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Our central purpose in this viewpoint is to briefly overview the existing literature on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and argue both how pivotal it is in underlining the experiences of local communities and do so from a gendered perspective. If the BRI is a global project in the making, as many argue, then it is important to appreciate how local people make claims, contest when their claims are ignored, refuted, or misrecognized, and through this understand how gendered notions of citizenship are disrupted and enacted. Therefore, we call for further research that genders the BRI to understand the interconnections along the axes between citizenship, claims and contestations to assess the spatial and temporal changes that a global project, such as the BRI, may bring about. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on a fourteen-month ethnographic fieldwork experience along the border of Bangladesh and India, I offer a narrative of daily challenges and uncertainties in the 'field'. Highlighting my positionality and reflexivity, I suggest that first, although a researcher may use social capital to gain access, it may raise concerns regarding the genuineness of the participant's response. Second, with careful attention, unplanned moments and spontaneous conversations can be turned into sources for valuable insight. Third, pushing the boundaries of social norms to attain a textbook example of 'gender balance' does not necessarily 'add value' to the research; instead, is likely to make it more challenging to access the same population for further research. Finally, I reaffirm that being from the same region with a similar background does not make the researcher an 'insider'. Rather, their positionality becomes more 'fluid' and constantly shifts between an insider, an outsider, both, and sometimes none. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on newly incorporated citizens' experiences, interviews with numerous state officials, and field observations in the former border enclaves of India inside Bangladesh after their exchange in 2015, I contend that the state of Bangladesh took extraordinary measures to incorporate its new citizens. Such exceptional measures resulted in a category of citizens that cannot be fully grasped by the existing citizenship vocabulary. In this paper I therefore offer the concept of showcase citizens. Showcase citizens represent an exceptionally treated group of citizens who became subjects to special attention from the state in certain spaces at a specific time. The key to our understanding of such 'exceptions' and the unique response from the Bangladesh state, I argue, lies in placing the enclaves within the broader context of post-colonial South Asia, specifically in relation to the imagination of nation and territory, sovereignty, (performative) governance, and state-making. As such, showcase citizens becomes both an analytical tool – which links the imagination of territory, sovereignty, and citizenship in post-colonial South Asia – and a technique of performative governance that combines the formal with the informal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The former border enclaves of Bangladesh and India, which were small pieces of one state entirely surrounded by the other, existed as extraterritorial spaces from 1947 until 2015. Since these spaces were subject to state violence but remained completely excluded from the protections provided by courts, police, and government, they have historically been understood as spaces of exception that contained bare lives. After the exchange of enclaves in 2015, the situation changed dramatically as the state assumed an active role in incorporating new lands and citizens. Such an active role resulted in unique privileges exclusively for the enclave residents understood here as sovereign atonement. Drawing on field research in Bangladesh, however, the paper argues that it would be misleading to capture sovereign atonement as an effort to correct the past violence of extraterritorial exclusion; instead it must be understood through the primacy of territory in state‐making in post‐colonial South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]