Search

In compulsory population transfers and expulsions such as those wrought by partition, costs may accrue not only to the banished, but also to the places left behind. In particular, forcibly removing portions of the population rends social networks and discards location-specific skills and knowledge; these costs may be even worse if the expellees are replaced by refugees from elsewhere. The case of the interwar German-Poland borderlands, now Polish territory, shows that even six-plus decades after a population expulsion, ethnically cleansed and resettled places are appreciably different, with higher crime rates, lower civic engagement (measured by voter turnout), and less efficient public services (as measured by educational statistics). Although post-conflict population transfers might increase local social cohesion in some dimensions, this does not guarantee improved economic and sociological outcomes. Expelling local populations can, instead, cause highly persistent damage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chinese influence at the northern Nepali borderlands have created cartographic anxieties and new political subjectivities for Himalayan Indigenous communities and Tibetan refugees, who call these mountain border spaces their home. This article discusses the changing dynamics of intercommunity kinship at the scale of the local which are ruptured yet re-imagined to repurpose and intervene state imaginations of borders. What affective bearings do new border dynamics create for citizens - both formal citizens and Tibetan refugees - at the borderlands? Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research conducted between 2016 and 2019 in Nepal, I examine the ways in which intimacy produces affection and familiarity at one end, while at the other engendering notions of disruptions in the everyday. For my respondents, placemaking and memory become active experiences of making do to overcome anxieties of the future. • Narrates everyday engagements with geopolitics at multiple scales. • Addresses belonging and placemaking practices situated in multiple sovereignties. • Illustrates intimate geopolitics and ways of making do in the borderlands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper explores the politics of community making at the India–Bangladesh border by examining the public and private narratives of history and belonging in a Bangladeshi enclave—a sovereign piece of Bangladesh completely territorially surrounded by India. Drawing on framings of political society, this paper argues that understanding populations at the margins of South Asia and beyond requires attention to two processes: first, to the ways that para-legal activities are part and parcel of daily life; and second, to the strategies through which these groups construct themselves as moral communities deserving of inclusion within the state. Border communities often articulate narratives of dispossession, exceptionality, and marginalization to researchers and other visitors—narratives that are often unproblematically reproduced in academic treatments of the border. However, such articulations mask both the complicated histories and quotidian realities of border life. This paper views these articulations as political projects in and of themselves. By reading the more hidden histories of life in this border enclave, this article reconstructs the notion of borders as experienced by enclave residents themselves. It shows the ways that the politics of the India–Bangladesh border are constitutive of (and constituted by) a range of fractures and internal boundaries within the enclave. These boundaries are as central to forging community—to articulating who belongs and why—as are more public narratives that frame enclave residents as victims of confused territorial configurations. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

As China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) development projects deepen connections across Eurasia, the Sino-Kazakh border has been rematerialized in a manner that complicates the exercise of Chinese BRI soft power. On the one hand, the border city of Khorgos is being rebuilt as a bridgehead to facilitate trade and development between the countries; new infrastructure and spectacle at Khorgos and beyond works to entice Kazakhs to cross the border in pursuit of economic opportunities. At the same time, recent crackdowns on Muslims in China's Xinjiang Province has led to the detention and harassment of cross-border migrants with differentiated migrant statuses. Chinese security forces' continued anxieties about separatism in its borderlands imperil the developmental horizons the BRI project uses to entice Kazakhs. It also threatens the translocal development that a border conductive to mobility has provided for Kazakhs over the past thirty years. I argue that the BRI in northwest China fuses soft power rhetoric with territorial security practices in a way that is proving to be counter-productive. This is because border hardening can reactivate borders as "difference condensers" that draw from imperial and national legacies to reinscribe the othering of spaces and peoples beyond the border. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]