The Ethnic Minority Question and Rohingya Crisis in Contemporary Myanmar

The recent humanitarian Rohingya crisis has once again put Myanmar onto the centre stage of global media attention. The aim of this paper is to look into the ethnic minority question in contemporary Myanmar. The paper has a special focus on the Muslim Rohingya community. The paper argues that problematic race relations in Myanmar today should not be viewed in isolation but should be seen as a part of a historical continuum. The British colonial policies of divide and rule, political leaders and their obsession with Buddhism in the post-independence period and xenophobic tendencies during the long years of the military junta have all collectively contributed to the very complex situation in which the country finds itself today when it comes to race relations. Meaningful democracy and economic development have been advocated as the way forward especially for the more peripheral parts of the country where there is a strong ethnic minority presence.     

Forced Migration and the Expatriation of the Rohingya: A Demographic Assessment of Their Historical Exclusions and Statelessness

This paper attempts to outline the forced migration and consequent flee and displacement of the Rohingya Muslims in Northwestern Arakan State of Myanmar after several violent clashes and insurgencies between the Rohingya Muslims, the Buddhists and government security forces. More than 400,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled from Myanmar in August 2017 violence which has been described as “a textbook example of ethnic cleansing” by United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR). Being only visible as “refugee problem” of this mass expatriation, the continuous forced migration and displacement of the Rohingya have been rendered invisible. In this context, this paper attempts a demographic assessment of Rohingya people through historical process of their exclusions and the magnitude of the forced migration to the neighboring countries as illegal, economic burden, stateless migrants. This paper analyses the historical origin of the underlying situation, identity politics, ethnic crisis, and statelessness for better understanding the demographic decline of the Rohingya in this geographic region. Finally, it highlights the international community's responses to this undergoing humanitarian crisis of the Rohingya.     

The Two Faces of Democratization in Myanmar: A Case Study of the Rohingya and Burmese Nationalism

The Rohingya have faced discriminatory policies and actions by the Myanmar government since independence in 1948, with many within the state seeing them as foreigners. This paper uses historical process tracing from pre-British colonialism to present day to argue that the persistent persecution of the Rohingya stems from the divergent experiences under British colonialism for the Rohingya and majority Burman population and, as a result of this, Burmese national identity forming around the dominant Burman ethnic group and the Buddhist faith. The government following independence, then, institutionalized this national identity, excluding the Rohingya as a part of the nation and denying their identity, arguing instead that they are “illegal Bengali immigrants”. As shown through this case study, the resiliency of these anti-Rohingya policies and attitudes within the Myanmar government through successive regime changes is a result of national identity being defined as both Burman and Buddhist, which remained constant. It also helps to explain how the political opening provided by the democratization process resulted in a number of anti-Muslim and anti-Rohingya operations by Buddhist monks and other Buddhist nationalists, government policies, and even military operations.     

The Rohingya Crisis: The Centrality of Identity and Citizenship

The article examines the recent developments of Rohingya refugee crisis, especially in the aftermath of August 2017 violence which led to the exodus of hundreds of thousands of people across the border to Bangladesh. It analyzes the three-stage-plan proposed by China and the repatriation agreement between Myanmar and Bangladesh and argues that ethnic identity and citizenship issues are fundamental to the Rohingya conundrum. Without addressing these core issues, which thus far have been paid little or no serious consideration, there is a danger of recurrence of violence. While the Myanmar authorities are ready to address some of the immediate concerns, such as providing accommodation and food, evidences suggest that the government does not have the political will, at least at the moment, to address the core issues of ethnic identity and citizenship, as well as the related security concerns.     

Rohingya Ethnic Muslim Minority and the 1982 Citizenship Law in Burma

The Rohingyas have experienced difficulties in obtaining citizenship since the enactment of the 1982 Citizenship Law in Burma. From the beginning of Burmese independence, their separate identity was recognized by the then democratic government of Premier U Nu (1948–1962). Their situation worsened after the military takeover in 1962 leaving then subject to humiliating restrictions and harsh treatment by the State. However, the Burmese 1982 Citizenship Law institutionalized the Rohingyas statelessness.This paper argues that despite all evidence as indigenous people of Arakan, the ethnic Muslim minority Rohingya are arbitrarily deprived of their citizenship. The Burmese are adamant that the Rohingyas are Bengalis regardless of their residency history, and therefore belong in Bangladesh. Their Islamic religion and Indo-Aryan appearance do not conform with the “Burmese citizenship standard”. In this context, Burma/Myanmar citizenship law fails to meet the international standard. Rohingya ancestry related documents prove that the government enacted the new law simply to deny the Rohingya identity.     

