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| 1 |
ID:
193150
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| Summary/Abstract |
This conclusion to the special issue notes the persistent use of binary frames in conceptions of (European) security. Such frames reify and limit our ability to make sense of key security challenges, not least by occluding their gendered and racialised dimensions. Therefore, it asks: How to move beyond binaries towards a more nuanced, inclusive and impactful conception of (European) security? Developing an answer via synthetic engagement of the articles in this collection – and their sources in gender and postcolonial studies – it argues that we can begin to challenge binaries with a relational approach operationalised by linking three concepts: intersectional positionality, performativity and allyship. By thus acknowledging the plural and performative thrust of intersecting security stances, the pieces in this collection point to the promise of situationally appropriate forms of allyship across positions, bringing a broader range of voices and insights to security agendas.
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| 2 |
ID:
179106
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This article develops a critical analysis of the colonial world of the postcolonial historians whose works inadvertently contribute to the process of reconstituting the colonial construction of tribal identities in neoliberal India. The monolithic and colonial construction of tribal identities in postcolonial India reinforces and preserves tribal identities along the lines of the colonial methods of identity formation based on territorialization. The article highlights the problematic features of the territorialization and deterritorialization of tribal identities and their reconstitution. Territorial-based identity formation is now being used and sustained by the neoliberal political and economic ruling and non-ruling elites in order to exploit tribal communities. The existence of upper-caste and class-based Hindu social order is concomitant with a social hierarchy based on the exploitation of tribal communities in India. This article locates the colonial and neoliberal capitalist logic of identity formation that serves elites, and helps to advance the neoliberal political-economic project of the Hindu right. A postmodern logic of identity formation facilitates the expansion of the neoliberal capitalist economy with the process of Hinduization. It contributes to identity formations that divide the people on territorial grounds. The article is divided into four parts. The first outlines the philosophical basis of identity formation and its links with neoliberalism; the second deals with identity formation based on territory; part three documents the debates on tribal identity formation in postcolonial India; and the final part elucidates the capitalist logic inherent in territorial-based identity formations.
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| 3 |
ID:
143646
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| Summary/Abstract |
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.
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| 4 |
ID:
180618
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| Summary/Abstract |
Contemporary Naga literature in English engages with aspects of State-making, nationalism while it lives in a moment identified as the global. It also inhabits the ‘postcolonial’ terrain given its history of British Colonisation. In other words, even as contemporary Naga literature in English engages with features broadly identified as constituting the postcolonial, due to the multiple socio-political realities it inhabits, it also needs to be read in terms of its specificities. Since contemporary Naga literature in English is embedded in multiple realities, locating it within a single theoretical trajectory can be difficult. This paper attempts to demonstrate that while literatures can be mapped as belonging to the ‘postcolonial’ time, it is difficult to map similarities across literary writings, in terms of literary articulation.
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| 5 |
ID:
165078
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| Summary/Abstract |
Drawing on postcolonial literature and theories of farmer resistance, this article provides an empirically based alternative explanation of African farmer behaviours to narratives that blame them for their lack of technology adoption. Based on six months of ethnographic immersion in one district in the Northern Region of Ghanaa, we identify the ways that farmers defy commercial agriculture investment, government services and non-governmental organisation (NGO) project interventions aimed at intensification, and describe their reasons for doing so. This study interprets farmers’ acts of defiance, such as side-selling or falsely weighting their products, as insights into everyday acts of resistance. We find that throughout Ghana’s postcolonial period, agriculture intensification policy and practice have produced an environment where various development actors and farmers have both a sense of entitlement and mistrust of each other. Farmers’ acts of sabotage may be spaces where they make rational choices based on experiences of historical antecedence, including decades of failed development projects, elite corruption and mismanagement, degrading ecologies and donor hegemony.
