Mapping Europe's Borderlands
Mapping Europe's Borderlands

Author: Steven Seegel

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-05-14

Total Pages: 402

ISBN-13: 0226744256

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The simplest purpose of a map is a rational one: to educate, to solve a problem, to point someone in the right direction. Maps shape and communicate information, for the sake of improved orientation. But maps exist for states as well as individuals, and they need to be interpreted as expressions of power and knowledge, as Steven Seegel makes clear in his impressive and important new book. Mapping Europe’s Borderlands takes the familiar problems of state and nation building in eastern Europe and presents them through an entirely new prism, that of cartography and cartographers. Drawing from sources in eleven languages, including military, historical-pedagogical, and ethnographic maps, as well as geographic texts and related cartographic literature, Seegel explores the role of maps and mapmakers in the East Central European borderlands from the Enlightenment to the Treaty of Versailles. For example, Seegel explains how Russia used cartography in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and, later, formed its geography society as a cover for gathering intelligence. He also explains the importance of maps to the formation of identities and institutions in Poland, Ukraine, and Lithuania, as well as in Russia. Seegel concludes with a consideration of the impact of cartographers’ regional and socioeconomic backgrounds, educations, families, career options, and available language choices.

Contested Coastlines
Contested Coastlines

Author: Charu Gupta

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2012-04-27

Total Pages: 263

ISBN-13: 1136518282

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This book is about the tragic journeys and livelihood insecurities of coastal fisherfolk jailed by India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh for having entered each other’s territorial waters. While reflecting on national anxieties and the deleterious politics of boundaries, it reveals how these fisherfolk create alternative maps and a new world of ‘debordering’. These fishworkers and coastal conflicts have been subjects of everyday news, but never a subject of serious study. A first of its kind, the present book breaks new ground by examining the journeys of these fisherfolk and coastal conflicts in South Asia from several overlapping but distinct perspectives: declining sea resources, security and border anxieties, suffering of the fisherfolk, their ambiguous identities and transnational movements. The book is also innovative in terms of methodology: it is fisherfolk-centric as it marginalizes the concerns of the state from the perspective of security; it questions the very basis of security and argues for a shift in its perspective.

“We Love Mr King”
“We Love Mr King”

Author: Anusorn Unno

Publisher: ISEAS-Yusof Ishak Institute

Published: 2018-10-04

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 9814818119

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This book is an ethnography of the Malay Muslims of Guba, a pseudonymous village in Thailand’s Deep South, in the wake of the unrest that was primarily reinvigorated in 2004. It argues that the unrest is the effect of the way in which different forms of sovereignty converge around the residents of this region and the residents at the same time have cultivated themselves and obtained and enacted agency through the sovereigns. Rather than asking why the violence is increasing and who is behind it, like most scholarly works on the topic, it examines how different forms of sovereignty — ranging from the Thai state and the monarchy to Islamic religious movements, the insurgents and local strongmen — impose subjectivities on the residents, how they have converged in so doing and what tensions have followed, and how the residents have dealt with these tensions and cultivated themselves and obtained and enacted agency through the sovereigns. The phrase “We Love Mr King” or rao rak nay luang inscribed on the decorated, footed tray is one example of how the residents crafted themselves as royal subjects and enacted agency through the sovereign monarch. “This book represents one of the very few locally focussed anthropological studies to be undertaken in Thailand’s Muslim Malay border region since the upsurge in insurgent-driven violence since 2004. Just as noteworthy: the researcher is a Thai Buddhist who succeeded in establishing rapport with his Malay Muslim informants. Unlike most journalistic and academic research in this field based on hit-and-run interviews, Dr Anusorn’s work is founded on sustained in situ observation and participation with the local residents of the hamlet of Guba in Yala Province. Exploring a range of themes including local historical memory and place identification, Islamic practices, cultural rituals, complex local rivalries and violence, and interactions between villagers and military/state officials and projects, Anusorn skilfully highlights the co-existence and tensions between ‘different subjectivities’ in the context of the competing ‘sovereignties’ that inform the world of the villagers of Guba.” — Marc Askew (author of Performing Political Identity in Southern Thailand and Conspiracy, Politics and a Disorderly Border)

Autonomy and Armed Separatism in South and Southeast Asia
Autonomy and Armed Separatism in South and Southeast Asia

Author: Michelle Ann Miller

Publisher: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9814379972

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Armed separatist insurgencies have created a real dilemma for many national governments of how much freedom to grant aggrieved minorities without releasing territorial sovereignty over the nation-state. This book examines different approaches that have been taken by seven states in South and Southeast Asia to try and resolve this dilemma through various offers of autonomy. Providing new insights into the conditions under which autonomy arrangements exacerbate or alleviate the problem of armed separatism, this comprehensive book includes in-depth analysis of the circumstances that lead men and women to take up arms in an effort to remove themselves from the state's borders by creating their own independent polity.

National Manhood
National Manhood

Author: Dana D. Nelson

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 1998-10-14

Total Pages: 362

ISBN-13: 0822382148

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National Manhood explores the relationship between gender, race, and nation by tracing developing ideals of citizenship in the United States from the Revolutionary War through the 1850s. Through an extensive reading of literary and historical documents, Dana D. Nelson analyzes the social and political articulation of a civic identity centered around the white male and points to a cultural moment in which the theoretical consolidation of white manhood worked to ground, and perhaps even found, the nation. Using political, scientific, medical, personal, and literary texts ranging from the Federalist papers to the ethnographic work associated with the Lewis and Clark expedition to the medical lectures of early gynecologists, Nelson explores the referential power of white manhood, how and under what conditions it came to stand for the nation, and how it came to be a fraternal articulation of a representative and civic identity in the United States. In examining early exemplary models of national manhood and by tracing its cultural generalization, National Manhood reveals not only how an impossible ideal has helped to form racist and sexist practices, but also how this ideal has simultaneously privileged and oppressed white men, who, in measuring themselves against it, are able to disavow their part in those oppressions. Historically broad and theoretically informed, National Manhood reaches across disciplines to engage those studying early national culture, race and gender issues, and American history, literature, and culture.

