannot be resolved within the existing regime. Consequently, the author argues that it is vitally important for Australia to preserve the legitimacy of the ATS through a policy framework of ‘strategic denial’ that aims to prevent all states from acquiring sovereignty over Antarctic territory. Australia should therefore reject recent proposals to securitise Antarctic policy or pursue World Heritage listing because they involve assertions of sovereignty that risk fracturing the ATS and thus compromise Australia's enduring interest in keeping Antarctica as ‘a continent of international cooperation and peace’.