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| 6 |
ID:
082444
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2008.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article offers an analysis of the dynamic interplay of ogenous and exogenous forces that create the complexity of immigrant entity. It examines cultural identity and the related discourse of one particular immigrant group, the 'post-war immigrant aiwanese, in contemporary Japan. This group came to Japan after the end of Second World War. They have experienced complex transitions in both legal status and self-identification. Constituted from the legacies of Japanese colonialism and Chinese aonalism,he post-warmigr Taiwanese constantly negotiate and redefine their 'neither here, nor there' identities and thus constitute a distinct case within the population of overseas ethnic Chinese. Japan, widely considered to be a society of racial and cultural homogeneity, faces an increasing influx of migrants, in particular those from East Asia in recent years. Immigration thus leads to a broad range of concerns in contemporary Japanese society. While previous literatures of the Chinese and Korean Diaspora are widely researched, there is a vacuum on Taiwanese Diaspora in the associated scholarship. This study investigates the Taiwanese migrants' cultural adaptation and socialization under the Japanese discourse through literature reviews and field study. This paper argues that the post-war migr Taiwanese have constructed a transnational identity hidden in-between two cultures of Japanese and Chinese. In other words, this paper attempts to offer a perspective of Taiwanese under Japanese colonialism and Chinese nationalism that transcends the 'identity struggle' commonly experienced by immigrants around the world. This group of Taiwanese migrants in postwar Japan struggle with surveillance, assimilation, resistance and identity confusion. To balance between a survival strategy overseas and a primordial attachment to the motherland, their identification with group boundaries may shift in accordance with a variety of situations.
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| 7 |
ID:
117604
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Much contemporary analysis of world order rests on and reproduces a dualistic account of the international system, which is divided into liberal and non-liberal spaces, practices and subjectivities. Drawing on postcolonial thought, we challenge such dualisms in two ways. First, we argue that, as a specific form of governmental reason and practice produced at the intersection of the European and the non-European worlds, liberalism has always been hybrid, encompassing within its project both 'liberal' and 'non-liberal' spaces and practices. Second, through analysis of liberal engagement with diasporas, a specific set of subjects that occupy both these spaces, we show how contemporary practices of transnational security governance work to reproduce the hybridity of liberal peace. The article demonstrates the shifting conditions for local agency in relations and practices that transcend the simple dualism between liberal and non-liberal spaces, in the process showing how practices of transnational security governance also reproduce diasporas as hybrid subjects. The argument is illustrated with reference to the Tamil diaspora and the Sri Lankan state's war against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam.
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| 8 |
ID:
192526
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| Summary/Abstract |
Few predicted the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine and especially its brutality. Similarly, Ukraine’s capable and determined resistance came as a surprise to many. Ukraine, viewed through the Russian lenses, was erroneously characterized as “weak” and “fragmented.” In turn, Russia was seen as a modern power seeking a “sphere of influence” through attraction and occasional meddling in neighbors’ affairs. The Ukraine–Russia relations were misconstrued as “brotherly.” I argue that Russia should be understood as a colonial power whose aggression aims to re-establish supremacy over the Ukrainian nation. This desire arose from Ukrainians' increased acceptance in Europe, which Russians perceived as a transgression of hierarchies. The brutality of the invasion was aggravated by the Russian forces’ realization that Ukrainians not only rejected their “rescue mission” but did not need one in the first place. Misconceptions about the Russian invasion can be addressed through interdisciplinarity, engagement with postcolonial scholarship, and attention to facts.
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| 9 |
ID:
118992
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2012.
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| Summary/Abstract |
Examining the coverage in seven major Japanese and Taiwanese daily newspapers of a selection of events involving both societies in the first decade of the twenty-first century, this paper investigates the phenomenon of rhetorical instrumentalization of the past for present ideological purposes. The concerns of this study are the processes of dehistorization in Japanese and Taiwanese news and public debate, and through a critical thematic reading of the sources I argue that a motif of Taiwanese repetition and imitation of Japan runs through all the studied cases as a basic narrative formula.
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| 10 |
ID:
157746
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| Summary/Abstract |
In this article, I aim to reorient debates, in International Relations and Law, about the relationship between law and war. In the last decade, writers have challenged common understandings of law as a limit on, or moderator of, warfare. They have instead claimed that law is often used as a ‘weapon of warfare’, describing such uses as ‘lawfare’. Below, rather than arguing that law is either a constraint on or an enabler of warfare, I examine how law comes to be represented as such. Specifically, I examine representations, primarily by US military and other governmental lawyers, of ‘non-Western’ invocations of the laws of war, which seek to constrain the policies or practices of the US or Israeli governments. I show how these authors cast such invocations as not law at all, but as tools of war. I suggest that this move rests on, and reproduces, colonial discourses of ‘non-Western’ legal inadequacy or excess, which serve to render ‘non-Western’ law ‘violent’ or ‘war-like’. I show that the referents and boundaries of law and war are stabilised by notions of civilisational difference, which serve to give meaning to what law is, what war is, and whether particular claims or practices are understood as martial or legal.