WHO's MIND,whose future? Mental health projects as colonial logics

This paper examines the Mental Health Improvements for Nations Development of the World Health Organization (WHO), or what it refers to as its MIND project, as it produces versions of human and human suffering. Arising at approximately the same time as decolonization began to occur, the WHO can be read as reflective of colonial history as well as a colonizing force in postcolonial times. Through an analysis of the WHO's publicly available material, we shall show how the MIND project is not only a product of, but also helps to produce the power of coloniality. In the WHO MIND project, professional disability knowledge is used to identify an emergent mental health crisis in need of Western medical intervention. Guided by Fanon's call to notice how assistance makes a subject ‘thoroughly fit into a social environment of the colonial type,’ we examine the role of disability knowledge in the production of people ‘fit’ to survive in environments that reproduce coloniality. We show how the WHO MIND project can be read so as to reveal the restrictive and exclusive versions of the human that have arisen from the colonial past as our way to attempt to disrupt the developmental trajectory of the coloniality of the present.     

Threatening consumption: managing US imperial anxieties in representations of skin lightening in India

This paper contextualizes the US mainstream media coverage of the skin-lightening industry in India within a moment of imperial crisis in the United States in the early part of the twenty-first century. Discourse analysis of news media accounts indicates that orientalist colonial tropes of Indian primitiveness, traditionalism, and gendered difference intersect with American post-racial ideology to disassociate American consumers from an Indian consuming public. Thus, representations of skin lightening attempt to ease imperial anxieties around the United States' faltering economic dominance due to the rise of emerging economies like India by reviving nationalist narratives of American exceptionalism. Not only does this obscure racism and colorism in the United States, it also impedes recognition of the overlapping conditions of transnational commercialized beauty culture and industry within which white/light beauty standards and skin-whitening products flourish.     

Commemorating the colonial Pilbara: beyond memorials into difficult history

The colonial Northwest of Western Australia was a harsh frontier, where demands for Aboriginal land, labour and knowledge led to dispossession, loss of rights, massacre and generations encumbered with the colonial legacy. In the Pilbara, there are some rare attempts to engage with this difficult colonial history, mainly in the form of heritage site interpretation and heritage trails. Overall, the difficult colonial history of the Northwest is poorly represented. Colonialism and its legacy are not effectively commemorated, nor are distinct local cultural and civic attributes highlighted as ‘lessons from the past’. In this paper, we explore the memorialization and commemoration of the Northwest's traumatic colonial history and consider a history of how heritage has been represented across the landscape. We suggest that the affective heritage of the Northwest especially cross-cultural or multi-cultural sites and histories can provide a basis for commemorating difficult colonial history or violent events that are underrepresented in dominant heritage regimes.     

辛亥革命前后治边理念及其演变

辛亥革命前后,面对中国边疆民族地区日益严峻的形势,在新旧思想交替、中西观念汇聚的背景下,各界人士在民族关系、边疆治理方面提出了许多建议和意见,反映了当时的相关理念,仿殖民体制和同化就是其中的重要内容。本文探讨了当时仿殖民体制和同化治边理念的内涵及变化,认为如果回归到特定的历史环境中进行分析,研究者会更加全面地评价这些理念及其影响。     

中东政局动荡及对中国的影响因素

中东乱局,使得类似中国这样的发展中国家所谓的“世界加工厂”未来地位的受损不可低估。但无论今后中东出现什么样的政府,预计都不会改变目前奉行的对华友好政策。中国与中东国家、阿拉伯国家、伊斯兰国家无战争交恶历史及殖民主义统治历史,中国是其值得信赖的、负责任的国家。中国在中东投资的决心不会变,中国“走出去”已经势不可当。中国正...     

Decolonising Eurocentric disability studies: why colonialism matters in the disability and global South debate

The words ‘colonised’ and ‘colonising’ have recently been adopted in global North fields such as disability studies, highlighting notions of colonised bodies by colonising practices, with the implication that some or other ‘decolonisation’ is required. But these words remain little more than abstract and dehistoricised metaphors in these Eurocentric academic projects. This paper critically maps out some arguments as to why the colonial encounter is not simply a metaphor and cannot be bypassed in any global disability analysis. The paper argues how this historical event transcends the discursive, a violent materiality framing disability as a historical narrative and human condition, while (re)positioning disability as a useful optic through which to examine the dynamics of imperialism. The colonial provides the landscape for understanding contemporary Southern spaces within which disability is constructed and lived – neocolonised spaces hosting what I call neocolonised bodies. The paper concludes that decolonisation, just like colonialism, is not a metaphor. Instead, it is a continuous violent and political process owned by the global South but open to collaboration, drawing on forms of resistance that have long colonial lineages.     

