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"Schendel, Willem van"
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Illicit flows and criminal things : states, borders, and the other side of globalization
Illicit Flows and Criminal Things offers a new perspective on illegal
transnational linkages, international relations, and the transnational. The
contributors argue for a nuanced approach that recognizes the difference between
organized crime and the thousands of illicit acts that take place across
national borders every day. They distinguish between the illegal (prohibited by law)
and the illicit (socially perceived as unacceptable), which are historically
changeable and contested. Detailed case studies of arms smuggling, illegal
transnational migration, the global diamond trade, borderland practices, and the
transnational consumption of drugs take us to Asia, Africa, Latin America, Europe,
and North America. They allow us to understand how states, borders, and the language
of law enforcement produce criminality, and how people and goods which are labeled
illegal move across regulatory spaces.
eBook
The camera as witness : a social history of Mizoram, Northeast India
\"Uses vernacular photography to highlight remarkable transformations and multiple forms of modernity that have flourished in Mizoram, Northeast India\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Introduction
Abstract In this theme section we explore why and when states knowingly refrain from recording people and their activities. States are not simply in pursuit of enhanced “legibility”; at times they also need to be able to “look away.” In explaining strategies of nonrecording, our focus is on how subjects negotiate with state recording agencies, how nonrecording relieves state agents from the burden of accountability, how the discretionary power of individual state agents affects (non)recording in unanticipated ways, and how states may project an illusion of vigorous recording internationally while actually engaging in deliberate nonrecording. Presenting case studies from China, Greece, the Netherlands, India, and Romania, we show that strategies of nonrecording are flexible, selective, and aimed at certain populations—and that both citizens and noncitizens can be singled out for nonrecording or derecording. In analyzing this state-produced social oblivion, divergences between national and local levels are of crucial significance.
Journal Article
Stateless in South Asia: The Making of the India-Bangladesh Enclaves
“Only in the eyes of the law are we indians.” With these words Anu Chairman sketched the position of tens of thousands of people living beyond the reach of state and nation in dozens of enclaves in South Asia. Much of the recent wave of literature on the nation is concerned with critiquing an earlier generation of scholars who tended to assume a correspondence between nations and states. In the new literature, the connections among nation, state, territory, sovereignty, history, and identity are all problematized. Nations are seen as being socially constructed in many different ways. Thus, there are nations without states, new nations that are invented before our eyes while older ones disintegrate, and older diasporic nations that are being joined by a host of new transnational communities. Nations are now conceived as more fluid, malleable, and unpredictable than ever before.
Journal Article
Toward a Comparative History of Borderlands
The historical study of borderlands has been unduly restricted by an emphasis on the legal, political, and geographical aspects of borders and by a state-centered approach. Too often, the question has been how states have dealt with their borderlands rather than how borderlands have dealt with their states--culturally, economically, and politically. This article outlines a comparative approach to the social dynamics (struggles, adaptations, and cross-border alliances) in regions bisected by borders, and it argues that borderland studies provide an indispensable corrective to historical narratives that accept the territoriality to which all modern states lay claim.
Journal Article
Southeast Asia: An idea whose time is past?
In this issue we focus on claims made by Willem van Schendel in an article 'Southeast Asia: An idea whose time is past?'. Specialists in the field, invited to comment, are Robert Cribb, James D. Sidaway, and Tharapi Than.
Willem van Schendel, Southeast Asia: An idea whose time is past?
- ‘Southeast Asia’: A good place to start from (Robert Crib)
- Long live trans-area studies! (James D. Sidaway)
- If scholar foreign policy works… (Tharapi Than)
Registered readers may participate in the debate.
Journal Article
‘I Am Not a Refugee’: Rethinking Partition Migration
In the wake of Partition—the break-up of British India in 1947—millions of people moved across the new borders between Pakistan and India. Although much has been written about these ‘Partition refugees,’ a comprehensive picture remains elusive. This paper advocates a rethinking of the study of cross-border migration in South Asia. It argues especially for looking at categories of cross-border migrants that have so far been ignored, and for employing a more comparative approach. In the first section, we look at conventions that have shaped the literature on Partition refugees. The second section explores some patterns of post-Partition migration to East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), and the third uses oral evidence from cross-border migrants to present a number of case studies. The concluding section underlines that these cases demonstrate the need for re-examining historiographical conventions regarding Partition migration; it also makes a plea for linking South Asia's partition to broader debates about partition as a political ‘solution’ to ethnic strife.
Journal Article
A Politics of Nudity: Photographs of the ‘Naked Mru’ of Bangladesh
This article uses photographs to explore the meanings of nudity in a district of Bangladesh. Throughout the colonial and postcolonial periods, photography was a major tool here in the framing of a confrontation between local and external cultural styles. In this confrontation, nudity was used as a visual marker of specific, but contradictory, local characteristics. It stood variously for primitivity, underdevelopment, indecency and indigeneity. In the dominant discourses, one group in particular, the Mru, was singled out to represent these characteristics. Photographs of the Mru reveal a politics of nudity which is illustrated here by exploring three themes: enforced authenticity, enforced decency, and folklorization. The article links these photographs with wider discussions about romantic views of the exotic, about Orientalist representations—not just by Northerners but also by Southern nationalist elites and post-colonial intellectuals—, about development, and about minority rights. It is argued that the case of this district, the Chittagong Hill Tracts, is particularly instructive because here a politics of nudity can be seen to have underpinned deeply intrusive policies of development, oppression, expulsion and war.
Journal Article
A War Within a War: Mizo rebels and the Bangladesh liberation struggle
In 1971 a war led to the creation of Bangladesh. Instantly three narratives sprang up: the war as a national triumph, the war as betrayal and shame, and the war as a glorious campaign. Today more layered interpretations are superseding these ‘first-generation narratives’. Taking the case of insurgents from neighbouring India who, against their will, became embroiled in the war, this article seeks to contribute to ‘second-generation narratives’ that challenge the historiographical apportioning of blame and the national/ethnic framing of the conflict. The article uses hitherto-unpublished photographs from private collections to demonstrate how the war for the liberation of Mizoram (India) and that for the liberation of Bangladesh became entangled. Jointly they produced a ‘war within a war’ that unsettles common assumptions about both these struggles.
Journal Article