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| 11 |
ID:
134147
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| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article contributes to the existing critical theory and gender scholarship on private military security companies by examining how the gendered subjectivities of third-country nationals (TCNs) are constituted through the intersections of colonial histories and neoliberal economic practices. Focusing on Gurkha contractors, I ask how it is that both the remuneration and the working conditions of TCNs are inferior to those of their white Western peers within the industry. The article shows that Gurkhas' working conditions flow from their location on the periphery of global employment markets, a disadvantage that is further inflected by their status as racially underdeveloped subjects. Thus, their material and cultural status within the industry - regardless of the abilities of the individuals in question - is argued to be the outcome of tenacious colonial histories that continue to shape the labour-market opportunities of men from the global South within larger global security governance practices that increasingly feature outsourcing of military labour in operations.
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| 12 |
ID:
143569
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| Summary/Abstract |
Women’s empowerment discourses in Africa involve contradictory desires from women on one hand and society at large on the other. This article argues that the traditional validation mechanisms for women’s identities are crucial avenues for analysing both the conceptions and experiences of empowerment. Drawing on primary ethnographic data, I analyse paradoxes in women’s empowerment discourses in postcolonial Ghanaian societies, where neoliberal discourses thrive side-by-side with collectivist–socialist cultural ideals. Using an example of social capital, gained largely through mothering, I suggest that, because women’s relationships with capital are structured by local socio-cultural and global economic structures and relations, the theorisation and application of the concept of empowerment need to recognise the complicated relationships (with capital) that women negotiate on a daily basis.
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| 13 |
ID:
167046
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One of the most outstanding historical developments of the twentieth century was the gaining of national independence from imperial rule by most of the formerly colonized countries, especially in Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Yet, rather surprisingly, many of the leading contributors to postcolonial theory, including Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Homi Bhabha and others, tend to minimize the significance of national independence and take a dim view of the nationalist movements, leaders and ideologies that struggled for it. The aim of this article is to probe the reasons for this, canvassing postcolonial theorists’ main arguments and outlining certain intellectual currents and commitments, notably poststructuralism, deconstruction and postmodernism, that have contributed to these negative stances. Some counterarguments are presented, as it is suggested that the achievements of nationalist revolutions in the former colonies should be reassessed more favourably. This could be a way of resisting the current hegemonic power of the ideology of globalization.
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| 14 |
ID:
189032
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| Summary/Abstract |
In 2019, the tiny West African country of the Gambia imposed a moratorium on all deportation flights from the EU. Though West African countries are notoriously reluctant to cooperate on forced returns, such a moratorium was unheard of and caused an uproar within diplomatic circles in Europe. In the age of deportability, why is deporting ‘unwanted’ migrants an illustration of a nation’s sovereign rights, yet refusing to accept deportees is not? The Gambian government used the moratorium to forestall political destabilization at a time of transition from a long dictatorship. With the moratorium, the government not only sought to protect deportees from violent removal practices but also served the interests of the Gambian population more broadly, among whom deportation remains deeply unpopular. Drawing on original expert interviews and informal conversations carried out between 2017 and 2020, this article shows that the moratorium allowed the Gambia to enact its internal sovereignty through a (temporary) protective exclusion of its citizens. Given the asymmetric and colonial legacy of modern-day sovereignty between states, the moratorium was a legitimate renegotiation of established but questionable standards of interstate sovereignty.
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| 15 |
ID:
177966
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article explores the ways in which death can be understood to occupy a formative function in the construction of Irish national identity. The analysis of three distinct moments in Irish history (Plantation-era funerary practices, the Great Famine, and the 1981 hunger strikes) is undertaken with recourse to Michel Foucault’s understanding of race as it is deployed through disciplinary and biopower and Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics. The continuing concern with history in Irish political discourse is juxtaposed with Derrida’s idea of ‘hauntology’. It will be seen that the act of remembering politically carries with it an ambivalent legacy, exposing the violence at the heart of the establishment of both states in Ireland, while maintaining the potential of emancipatory promise. This promise is itself rooted in the violence implicated in the production of alterity through the historical experience of death.