Necronationalism: managing race,death and the nation's skeletons

This paper examines the construction of the Simon Wiesenthal Center ‘Museum of Tolerance (Jerusalem)’ over Mamilla Cemetery, one of the largest Muslim burial grounds in the region. Tracing the politics of death as exercised through the excavation of the cemetery, I consider how access to settler colonial memory is managed and renewed through the purging of Indigenous corporeality. Inspired by Achille Mbembe's sobering account of necropower, this paper conceptualizes power as a system of domination inscribed through the colonial management of deceased racial subjects and asks how we might understand systems of settler colonial power arranged through dehumanization of the already dead. I contend that the capacity to govern life after death is still firmly rooted in the reach of colonial power, and that by attending to the excavation and erasure of Mamilla Cemetery's deceased Palestinian subjects, we see a particular configuration of sovereignty defined through a calculus of absence. Identifying this practice of settler colonial nation building as ‘necronationalism’, I consider how power over life after death becomes the very terrain through which a nation is imagined.     

Postcolonial reproductions: disability,indigeneity and the formation of the white masculine settler state of Australia

There has been a growing debate within the broad field of postcolonial scholarship which seeks to challenge both its territorial boundaries with the advent of globalization and its limitations when applied to the realm of white-settler societies. The debate has been extremely fruitful in situating emerging scholarship that seeks to extend postcoloniality, its theoretical framing, and the internal processes of social categorization for peoples caught within the nation-state's territorial sphere. Unfortunately, disability and indigeneity remain largely absent from these fresh debates; or when included, are explored as singular fields of analytical inquiry with little intersectional dialogue. With this paper, I aim to extend these nascent debates by critically engaging with both disability and indigeneity as two interlocking sites of (post)colonial nation-state power. To explicate this argument, my analysis focuses on a key historical moment in the Australian experience – the formation of the colonial white-settler society of Australia in its early years (1901–1920s), comparing and contrasting the systems of administrative management of disability and indigeneity. In doing so, the paper reveals the deep materialities of white, able-bodied, masculine, (post)colonial settler rule that bring together disability and indigeneity via gender reproductive controls. The conclusion reflects on the transformative effects of managing transgressive bodies and minds under the white able-bodied settler state and the potential this opens to negotiate practices of solidarity.     

Liberalism and Cultural Policy in Indonesia

The beginning of contemporary cultural policy in the West is tied to the emergence of liberalism and its formulation of the subjects of governance as free individuals. Culture was judged a field where the state could teach its subjects to exercise a ‘responsible and disciplined’ freedom without impinging on that freedom. In colonial contexts, indigenous subjects were judged incapable of exercising freedom responsibly and the state considered them to require a degree of state control thought inappropriate for Western subjects. In this paper, I explore how cultural policy in Indonesia has been influenced by engagement with these two applications of liberalism from the late colonial period until the present, against the background of a changing international climate and political events in Indonesia. I also address the post-Suharto period where, due to the absence of a strong political movement for reform to drive change and the decentralisation of a number of policy areas including culture, a variety of cultural policies reflecting a variety of engagements with these interpretations exist together. I demonstrate that understanding the complexity of the application of liberal methods of governance in a colonial and postcolonial context is central to appreciating the cultural policy of that location.     

Colonial legacies,post-colonial (in)securities,and gender(ed) representations in South Asia's nuclear policies

Through a comparative study of India and Pakistan's national security discourses, this article explores the linkages between post-colonial India and Pakistan's nationalist/communalist identities, configurations of masculinities, and gendered representations underpinning their nuclear (in)securities. This paper contends that the colonial politics of place-making in the sub-continent has not only inscribed a process of ‘othering’ between these states but has also facilitated the rise of divergent visions of post-colonial nationalisms, which, at each of their phases and with particular configurations of masculinities, have used women's bodies to re-map India-Pakistan's borders and national (in)securities. This article particularly draws attention to a new form of gendered manipulation in South Asian politics in the late 1990s, whereby both states, embedded in colonial notions of religious/cultural masculinities, have relied on discourses of Hindu/Indian and Muslim/Pakistani women's violence and protection from the ‘other’ to pursue aggressive policies of nuclearization. It is at this conjectural moment of a Hinduicized and Islamicized nationalism (flamed by the contestations of a Hindu versus an Islamic masculinity) that one needs to provide a feminist re-interpretation of India-Pakistan's nationalist identities, gendered imaginaries, and their re-articulation of national (in)securities – that represents a religious/gendered ‘otherness’ in South Asia's nuclear policies.     

