Based on ethnographic fieldwork around commemorative events in London and analysis of textual materials used during commemorations, this article explores how long-distance nationalists are involved in Bangladeshi state building practices. I demonstrate how long-distance nationalists, people who identify with Bangladesh and its government as their ancestral homeland, and who seek to influence the state, draw on family histories to narrate national pasts and justify dynastic political hierarchies that characterise Bangladeshi politics. Further, by paying attention to the uses of the idioms of kinship in transnational state practices, the article deconstructs thinking about states as natural entities that can only be studied as part of larger abstract political frameworks removed from peoples’ experiences. Narrating shared pasts are central in creating shared sentiments and form a justification for undertaking Bangladeshi state practices from London. Taken together, the materials presented in this article illustrate the need to take the use of kinship idioms in state apparatuses seriously, because they provide key insights into the ways these apparatuses work within and beyond the borders of the nation-state.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

This essay investigates transnational human rights activist networks seeking justice for war crimes committed during the Bangladesh War of 1971, especially in light of the International Crimes Tribunal in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Focusing on activists in London, it demonstrates the need to engage with transitional justice initiatives discursively and ethnographically in order to avoid losing sight of the ways in which uses of human rights concepts can veil power dimensions through universalist legalistic abstractions. The essay explores engagements with atrocities of the war by mapping the travel and uses of human rights tropes to articulate claims of justice. It showcases how in addressing the violence of the Bangladesh War, victor justice and punishment are emphasized while futures are imagined in which enemies no longer exist. In the examples, a language of justice is employed to call for prosecution, but justice is reframed so that it is equated with the impossibility of reconciling people on opposing sides during the war.