On ethnicity and development imperative: a case study of North-East India

‘North East India’ composed of different ethnicity is plagued with ethnic assertions and regionalism with that of centuries of alienation. Development is one big issue that need to be address in the region. The North East India after decades of independence is still lagging behind in term of socio, economic, education, political, cultural and social development. A deeper study reveals that movement for separate homeland, regionalism, tribalism, ethnic clash, crime, mass poverty, etc in the region are caused by backwardness of the region. The distinct geo-ethnic and socio-historical characters of North-East India constitute the hotbed of ethnic strife and extreme radicalism. The solution lies partly in resolving the conflict between primordial ethnic loyalties or ‘ethno-nationalism’ and the ‘nationalism of the nation state’, and partly a conscious and voluntary effort to resist corruption and unholy alliance between the militants and the politicians in the region. In any case, ethnic reconciliation would result in the reduction of ethnic violence of all kinds and would eventually restore law and order in the region. When the civil governance in the region will be spared from combating militancy or appeasing the militants, the whole energy of the government would be for strengthening the institutions of local self-government, which act as potential agents of development in the conflict-ridden states of the North-East India.     

Defining Nations in Asia and Europe: A Comparative Analysis of Ethnic Return Migration Policy1

We argue that regional comparison of East Asian and European ethnic return migration policy offers important new perspectives on nationhood, nondiscrimination norms, and trans‐nationality. We find that despite international nondiscrimination norms, preferential ethnic return policy is common in both regions. These policies at least implicitly define the nation as existing across borders. However, there are significant regional differences. East Asian states use co‐ethnic preferences instrumentally for economic goals and also offer preferential treatment of co‐ethnic foreign investors. European states offer preferences to coethnics to protect these populations or express symbolic ties, sometimes at great expense. Thus, in Europe the state has an obligation to assist coethnics abroad, but in Asia, foreign coethnics assist the state.     

Coming to terms with inequality and exploitation in an African state: researching disability in Sierra Leone

In this article, I describe how during my anthropological research in post‐conflict Sierra Leone with a disabled community, I was confronted by experiences of inequality and exploitation. Many disabled people had previous disabling contact with other researchers, organisations and journalists. Others described difficulties surviving the disabling socio‐economic conditions and were not viewed as ‘development’ partners, despite the fact that their images and stories had played a big role in the rebuilding and ‘healing’ of the Sierra Leonean nation state. I ask whether we as researchers and an international community are still not colluding with structures and institutions that exploit disabled people in post‐conflict and post‐disaster countries.     

The Politics of IDP Education Provision: Negotiating identity and schooling in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

The expansion of Islamic State control in Iraq led to massive internal displacement. Iraq now has one of the largest internally displaced populations in the world. Many families found relative safety in government‐controlled towns throughout the country; a large proportion sought refuge in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), having fled from its northern territories where Arabs, Kurds, Yezidis, Assyrians and Turkmen each claimed demographic dominance. Consequently, the KRI has become a sanctuary to almost a million Iraqi IDPs of varying ethnic backgrounds and cultures. This article draws on extensive regional fieldwork to explore the relationship between education provision for displaced populations and broader ethno‐sectarian and socio‐political influences. The article will unpack the research question: “In what ways does education for IDPs in KRI exacerbate or mitigate conflict?” and will highlight key areas in which misunderstanding of identity politics has resulted in reduced quality education for displaced populations.     

