Justice at Sea: Fishers’ politics and marine conservation in coastal Odisha, India

This is a paper about the politics of fishing rights in and around the Gahirmatha marine sanctuary in coastal Odisha, in eastern India. Claims to the resources of this sanctuary are politicised through the creation of a particularly damaging narrative by influential Odiya environmental actors about Bengalis, as illegal immigrants who have hurt the ecosystem through their fishing practices. Anchored within a theoretical framework of justice as recognition, the paper considers the making of a regional Odiya environmentalism that is, potentially, deeply exclusionary. It details how an argument about ‘illegal Bengalis’ depriving ‘indigenous Odiyas’ of their legitimate ‘traditional fishing rights’ derives from particular notions of indigeneity and territory. But the paper also shows that such environmentalism is tenuous, and fits uneasily with the everyday social landscape of fishing in coastal Odisha. It concludes that a wider class conflict between small fishers and the state over a sanctuary sets the context in which questions about legitimate resource rights are raised, sometimes with important effects, like when out at sea

Certifications of citizenship: the history, politics and materiality of identity documents in South Asian states and diasporas

Experiences in the post-partition Indian subcontinent refute the conventional expectation that the 'possession of citizenship enables the acquisition of documents certifying it' (Jayal, 2013, 71). Instead, identity papers of various types play a vital part in certifying and authenticating claims to citizenship. This is particularly important in a context where the history of state formation, continuous migration flows and the rise of right-wing majoritarian politics has created an uncertain situation for individuals deemed to be on the ‘margins’ of the state. The papers that constitute this special issue bring together a range of disciplinary perspectives in order to investigate the history, politics and materiality of identity documents, and to dismantle citizenship as an absolute and fixed notion, seeking instead to theorise the very mutable ‘hierarchies’ and ‘degrees’ of citizenship. Collectively they offer a valuable lens onto how migrants, refugees and socio-economically marginal individuals negotiate their relationship with the state, both within South Asia and in South Asian diaspora communities. This introduction examines the wider context of the complex intersections between state-issued identity documents and the nature of citizenship and draws out cross-cutting themes across the papers in this collection

Maritime labour, transnational political trajectories and decolonisation from below: the opposition to the 1935 British Shipping Assistance Act

This paper uses a discussion of struggles over attempts by the National Union of Seamen to exclude seafarers form the maritime labour market in the inter-war period to contribute todebates at the intersection of maritime spaces and transnational labour geographies (cf Balachandran, 2012, Hogsbjerg, 2013). Through a focus on struggles over the British Shipping Assistance Act of 1935 it explores some of the transnational dynamics through which racialized forms of trade unionism were contested. I argue that the political trajectories, solidarities and spaces of organising constructed through the alliances which were produced to oppose the effects of the Act shaped articulations of ‘decolonisation from below’ (James, 2015). Engaging with the political trajectories and activity of activists from organisaions like the Colonial Seamen’s Association can open up both new ways of understanding the spatial politics of decolonisation and new accounts of who or how such processes were articulated and contested. The paper concludes by arguing that engagement with these struggles can help assert the importance of forms of subaltern agency in shaping processes of decolonisation