Rethinking the Bangladesh state

The study of the Bangladesh state continues to be a path less travelled for scholars of South Asia. The articles in this special issue aim to offer fresh perspectives based on recent ethnographic work on a variety of aspects of the state by new young national and international scholars. Overall, there is a pressing need to pay closer attention to the state and to think about it in new ways, and in this brief concluding article, we offer some thoughts on where we are and some pointers towards where we may need to go. While there are many strengths to the small quantity of literature that exists on this theme, there are also some important limitations

Labour Migration and Human Trafficking: An Introduction

Anti-trafficking initiatives grew exponentially since the United Nations passed the UN Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (hereafter the UN Trafficking Protocol) in 2000. This book contributes to the growing critique of the anti-trafficking agenda by exploring the ways in which the UN Trafficking Protocol has been taken up by policy-makers, non-governmental organizations, and international agencies in Southeast Asia. This region is recognized internationally as a ‘hotspot’ for human trafficking, but there have been few attempts to critically evaluate the vast numbers of anti-trafficking programs and projects or counter-trafficking laws and regulations in operation in the region. Instead, much of the literature has focused on documenting the role that international agencies and NGOs have played in counter-trafficking programs; the development of anti-trafficking laws and policies; or empirical studies of human trafficking cases and/or trends.2 In order to address this gap, the authors in this collection focus their attention at the local level and pay careful, systematic attention to the ways that anti-trafficking initiatives have been taken up and translated by different stakeholders at different scales. As these cases show, anti-trafficking initiatives include rescue and repatriation programs for ‘victims’; education programs about the dangerous habits of smugglers and traffickers; development programs aimed at improving economic livelihoods in ‘hotspots’; and international and bilateral policing efforts aimed at securing borders and arresting people smugglers and traffickers. Associated with the rise of a strong discourse of transnational crime prevention, these initiatives have been accompanied by numerous anti-trafficking laws and protocols passed at local, national and regional levels

Frontier Tibet

Frontier Tibet: Patterns of Change in the Sino-Tibetan Borderlands addresses a historical sequence that sealed the future of the Sino-Tibetan borderlands. It considers how starting in the late nineteenth century imperial formations and emerging nation-states developed competing schemes of integration and debated about where the border between China and Tibet should be. It also ponders the ways in which this border is internalised today, creating within the People’s Republic of China a space that retains some characteristics of a historical frontier. The region of eastern Tibet called Kham, the focus of this volume, is a productive lens through which processes of place-making and frontier dynamics can be analysed. Using historical records and ethnography, the authors challenge purely externalist approaches to convey a sense of Kham’s own centrality and the agency of the actors involved. They contribute to a history from below that is relevant to the history of China and Tibet, and of comparative value for borderland studies

Between Security and Mobility: Negotiating a Hardening Border Regime in the Russian-Estonian Borderland

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on 27th Feb 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1015408Since the end of the Cold War order post-Soviet borders have been characterised by geopolitical tensions and divergent imaginations of desirable political and spatial orders. Drawing upon ethnographic research in two border towns at the Russian-Estonian border, the article makes a case for a grounded examination of these border dynamics that takes into account how borders as sites of ‘mobility and enclosure’ are negotiated in everyday life and shaped by the differentiated incorporations of statecraft into people’s lives. Depending on their historical memories, people interpret the border either as a barrier to previously free movement or as a security device and engage in correspondingly different relations to the state – privileging local concerns for mobility or adopting the state’s concerns over security and sovereignty. Analysing these border negotiations and the relations between citizens and the state, articulated in people’s expectations and claims, can provide us with a better understanding of how people participate in the making of borders and contribute to the stability and malleability of political orders