State Panel : “The State, Citizenship, and Transnational Flows”
STATE PANEL: “The State, Citizenship, and Transnational Flows”
Keynote Speaker: Professor Jonathan Friedman, Lund University and École des hautes études en sciences sociales
Abstracts:
Citizenship and Subjecthood Dilemmas of the Indian Population in South Africa, 1860-1920
Bijita Majumdar
Department of Sociology, Rutgers University, USA
“We have a right, we submit, to expect the British Government to protect us and insure for us that freedom to which we as loyal British subjects are entitled wherever the Union Jack flies.”
In social theory, citizenship is located exclusively within the site of the state and the historicity of the concept of citizenship is closely aligned to the historicity of the concept of the state. This implies a break from earlier periods when ‘belonging’ was located most often within the doctrine of allegiance, or in other words, the concept of subjecthood. In the early twentieth century, citizenship as a scarce and hence, desirable status acquired immense importance with the rise of labor relocations under colonialism. For migrants, the experience of movement from familiar surroundings to a distant land - from one colonial setting to another - and being subjected to the processes of empire building, capitalism and racial inequality under different, yet curiously similar conditions invoked an articulation of demands that most often used the language of rights enshrined within the concept of citizenship. Interestingly, however, for the state, labor migrants from colonies transported to work on plantations and mines were not citizens but instead, imperial subjects who owed loyalty to the crown. This paper analyzes the implications of this paradox and the consequences of this apparent lack of agreement of status between the colonial state and Indian colonial migrants located in South Africa during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Thus, while citizenship and subjecthood are often understood as discrete, bounded categories, temporally disparate and conceptually distinct, this paper challenges this predominant formulation by attesting that these categories are in fact, often breached and blurred in identity struggles. The colonial state claiming monopoly over the category of citizenship sought to control the migrant Indian population in South Africa by denying access to citizenship as a right and consequently, to the right to protest against unfair measures. For the colonial government Indians were colonial subjects, assigned to bear allegiance to the crown but not as citizens with full rights, necessitated by the fact that it is through this process of denial that the state exerted economic, political and social control on migrant workers. However, by virtue of the specially created colonial category of British ‘imperial citizens’, migrant Indians drew on legal and political intricacies to invoke this category, thus smudging the boundaries around the citizen and the subject. This paper analyzes the mechanisms employed to claim rights, pledge allegiance to the power-holders, create privileges by extending the same exclusionary codes of the colonizers to other dominated groups, as well as resist the authorities through Gandhian ‘Satyagraha’ or ‘the force born from non-violence’.
Using historical sources such as petitions and referenda written by members of the Indian community to the colonial rulers between 1860 and 1920, newspaper editorials on the socio-economic life of migrant Indians in general, Gandhi’s writings during his stay in South Africa and other related material, I explore the implications of this slippage between subject and citizen. I use multi-data analysis in order to provide an analysis that makes ‘truth as-official document’ problematic and move beyond the evidence of the colonial state documents and instead, document the histories of other actors as well. Thus, while the colonial records present the official version of social life for Indians, other sources present alternate interpretations of social reality and divergent histories thereby, allowing me to ‘read against the archival grain’(Stoler 2002: 83). In doing so, I also attempt to illuminate the theoretical and analytic connections between race, gender, labor, identity and displacement and map the transnational flows and geopolitical relationships that structured the colonial world during early capitalism.
Today, the increasing pace of global immigration raises critical questions about citizenship, belongingness and resistance among diasporas2. Historicizing the social context of mass movements helps us tie the present to the past by focusing on the politics of location and the repertoire of resistance and coping strategies that follow ethnic migrants to their new homes. It offers a ‘thick description’ of local identity struggles pitched onto a global platform as a result of transnational dislocation, memory and resistance. Thus, this paper draws on historical and sociological insights to creatively contribute to the existing literature on global labor migration, politics of identity, race relations and the experience of ‘otherness’ that connects colonial/post-colonial histories.
Edgár Dobos
Corvinus University of Budapest
The Bosnian war and the postwar ethnopolitical tensions in Bosnia-Herzegovina can be interpreted as a clash of governmentalities, a clash of conflicting conceptions about sovereignty, self-determination and the ways of imagining the boundaries of the nation and the state. The opposition between the politics based on a civic and an ethnic concept of statehood and citizenship has had a long history since the 19th century. The Ottoman millet-system, Benjamin Kállay’s efforts to forge an overarching Bosnian identity during the Austria-Hungarian era as well as the hierarchical system of the Yugoslav narodi and narodnosti categories all contributed to the institutionalization of ethno-religious categories in Bosnia-Herzegovina. In my paper I examine three actual cases which are relevant in discussing the state/citizenship relation in the Bosnian context: 1) the case of Finci and Sejdić vs. Bosnia-Herzegovina, in which the decision of the European Court of Human Rights may counterbalance the domination of the ethnic principle (similarly to some decisions of the Constitutional Court of BiH, e.g. “constituent peoples” decision, renaming of Bosnian cities and municipalities); 2) debates on the organization of a new population census in 2011 (according to the Dayton Peace Agreement the data from the 1991 census is being used to ensure proportional distribution of jobs and positions according to ethnic criteria in order to avoid the freezing of the results of ethnic cleansing) and 3) the decision of the European Commission as a result of which BiH is not included in the list of priority countries to benefit from visa free regime as of 19 December 2009 (which creates a de facto inequality between those citizens of BiH who have dual citizenship and hold either Croat or Serbian passports and those who hold solely BiH passports).
