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century is the gradual extension of state powers to remove citizenship, where the premise upon which it can be withdrawn has become more and more expansive and the fundamental rights which it provides for have become ever more precarious.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).

For more read the full article.

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.

Features Section on Women and the New Nationalism

Volume 17, Issue 2, pages 149-208

*In light of the ASEN 2018 conference theme on ‘The New Nationalism’, the weekly article is a special features section on women and the new nationalism.*

Introduction: Women and the New Nationalism

Kent Davis-Packard

The past five years mark a turning point in nationalism and its relationship to ethnicity and gender around the world. As the Egyptian diplomat, professor of Middle East Studies, and graduate students who contributed to this Features series reveal, the framework on which all nationalism depends continues to be structured according to a system human society has now bypassed. From Arab countries that recently experienced uprisings and revolution, to a United States that witnessed the largest march in its history in support of ‘women’s rights as human rights’, this series reveals that nationalism is crumbling under the weight of faulty scaffolding – its material is made of patriarchal norms that no longer serve to support a new human identity that allows for a more unified, inclusive state.

While this series focuses on events in the United States and Egypt, it could as easily have been written about many other countries in which women are transforming national identity. In ‘Protecting the Motherland: Women’s Agency in Transforming National Identity’, Amanda Sztein considers why increased female presence in the U.S. military is still subject to debate. Her article reveals that women’s agency in the military threatens the very structure of nationalism, which is based on the premise that only men are ‘reasoned’ and bring about structure, while femininity is ‘uncouth’, ‘uncontrolled’, and acting on a force that cannot be articulated in words and therefore is not safe. Worse, these so‐called ‘feminine’ characteristics are considered undesirable. If only this unspeakable force could be tapped.

Amanda Lawrence further defines this ‘untapped force’ in America by highlighting the need for ethnic and cultural inclusivity in her article on ‘The Power of Intersectionality to Transcend National Identity in the United States’. Lawrence points out that unless nationalism is inclusive of all ethnicities in the United States, the feminism it engenders cannot affect meaningful or positive change. A new conception of American nationalism that is not white‐centric is America’s only hope for achieving authentic equality.

The final two articles examine the connection between national identity and women in Egypt – a case study in the relationship between post‐colonial state‐building, national identity, and religion. In ‘The Impact of Notions of Nationalism on Women’s Rights in Egypt’, Ambassador Magda Shahin and Yasmeen El‐Ghazaly contemplate the development of constitutions after the 2011 revolution and demonstrate that, regardless of whether the government is ‘secular’ or ‘Islamist’, women remain disempowered in Egypt. In ‘The Guise of the Secular State’, I deconstruct notions of ‘secularism’ and ‘Islamism’ in Egypt and the region in order to demonstrate the burden women bear as a result of the ambiguity of national identity.

In all four cases, an outmoded version of national identity stands between women and the realization of their human rights. It also stands between a state’s ability to move forward as a socially and politically viable entity. Each article presents an argument for achieving a more truthful national consciousness – one that transcends both the state and the international order as it pulls the state and government towards higher principles of life.

Read the following articles here.

‘Protecting the Motherland: Women’s Agency in Transforming National Identity’

Amanda Sztein

‘The Power of Intersectionality to Transcend National Identity in the United States’

Amanda Lawrence

‘The Impact of Notions of Nationalism on Women’s Rights in Egypt’

Magda Shahin & Yasmeen El-Ghazaly

‘The Burden of Proof: Women and National Identity in ‘Islamic’ and ‘Secular’ States – The Case of Egypt’

Kent Davis-Packard