With/Out a State,Kurds Rising: The Un/Stated Foreign Policy and the Rise of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq

Abstract

Located in northern Iraq, the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) rules over an autonomous province in Iraq. Constitutionally, ‘Kurdistan Region’ is not independent, but empirically the KRG behaves as if it is a sovereign entity. With an elected parliament, a president, a prime minister, a cabinet, a flag, a national anthem, schools taught in Kurdish, and a booming economy, the ‘Kurdistan’ embodied by the KRG clearly exists empirically while unrecognized internationally. In this paper, I examine the rise of the KRG as an agent in international relations since the first Gulf War in 1991. I argue that foreign policy as a field of conduct and discourse has been central to the KRG's effective agency. In my analysis, I employ and interrelate Robert Jackson's work on ‘quasi-states’, Doug McAdam's argument on ‘political opportunity structures', and Giorgio Agamben's discussion on ‘indistinct zones of politics’ as in Iraq and the Middle East. Ultimately, I contend that while less than a full state in constitutional legal form, the KRG is more than a quasi-state in substance.¹1 See the official site of KRG at: http://cabinet.gov.krd/?l=12     

LGBTQ Activist Organizations as ‘Respectably Queer’ in India: Contesting a Western View

This study contests the distinction of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) organizations suggested by earlier scholars as ‘respectable’ — i.e. normalizing, professionalizing and conforming to the dominant cultural and institutional patterns — and ‘queer’, meaning challenging the cultural and institutional forces that ‘normalize and commodify differences’. Using Bernstein's model of identity deployment, it is found problematic to distinguish LGBTQ organizations this way because when the actions of LGBTQ organizations are more complex to describe, it is not warranted to conflate identity goals with identity strategies — whether normalizing (respectable) or differentiating (queer). To examine these concerns, a qualitative inquiry was used to study five LGBTQ organizations in India where the intersections of post‐colonial ethnicity, gender, social class and sexuality offer an intriguing context through which to study queer activism. Based on the findings, it is argued from a post‐colonial perspective that when the socio‐cultural and historical existence of non‐homonormative queer communities and practices is strong, LGBTQ organizations challenge the heteronormative and/or other forms of domination to become ‘queer’. But they may simultaneously become ‘respectable′ by conforming to the diversity politics of non‐profit business, donors, and social movement organizations they seek support from, and turn out as ‘respectably queer’.     

伊战后美国对伊拉克库尔德政策的动因及走向

长期以来,奉行亲美立场的伊拉克库尔德人在美国的中东战略中具有不可替代的作用。伊战后,以2003年伊拉克战争为标志事件,2011年美军撤离伊拉克为重要节点,美国的伊拉克库尔德政策可以分撤军前和撤军后两个阶段。随着伊拉克国内安全局势的恶化、伊朗支持什叶派力量的力度加大、极端组织“伊斯兰国”的沉浮和美国中东战略的收缩,美国不断调整对伊拉克库尔德政策。该政策是内外多重因素影响的结果,从本质上讲是美国将其作为维护中东霸权战略的重要抓手和依托。近年来,随着伊拉克国内反美情绪的高涨、伊朗地区影响力的增强、叙利亚局势的不确定性等多重因素的叠加,美国根据中东局势变化和战略利益需要持续调整库尔德政策,伊拉克库尔德人仍将是美国中东战略中的一个重要棋子。     

Ethnic Enclaves,Networks and Self‐Employment among Middle Eastern Immigrants in Sweden

The proportion of immigrants from countries in the Middle East living in Sweden has increased since the 1970s, and it is a well‐known fact that immigrants from the Middle East suffer from low earnings and high rates of unemployment on the Swedish labour market. There are often great hopes that self‐employment will enable immigrants to improve their labour market situation. Further, in Sweden as in many other countries, the question of whether the existence of ethnic enclaves are good or bad for immigrants’ earnings and employment opportunities has also been widely debated. This paper presents a study of the extent to which Middle Eastern ethnic enclaves and networks in Sweden enhance or hinder immigrants’ self‐employment. The results show that the presence of ethnic enclaves increases the propensity for self‐employment. Thus, immigrants in ethnic enclaves provide their co‐ethnics with goods and services that Swedish natives are not able to provide. The results also show that ethnic networks seem to be an obstacle to immigrant self‐employment. One explanation is that an increase in network size implies increased competition for customers among self‐employed immigrants. The question of whether ethnic enclaves are good or bad for the integration of immigrants into the labour market has been widely debated. The results of this paper provide us with information about the integration puzzle. Ethnic enclaves seem to enhance self‐employment propensities among Middle Eastern immigrants in Sweden.     