Editorial Note

The issue of acculturation is an important one in the history and historiography of Dutch colonialism in the Indies. In so far as there is any substantial orthodoxy, it is that the orientalisation of Java's Dutch communities had become very marked by the late seventeenth century and remained so for the next two hundred years. It was only with the changed global circumstances of the late colonial era, c. 1880 onwards, that Western modes began to assert themselves effectively against those of the East. In turn, the profound acculturation prior to that date of the Dutch colonial communities in the Indies, and in Java in particular, came to be associated with the notion of a Tempo Doeloe [lit: 'time past'], which provided a salient contrast to the markers of a subsequent, late-colonial 'modernity' This paper questions some of the basic assumptions of this orthodoxy, from a postcolonial standpoint that challenges its inherent colonial-era binaries. The nineteenth century family histories of a number of men and women - Suikerlords [Sugar Lords] and their Ladies - from the elite strata of Dutch colonial society in the Indies demonstrates that the cultural and social nexus between The Netherlands and the Indies throughout the nineteenth century was a good deal more intimate, and colonial identity significantly more ambivalent, than enduring stereotypes might allow.     

Eating cultures: Incorporation,identity and Indian food

Abstract

Linking the colonial British ‘fabrication’ of curry powder to the colonial fabrication of India, this paper explores the connections between colonial attitudes to India and to Indian food. The paper then looks at the links between food norms, and religious and political animosities in contemporary India. It then proceeds to use food to think about the place of the Indian community in contemporary England, and about the problematic roles assigned to women in immigrant Indian communities. The paper goes on to reflect on the notions of ‘food colonialism’ and ‘culinary imperialism’, arguing that the social meanings of ‘ethnic food’ in western contexts must also be considered from the point of view of immigrants to western contexts. The paper ends by arguing that concerns about multi‐culturalism and respect for other cultures must focus not only on relationships between ‘mainstream citizens’ and ‘ethnic Others’, but on the relationships between various ‘ethnic’ groups.     

Colonial hangover? A case of multiple cross-cultural influences on Indian Railways

Employing a reflexive-ethnographic design involving past experiences and analysing qualitative data contained in 73 interviews with senior managers from the Indian Railways (IR), this study argues for the remnants of colonial influence on the management, governance aspects and culture in IR. Findings from the study further ratify and confirm aspects of our four scenarios and indicate that the interaction between colonial culture with both national and organisational culture collides to create a complex and conflicting culture in this extremely large and diverse organisation. Such organisational culture, despite the resilient presence of Indianness, paradoxically retains strong elements of the colonial influences as this is seen at times a legitimate and dominant way of governing the world’s largest commercial employer – The IR.     

Comparing postcolonial identity formations: legacies of Portuguese and British colonialisms in East Africa

Colonial ties constitute the basis upon which Indian migration to the UK occurred. In the post-war years, while Punjabi migrants more than fulfilled the gap in expanding British industry, Indian elites also arrived to take up professional jobs. During the 1960s and 1970s, in a context of increasingly restrictive (and racially politicized) immigration legislation, there was a significant settlement of the so-called East African Indians, among them an important percentage of East African Gujaratis who had close links with England long before the processes of Africanisation began. Since the 1990s, those East African families also were the ‘hosts’ of a considerable number of Portuguese Indians of Gujarat origin, most of whom had been born in Mozambique during the colonial period and had lived in post-colonial Portugal. This paper will attempt to show how different experiences of intersubjectivity between colonizers and colonized in British and Portuguese African colonial contexts still constitute a source of (re)invention and pluralization of identities within post-colonial Gujarat diasporas settled in the UK. An analysis of these narratives in process will serve to underline the significance of dialectic processes of remaking colonial and post-colonial experiences in order to understand post-colonial identity formations, their ex-tensions and in-tensions, as well as the identity strategies of postcolonial subjects to deal with ‘old’ and ‘new’ multicultural dilemmas.