Boundaries in Shaping the Rohingya Identity and the Shifting Context of Borderland Politics

By Kazi Fahmida Farzana

Volume 15, Issue 2, pages 292-314

Abstract

In recent years, new waves of ethnic violence in the Arakan (Rakhine) state of Burma (Myanmar) have resulted in increased internal displacement and the continued exodus of the Rohingya people to neighbouring countries. At the heart of this problem is the fact that Burma (which the Rohingyas claim as their ancestral land) and Bangladesh (where many Rohingyas are unwelcome and/or undocumented refugees) continue to deny the Rohingyas their political identity, each insisting that the displaced Rohingyas are the responsibility of the other. This study examines the history of the region to explore how political identities are shaped (generally) and how Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh, living along the borders, identify themselves in the midst of political sovereignty claims and a social space that exists across artificially drawn borders (specifically). This article argues that the true political identity of the displaced Rohingya refugees can be located in their social memory and their life-politics in the borderlands. In this social memory, the Rohingyas’ beliefs in ethnicity, identity, and belongingness play an important role in shaping their current identity. Their production of cultural artefacts while in exile suggests a non-conventional resistance, and the close proximity of the refugees to their homeland creates a completely different psychology of attachment and alienation, which needs further attention in refugee studies. Such an understanding of life-politics along the border may challenge our current understanding of borderland conflicts within the framework of state-imposed boundaries. The boundaries of identity may go beyond traditional notions of national borders and the identity of the state.

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‘Two Ukraines’ Reconsidered: The End of Ukrainian Ambivalence?

By Mykola Riabchuk

Volume 15, Issue 1, pages 138-156

Abstract

The 2014 Russo-Ukrainian war, euphemistically called the ‘Ukraine crisis’, has largely confirmed, on certain accounts, a dramatic split of the country and people’s loyalties between the proverbial ‘East’ and ‘West’, between the ‘Eurasian’ and ‘European’ ways of development epitomized by Russia and the European Union. By other accounts, however, it has proved that the Ukrainian nation is much more united than many experts and policymakers expected, and that the public support for the Russian invasion, beyond the occupied regions of Donbas and Crimea, is close to nil. This article does not deny that Ukraine is divided in many respects but argues that the main – and indeed the only important – divide is not between ethnic Russians and Ukrainians, or Russophones and Ukrainophones, or the ‘East’ and the ‘West’. The main fault line is ideological – between two different types of Ukrainian identity: non/anti-Soviet and post/neo-Soviet, ‘European’ and ‘East Slavonic’. All other factors, such as ethnicity, language, region, income, education, or age, correlate to a different degree with the main one. However divisive those factors might be, the external threat to the nation makes them largely irrelevant, bringing instead to the fore the crucial issue of values epitomized in two different types of Ukrainian identity.

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Nationalism, Exclusion and Violence: A Territorial Approach

By John Robert Etherington

Volume 7, Issue 3, pages 24-44

Abstract

Nationalism can be understood as a doctrine of territorial political legitimacy, in the sense that demands for national self-government necessarily involve claims over a given territory. Such claims are ultimately justified by establishing a relationship of mutual belonging between the nation and ‘its’ territory. This makes nationalism intrinsically exclusionary and potentially violent, since purely civic nations become impossible in practice. Shared political and social values on their own fail to bind nation and territory together, and as such the nation’s ‘home’ might be anywhere, and thus, in a world of competing political claims over territory, nowhere. Ethnic elements of national identity are therefore necessary if an exclusive relationship is to be established between the nation and ‘its’ territory. These arguments are illustrated by analysing a series of nationalisms that have been traditionally considered to be ‘civic,’ such as those found in the United States, Canada and England.

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From the Bronx to the Wilderness: Inari-Sami Rap, Language Revitalisation and Contested Ethnic Stereotypes

By Juha Ridanpää and Annika Pasanen

Volume 9, Issue 2, pages 213-230

Abstract

This article discusses how rap music operates as an emancipatory ‘tool’ in the processes of language preservation and the deconstruction of ethnic stereotypes. It focuses on Amoc, the first ever rap musician to use the Inari Sami language, a minority language spoken in Northern Finland with only approximately 350 remaining speakers. The case as a whole is understood as a confrontation between two opposite discursive worlds. Rap music is perceived as a representation of urbanity, whereas the ethnic Sami culture is understood as a nationally ‘othered’ discourse based on old subordinating stereotypes of primitive people living in nature, beyond civilisation. In this context Amoc represents a bridge-builder between these two contrary worlds. This article discusses how Sami rap, as a modernised artistic practice, functions as an emancipatory ‘tool’ deconstructing the stereotypical ways of approaching ethnic heritages and thereby helping to sustain and revitalise the minority language of the Inari Sami group.

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