Not a Silk Road: trading networks between China and the Middle East as a dynamic interaction of competing Eurasian geographies

This article offers a different theorization of the commercial geographies and economic networks that connect China to the Middle East from those associated with the metaphor of the ‘Silk Road’. Many accounts of the recent and ongoing internationalization of the Chinese trade in small commodities through the well‐known market city of Yiwu describe the increasingly significant flows of commerce between China and the Middle East in these terms. In this article, I propose an alternative theoretical frame, arguing that the commercial geographies fashioned by Arab traders in Yiwu are, rather, formed through a dynamic relation of competition and cooperation between a series of distinct but overlapping Eurasian political geographies which have been in process from the 1970s onwards. Analysts have also often highlighted the Muslim and Arab ethnic nature of the transnational economic networks that connect Yiwu to markets across the Middle East. But rather than adopting a network governance approach, which sees these networks as embedded in a shared culture or ethnicity that furnishes the possibility of trust, I adopt a structural analysis approach in which traders act as brokers, moving and mediating between different geographies. I argue that they act strategically to keep several contexts in play at once because they are faced with an unforeseeable future and marginal citizenship rights.     

Urban ‘untouchables’ and Hindu nationalism

The ‘untouchables’ of India are excluded from various areas of social and cultural life. Despite this, the higher castes do not exclude them from the category of ‘Hindu’ since, for them, the term is counterposed to the concept of ‘foreigner’. The lowest groups, on the other hand, often do not think of themselves as Hindus, for they use the word in terms of a very different set of conceptual oppositions. For them, ‘Hindus’ are people of high caste. Anderson's (1983) characterization of the nation as an ‘imagined community’ does not adequately explain why Hindu nationalists are now pressing minority ‘untouchables’ to define themselves as Hindus. Western reification of the concept of ‘Hindu’ has implications for political struggles in the sub‐continent.     

After ‘ethnicity’: Migration,identity and political economy

In an earlier article¹ I have argued that British ‘African Asians’ can not legitimately be described as an ‘ethnic’ community. This argument was made by means of a critique of sections from the 4th PSI Survey. I show that the attitudinal responses of British ‘African Asians’, as evidenced in the Survey, do not reveal any special emphasis upon the components of ethnicity (religion, skin colour, ‘extra‐British’ origins, ‘racial’ grouping) specified by the Survey's authors and that parental roles in marital decision‐making, thought by the Survey's authors to be important in maintaining ‘ethnic’ boundaries, and their attitudes towards ‘mixed marriages’, are now little different from the majority of Britishers. My chief objection to the ‘ethnicity’ paradigm, incorporating the notion of ‘ethnic identities’, is that, as with all analytical concepts, it inhibits those whom it embraces from inclusion within alternative conceptions: marking individuals and communities as ‘ethnically’ special robs them of parity with their ‘non‐ethnic’ neighbours.

In this article, in opposition to the current vogue for ‘ethnic’ labelling and in sympathy with Robert Miles's well‐known position, I contend that British Gujarati Hindus (who form a majority of British ‘African Asians') should be considered in the same analytical light as any other group of British citizens. The focus of the article is on those members of the Gujarati Hindu Patidar caste (commonly having the surname Patel), who settled first in East Africa and then, often not through their own choice, in Britain. I argue that their caste identity, the dynamics of their migrations and changes to their socioreligious culture are all fully explicable by non‐'ethnic’ political sociology.     