Maps of Englishness
Maps of Englishness

Author: Simon Gikandi

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 1996

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 9780231105996

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Gikandi explores the politics of identity to analyze how the colonial experience inspired narrative forms that changed the nature of the English identity by surveying the British imperial tradition since the nineteenth century. He provides detailed readings of the works of Trollope, Carlyle, and others; through the narratives of imperial women travelers such as Mary Kingsley and Mary Seacole; and through Africanist texts by Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and postcolonialists such as Salman Rushdie and Joan Riley.

Participation without Democracy
Participation without Democracy

Author: Garry Rodan

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2018-05-15

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 1501720120

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Over the past quarter century new ideologies of participation and representation have proliferated across democratic and non-democratic regimes. In Participation without Democracy, Garry Rodan breaks new conceptual ground in examining the social forces that underpin the emergence of these innovations in Southeast Asia. Rodan explains that there is, however, a central paradox in this recalibration of politics: expanded political participation is serving to constrain contestation more than to enhance it. Participation without Democracy uses Rodan’s long-term fieldwork in Singapore, the Philippines, and Malaysia to develop a modes of participation (MOP) framework that has general application across different regime types among both early-developing and late-developing capitalist societies. His MOP framework is a sophisticated, original, and universally relevant way of analyzing this phenomenon. Rodan uses MOP and his case studies to highlight important differences among social and political forces over the roles and forms of collective organization in political representation. In addition, he identifies and distinguishes hitherto neglected non-democratic ideologies of representation and their influence within both democratic and authoritarian regimes. Participation without Democracy suggests that to address the new politics that both provokes these institutional experiments and is affected by them we need to know who can participate, how, and on what issues, and we need to take the non-democratic institutions and ideologies as seriously as the democratic ones.

If You Meet the Buddha on the Road
If You Meet the Buddha on the Road

Author: Michael Jerryson

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-03-27

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0190683589

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It is said that the famous ninth century Chinese Buddhist monk Linji Yixuan told his disciples, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." The deliberately confounding statement is meant to shock people out of complacent ways of thinking. But beyond the purposeful jolt from complacency there is another intention. This axiom suggests that, for liberation, one should seek the Buddha nature that resides within, rather than a mere Buddha exterior. The metaphor of killing the Buddha dislodges a person from the illusion that enlightenment lies outside the body. The proclamation also highlights the power of violence, even on a symbolic level. Violence abounds in Buddhist thoughts, doctrine, and actions, however unacknowledged or misunderstood. If You Meet the Buddha on the Road addresses an important absence in the study of religion and violence: the religious treatment of violence. In order to pursue an understanding of the relationship between Buddhism and violence, it is important to first consider how Buddhist scriptures and followers understand violence. Drawing on Buddhist treatments of violence, Michael Jerryson explores the ways in which Buddhists invoke, support, or justify war, conflict, state violence, and gender discrimination. In addition, the book examines the ways in which Buddhists address violence as military chaplains, cope with violence in a conflict zone, and serve as witnesses of blasphemy to Buddhist doctrine and Buddha images.

The 3rd ASEAN Reader
The 3rd ASEAN Reader

Author: Ooi Kee Beng

Publisher: ISEAS - YUSOF ISHAK INSTITUTE

Published: 2015-08-24

Total Pages: 511

ISBN-13: 9814620610

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Over the past two decades, ISEAS has compiled abridged articles that analyse key aspects of Southeast Asia’s development and the ASEAN process. The ASEAN Reader was published in 1992 just as the Cold War ended, while The Second ASEAN Reader came in 2003 in the wake of the 1997 Asian crisis and the September 11 attacks in 2001. The past decade has not been spared its share of intense changes, with the rise of China and India bringing new challenges to the region’s power equation, and the impact of the 2008 global financial crisis. Despite this, the momentum towards an integrated ASEAN community has been maintained. The articles in The Third ASEAN Reader study the trends and events of recent years, and discuss the immediate future of Southeast Asia.

Race and State
Race and State

Author: Karen Fricker

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2009-01-14

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 1443804045

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Speaking about racism in the western political climate of the first decade of the twenty-first century is more difficult than ever before. There is a feeling in post-colonial and post-immigration societies that the blatant overt racism of the past is no longer as pressing. Admitting racism elicits discomfort because common wisdom tells us that racism opposes everything that we believe in as citizens of democratic, “civilised” modern states. Yet state racism appears to be here to stay and, in many ways, is more acceptable than ever before. Immigration detention centres, the deportation of “failed” asylum seekers and “illegal” immigrants, racial profiling and the rolling back of liberties won by the civil rights movement are all examples of how state racism impacts on our daily lives. Race and State contributes to breaking the taboo of discussing the links between “race” and state. The papers collected in this book highlight the interconnections between “race” and state, from historical, theoretical or contemporary sociological perspectives. Part I of the book looks at theoretical issues in conceptualising the “race”-state relationship. Part II examines racism in its most pernicious contemporary manifestation: the racialisation of “terror”. Part III, on the racial state(s) of Ireland, is an important addition to the debate, examining Ireland as a “test case” for demonstrating and interpreting the relationship between “race” and state.