Governing Exiles: Legal Pluralism and Refugee Statecraft on the Thai-Burma Border
Kirsten McConnachie
This paper examines citizenship and governance among stateless people, residents of a refugee camp on the Thai-Burma border. Refugee camps are often described as sites of ‘warehousing’ which are absent jurisdictional oversight and political participation. In reality refugee camps exist at an intersection of multiple forms of regulation and refugees are not apolitical but play active roles in shaping their lives and society. This paper profiles refugee agency by documenting systems of governance within a refugee camp, focusing on the administration of justice. This camp is a densely pluralistic jurisdictional site where multiple actors claim a role in governance, including Royal Thai Government, refugee committees, international agencies and others. This camp, along with others along the Thai-Burma border, is characterized by a high degree of refugee-led camp management, which can be understood as a form of “refugee-statecraft”. This paper discusses the practice of refugee justice workers, and the intersection between these structures and other authorities, including non-governmental organizations seeking to enhance ‘access to justice’ for refugees on the Thai-Burma border.
Home in the language: identity-building and cultural practices of Russian-speaking Israelis
Daiva Repeckaite
This paper discusses the transnational identity and cultural identification among the recent wave Russian-speaking first-generation immigrants in Israel. Russian-speakers in Israel strive to belong in their new country and conceptualize their 'Russian' culture as something that is 'carried in one's heart', which does not always correspond to the strength of their connection to the home country. Although Russian-speakers in Israel are far from an understudied group, there is a lack of problematization of its internal diversity. 'Russian-speakers' include people from all ex-USSR countries, with many of the internal hierarchies brought along from Former Soviet Union (FSU). Russian cultural institutions, events and bookstores invest in community development. However, the presumed equality among their 'clients' is based on an assumption that all Russian-speaking immigrants, wherever they come from, can equally identify with Russian popular culture, printed and other media, and news predominantly from Russia. This factor is coupled with the fact that persons from the various republics have profoundly different opportunity structures for keeping in touch with their country of origin through visits of family members, flights to the home country, double citizenship, etc. Therefore the identity of Russian-speakers is not only hyphenated (Russian-
Israeli), but can be triangulated (home country-Russia-Israel). The methodological choices in this article correspond to the complexity of the identity and situation of the research subjects. It uses in-depth interviews with Russian-speaking individuals, participant observations in Russian cultural institutions, and a self-ethnography of the author, which is between “home Anthropology” and “Anthropology of the other” (me being a 'Russian-speaking', but not Russian person in this context, yet not an immigrant in Israel).
Rescaling the security State off The Horn of Africa: Maritime Piracy, Capital, and Securitization of the Somali Basin
Zoltán Glück
Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology, Central European University
The rapid rise of reported incidents of piracy off of the Horn of Africa since 2007 has prompted a host of responses by state and non-state actors. While initial responses by national navies acting independently yielded a chaotic dynamic of ad-hoc security measures geared at protecting individual national and corporate interests. The subsequent developments, stemming largely from a set of UN Security Council resolutions in 2008, have seen an unprecedented level of strategic coordination and informational integration of international naval efforts in the Gulf of Aden and the Somali Basin. Moreover, the formation of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia in 2009, comprising members of such disparate national interests as Yemen, the United States, India, Russia, China, the U.A.E., Saudi Arabia and the Somali Transition Government, breathes new symbolic content into the ancient Roman legal definition of the pirate as an “enemy of humanity” (Hostis Humani Generis). This paper offers an analysis of this state-led securitization of the West Indian Ocean and the Gulf of Aden as a structural evolution within rescaling of the certain national-state security functions and their reconstitution at an international level. It is my contention that this case study offers a revealing insight into the conflicting logics of capital, territory and law. While on the one hand it is surely the shared interest in the maintenance of an uninhibited circulation of capital which is at the heart of the cooperative efforts to securitize trade routes, each of the considerable snags in these organizational efforts seems to signify deeply laden contradictions within the logic of the capitalist state. Methodologically, this paper is rigorously dedicated to the critique of epistemological nationalism. Informed as much by recent scholarship in relational approaches to researching the state, as by the literature of postcolonialism and critical security studies, this paper will offer an empirically rich analysis of the state structural evolution around maritime security, a critique of its logic and an appraisal of its probably the social and political consequences in the region. This paper is informed by research conducted in Kenya in the spring of 2010.