Special theme introduction: methodological cosmopolitanism across the socio‐cultural sciences

The cosmopolitan sociology of Ulrich Beck has been widely recognized as making vital contributions to crosscutting conversations on globalization and transnational studies, including these debates that are being played out on the pages of Global Networks. Beck's impassioned critique of ‘methodological nationalism’ in his own discipline of sociology, in particular, has often served as a springboard for programmatic calls to attend more closely to transnational actors, issues, and processes. However, beyond the occasional acknowledgement, comparatively less attention has been paid so far to the potentialities, specificities, and practicalities of Beck's affirmative alternative vision for the socio‐cultural sciences, that of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’. Building on and extending out from research experiences obtained in Beck's East Asia and Europe‐focused Cosmopolitan Climate Change (Cosmo‐Climate) project, this special theme brings together experts from across a range of socio‐cultural research fields to discuss and critically interrogate the challenges and capacities of doing methodological cosmopolitanism.     

‘Between authenticity and pretension’: parents', pupils' and young professionals' negotiations of minority ethnic middle‐class identity

Despite an increasing sociological interest in the middle classes and their educational practices, research has largely concentrated on the white middle classes. This paper considers the case of the minority ethnic (ME) middle classes through empirical data from a small, exploratory study conducted in England with 36 minority ethnic, ‘middle‐class’ individuals (parents, pupils and young professionals) from a range of ME backgrounds. It is argued that participants experienced ME middle‐class identity as a profoundly conflictual and precarious space, negotiated through a matrix of relational classed and racialized positionings. ‘Authentic’ middle‐classness remains the preserve of white society due to racial inequalities and the dominance of whiteness as the popularly legitimated marker of middle classness. Moreover, attempts to define an acceptable, legitimate and principled ME middle‐class identity are compromised by the discursive threats of ‘inauthenticity’, ‘pretension’ and ‘misrecognition’.     

伊拉克"后重建时期"的库尔德分离主义新危机

随着美军2011年撤退期限临近,伊拉克即将进入一个没有美军直接干预的"后重建"时代。与此同时,伊拉克库尔德人的分离主义危机也再次出现。究其原因,主要是美国政府干预下伊拉克建立的"合作性民主"制度缺乏内在凝聚力,伊拉克阿拉伯民族主义者强调中央集权和反对联邦制宪法的倾向威胁到库尔德人的自治,伊拉克国内不同种族和宗教派别之间因核心利益差异而导致的各种冲突难以和解,还有库尔德斯坦自治以来与周围国家地缘政治关系的有利改变。这些因素都为库尔德人争取独立提供了重要契机,从而使得伊拉克库尔德分离主义危机再次成为国际社会关注的焦点。     

Displacement,integration and identity in the postcolonial world

Defining the relationship between displaced populations and the nation state is a fraught historical process. The Partition of India in 1947 provides a compelling example, yet markedly little attention has been paid to the refugee communities produced. Using the case of the displaced ‘Urdu-speaking minority’ in Bangladesh, this article considers what contemporary discourses of identity and integration reveal about the nature and boundaries of the nation state. It reveals that the language of ‘integration’ is embedded in colonial narratives of ‘population’ versus ‘people-nation’ which structure exclusion not only through language and ethnicity, but poverty and social space. It also shows how colonial and postcolonial registers transect and overlap as colonial constructions of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ fold into religious discourses of ‘pollution’ and ‘purity’. The voices of minorities navigating claims to belonging through these discourses shed light on a ‘nation-in-formation’: the shifting landscape of national belonging and the complicated accommodations required.     

中东国家建构中的少数族群问题

中东地区民族、宗教状况极为复杂,这导致几乎所有中东国家都存在着大量少数族群,如何处理与少数族群的关系,是影响中东民族国家构建的关键因素之一。本文主要以埃及科普特人为例,阐明少数族群与主体民族间关系的演变及他们如何在中东民族国家构建进程中被边缘化。此外,本文还讨论了中东国家对待少数族群的政策性失误对民族国家构建的影响。本文认为政策及执行的公平性是确保中东国家各族群和平共处、共同发展的唯一出路。     

Staking the claims of identity: Purism,linguistics and the media in post‐1990 Germany1

