National Bodies: The ‘Comfort Women’ Discourse and its Controversies in South Korea

By Aniko Varga

Volume 9, Issue 2, pages 287-303

Abstract

This article examines how the nationalist discourse crystallising around the ‘comfort women’ issue (women abducted to function as sexual slaves for the Japanese Imperial Army during the Pacific War) in South Korea has eventually rendered individual victims’ needs and preferences irrelevant to a larger narrative of an unforgivable offence to national sovereignty. The narrative, constructed socially with the active participation of the Korean government(s), has also linked together past grievances felt towards both Japan and the USA (their people as well as their governments) – albeit the latter appears only covertly, and on a more symbolic level its presence is indicative of the general public mood. What have been lost in the discourse are the very victims of military sexual slavery, whose fate and wellbeing has no longer been the subject of any social interest.

Read the full article here.

Removing the Right to Have Rights

By Nisha Kapoor

Volume 15, Issue 1, Special Issue: Nationalism and Belonging, pages 105-110

Introduction

Since the Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2002 came into force, it is estimated that at least fifty‐three people have been stripped of their British citizenship, with forty‐eight of these cases occurring since 2010 under the coalition government (Galey and Ross 2014). In 2006, legislation was passed to make possible the removal of citizenship from someone if it was deemed that to do so would be ‘conducive to the public good’ (Immigration, Asylum and Nationality Act 2006, 56(1)), and last year a new clause was approved which effectively means naturalized Britons can be made stateless if there are ‘reasonable grounds for believing’ citizenship can be acquired from another country (Immigration Act 2014, 66(1)). Essentially what we have witnessed since the beginning of the twenty‐first century is the gradual extension of state powers to remove citizenship, where the premise upon which it can be withdrawn has become more and more expansive and the fundamental rights which it provides for have become ever more precarious.

Read the full article here.

Identity Construction and the Causes of Genocidal Mass Murder

By Daniel Chirot and Daniel Karell

Volume 14, Issue 3, pages 484-499

Introduction

What kinds of groups are targets of genocidal mass murder? To answer that we need to know the causes of genocide, but also how various kinds of identities come to define groups of people, and why in some cases they come into conflict with each other.

Defining genocide is difficult. The word, first introduced by Raphael Lemkin in his 1944 book on occupied Europe, referred to the German Holocaust (or Shoah) of the Jews then going on. Lemkin also considered the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Empire in 1915 to be genocide. A definition of genocide was then adopted by the United Nations in 1948. It said that genocides were acts ‘committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group,’ carried out by:

Killing members of the group; … [c]ausing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; … [d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; … [i]mposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; … [f]orcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

(Quoted in Kuper 1982:19)

The Genocide Convention implies an obligation by the members of the United Nations to intervene to stop genocide. The very first article states: ‘The Contracting Parties confirm that genocide whether committed in time of peace or in time of war, is a crime under international law which they undertake to prevent and punish’ (quoted in Kuper 1982:210).

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Greek and French: A New Vision of the Catalan National Myth of Origin at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century through Sculpture

By Cristina Rodríguez Samaniego

Volume 14, Issue 1, pages 101-118

Abstract

The principal aim of this article is to present a new vision of the founding myth of a Greek Catalonia, expressed and vindicated at the beginning of the twentieth century during Noucentisme. At that time, the cultural origins of Catalan society were linked to a colonial Greek heritage that was never fully proven. The text analyses this particular idea in a new light, and tries to establish the extent to which this cultural construction came from France and how it influenced Catalan visual arts. Tanagra‐type sculpture acts as the unifying factor in the text.

Read the full article here.