The Diasporic Pursuit of Home and Identity: Dynamic Punjabi Transnationalism

This paper examines the pursuit of home within a diasporic British Indian Punjabi community. It is argued that the British Asian transnational pursuit of home is significantly shaped by the dynamic social context of South Asia as well as social processes within Britain and across the South Asian diaspora. Drawing upon a decade of original, transnational, ethnographic research within the UK and India, I analyze the rapidly changing social context of Punjab, India, and the impact of this upon the diasporic Punjabi pursuit of home. I particularly argue that increasing divisions between the UK diasporic group studied and the non migrant permanent residents of Punjab, which are intrinsically related to processes of inclusion and exclusion within Punjab, especially the changing role and significance of land ownership and changing consumption practices therein, in turn connected to the increasing influence of economic neoliberalization and global consumer culture within India, significantly shapes the (re)production of home and identity amongst the Punjabi diaspora. Recent manifestations of these social processes within Punjab are threatening the very lived Indian home of some diasporic Punjabis, their Indian ‘roots’

Whose world, whose order? Spatiality, geopolitics and the limits of the world order concept

This article offers a critical re-examination of the concept of world order. Taking our cue from Georg Sørensen's recent article in this journal entitled `What Kind of World Order?' we begin by unpacking the concept of order itself. We distinguish two principal meanings of the term: one analytical and descriptive (order as non-randomness) and one value-laden and normative (order as stability and the absence of violent conflict). In debates about world order, these two meanings are often blurred. Drawing on William Connolly's critique of the descriptive-normative distinction, we suggest that this blurring occurs in part because world order is an `essentially contested concept'. Practices of ordering typically involve the production of specific spatializations, yet questions of space and spatiality are largely absent from discussions of world order. In the second part of the article, therefore, we address this absence through a discussion of geo-politics, focusing on US hegemony and neo-liberalism, military geographies and the spaces of marginalization and resistance. The article concludes with some reflections on the political implications of a spatialized account of world order