The paper examines one of the major metalinguistic debates in post‐war Germany: the debate about the influence of English on German, an issue which was raised in the 1990s in the German media and has dominated media discussions on language ever since. The analysis demonstrates that the debate is deeply embedded in current socio‐political discourses as well as in long‐term discursive traditions concerning, on the one hand, the socio‐political changes following German reunification in 1989/90, which involved a revision of the concepts of nation and nationalism, and, on the other, the genesis of the concept of nation, which is closely bound up with the history of the educated bourgeoisie and the process of standardisation as well as linguistic purism. It is argued that the debate on Anglicisms, as is the case in many other metalinguistic debates, cannot be regarded in isolation from the socio‐political environment and the context of historical usage within which it is embedded.     

A state of limbo: the politics of waiting in neo‐liberal Latvia

This article presents an ethnographic study of politics of waiting in a post‐Soviet context. While activation has been explored in sociological and anthropological literature as a neo‐liberal governmental technology and its application in post‐socialist context has also been compellingly documented, waiting as a political artefact has only recently been receiving increased scholarly attention. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a state‐run unemployment office in Riga, this article shows how, alongside activation, state welfare policies also produce passivity and waiting. Engaging with the small but developing field of sociological literature on the politics of waiting, I argue that, rather than interpreting it as a clash between ‘neo‐liberal’ and ‘Soviet’ regimes, we should understand the double‐move of activation and imposition of waiting as a key mechanism of neo‐liberal biopolitics. This article thus extends the existing theorizations of the temporal politics of neo‐liberalism.     

Transnational political action and ‘global civil society’ in practice: the case of Oxfam

The term ‘global civil society’ has taken on increasing significance within scholarly debate over the past decade. In this article we seek to understand transnational political agency via the study of a particular transnational actor, Oxfam. We argue that various schools of thought surrounding the global civil society concept, in particular the prevailing liberal‐cosmopolitan approach, are unable to conceptualize transnational political action in practice – due largely, in the case of liberal‐cosmopolitanism, to a shared normative agenda. We also assess what contribution literature on development and civil society has made to the analysis of groups such as Oxfam. In investigating Oxfam's own perceptions of its context and the meanings of its agency, we discover an anti‐political perspective derived from an encounter between Oxfam's longstanding commitment to liberal internationalism and globalization discourse. Existing scholarship has insufficiently identified the local or parochial nature of the identities of global civil society actors.     

Eating heritage: caste,colonialism, and the contestation of adivasi creativity

ABSTRACT

This paper uses a multiple colonialisms approach to study cultural production in India and argue that coloniality is not a casteless structure of violence. In discursive and planning rhetoric, ‘creativity is in India’s DNA.’ This discourse incites the poor to harness and develop their tangible and intangible cultural heritage in order to feed themselves. Foregrounding anti-caste, Dalit scholarship in conversation with extant formulations of decolonial aesthetics focuses urgent attention on the fact that caste domination and violence structure inter-state political systems of development planning and post/colonial state discourses of heritage that claim to feed the caste-oppressed poor with their own creativity. This article attends to the political histories and critiques of Indigenous Chhara performance artists because their expressive cultures foreground anti-caste struggles against simultaneous state erasure and capture of Indigenous creativity. Against planning’s compensatory solution of eating heritage, anti-caste scholarship and the creative politics of Budhan Theatre refute the apparent castelessness of what counts as creativity and heritage, demonstrating that optimistic global creative economy discourses actually rely upon caste and colonial histories to entrench caste-based definitions of heritage within international and national development regimes. Budhan Theatre’s decolonizing cultural production avoids the mistakes of postcolonial scholarship and its erasure of caste histories. They prompt a multiple colonialisms approach which refuses labels of postcolonial or settler colonial states to privilege instead attention to the actually existing contemporary ways in which caste violence structures inter-state systems of violence, policies, and discourses.