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| 16 |
ID:
092246
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2009.
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| Summary/Abstract |
This article focuses on the cultural dimensions of Sri Lanka's island geography. In particular it argues the importance of regarding the geography of Sri Lankan island-ness as a representational and imaginative trope repetitively and textually inscribed over time. I trace the contours of a topological enclosure that seem so matter-of-fact, natural and characteristic of the Sri Lankan island-state. Inviolability and historical-territorial integrity have become eponymous with the very sign 'Sri Lanka', but these ways of imagining and mapping Sri Lankan island space have European, colonial and post-independent spatial histories that are textual and representational. In reading a range of disparate texts that inscribe and map these insular geographies, the essay argues the importance of placing Sri Lanka's island geographies, and its civil war that had the contested island imagination at its core, in a critical postcolonial and spatial historical context. By tracing and loosening some of the misplaced concreteness surrounding settled geographical imaginations and understandings of a Sri Lankan island-state, the essay intervenes in that spatial discourse thereby gesturing toward the political possibilities of thinking and imagining island space differently.
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| 17 |
ID:
161129
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This article discusses the trajectories of the rainbow flag through the concept of transnationalism and sets up a theoretical exchange between transnational migration research, critical sexuality studies, and queer scholarship. By engaging with the analytical differentiation between transnational ‘ways of being’ and ‘ways of belonging’ this article reads these concepts through a queer lens, while also challenging some of their underlying assumptions. We are asking if, and in that case how, the rainbow flag can be regarded as a visible manifestation of transnational ways of queer being, and as a floating signifier filled with different meanings through quotidian acts and diverse and unequal queer ways of being – interlinked as it is with global hegemonies and colonial genealogies besides signifying local specificities – but nevertheless somehow indicating transnational ways of queer belonging to an imagined queer community.
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| 18 |
ID:
151223
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| Summary/Abstract |
Challenging the inside–outside dichotomy in international relations (IR) allows us to recognise and give voice to histories, positions, reflections, processes and actors that were invisible, marginalised or considered beyond the purview of the discipline. ‘Turning the outside in’ is not only about disrupting the long-held disciplinary boundaries but also about bringing into the mainstream that which had been overlooked or seen as epiphenomenal because of the centrality of the inside–outside dichotomy. Given the vantage point that ‘outside’ histories, ideas and worldviews provide, India and other postcolonial countries are well ‘placed’ to take advantage of looking ‘in’ and hence blurring the boundaries between inside and outside. However, it is important to underline the fact that, although multiple voices and perspectives need to be heard, they must do so free of the very frames and dichotomised approaches that signified knowledge building and dissemination for the better part of IR’s evolution as a discipline.
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| 19 |
ID:
101479
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2010.
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Unlike some other staples of security studies that do not even register the issue, Buzan & Hansen's (2009) The Evolution of International Security Studies unambiguously identifies 'Western-centrism' as a problem. This article seeks to make the point, however, that treating heretofore-understudied insecurities (such as those experienced in the non-West) as a 'blind spot' of the discipline may prevent us from fully recognizing the ways in which such 'historical absences' have been constitutive of security both in theory and in practice. Put differently, the discipline's 'Western-centric' character is no mere challenge for students of security studies. The 'historical absence' from security studies of non-Western insecurities and approaches has been a 'constitutive practice' that has shaped (and continues to shape) both the discipline and subjects and objects of security in different parts of the world.
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| 20 |
ID:
189411
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This article explores how marriage animates the racial logic of the security state. While the pursuit of romantic love culminating in a wedding is considered to be a universal good, arranged marriages are viewed as a dangerous anachronism which threaten the state’s authority. By revealing the animating force of arranged marriage in the UK immigration regime and the War on Terror, we can see the central role of love marriage within the principles of choice, autonomy and individuality around which the liberal subject organises their moral economy. The legalisation of gay marriage – constructed as a kind of love marriagepar excellence – becomes the means through which the nation state can uphold this moral economy and be renewed and reinvigorated in the process. By putting gay marriage in dialogue with arranged marriage, the gendered and racial configuration of the UK as a security state becomes visible.
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