Life in de facto statelessness in enclaves in India and Bangladesh

Shewly, Hosna J.

doi:10.1111/sjtg.12181

Cited by 7 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 46 publications

(77 reference statements)

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“…Despite their numbers, though, Cambodia's stateless ethnically Vietnamese population is historically diverse and geographically dispersed. Many have never crossed a border, but the complex history of migration and domination -which reached a peak during the upheaval and bloodshed of the 1970s and literature, with studies on Somalia (Brons, 2001), Malaysia (Allerton, 2017;Allerton, 2014) and the border enclaves of India and Bangladesh (Shewly, 2017(Shewly, , 2016(Shewly, , 2013Cons, 2013;Jones, 2009) being prominent examples. Furthermore, studies of statelessness amongst particular ethnic groups have been undertaken in numerous parts of Asia, with the Biharis in Bangladesh (Redclift, 2013;Hussain, 2009;Farzana, 2008, Paulsen, 2006 most prominent amongst academic studies, followed by the Rohingya in Myanmar (Parnini 2013;Rahman, 2010;Lewa, 2009) and Tamil in Sri Lanka (Kanapathipillai, 2009;Kanapathipillai, 1995).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing like the stateless: Documentation and the mobilities of liminal citizenship in Cambodia

Parsons

Lawreniuk

2018

Political Geography

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King's College LondonThis paper explores de facto statelessness amongst ethnically Vietnamese communities in Cambodia. It demonstrates that the inaccessibility of citizenship rights is not rooted directly in what documents an individual possesses, but in collective mobilities driven by a combination or past and present and potential risks. Specifically, the reluctance of officials to replace documents for those they perceive not to be ethnically Khmer means that even ethnically Vietnamese Cambodians possessing a full set of documents -and who have never crossed a border -are encouraged to pursue similar mobilities to those who have none, including first generation immigrants. The higher level of environmental risk associated with these ethnically mediated, informal livelihoods further reduces these households' stocks of physical documentation, inducing a reliance on social networks that are vulnerable to evictions and harassment.On this basis, this paper proposes the category of liminal statelessness, in order to better conceptualize a situation in which people with different legal statuses and abilities to prove them share livelihoods characterized by the non-exercise of citizenship rights. its aftermath -has left their communities with a patchwork of documentation whose impacts are felt across generations. For those thus afflicted, citizenship is therefore not an absolute state, but a question of degree (Ang et al., 2014;Sperfeldt and Nguyen, 2012), rooted more in the everyday judgments of ethnicity enacted by officials than such abstractions as legal status and entitlement. Statelessness for ethnically Vietnamese populations is therefore continually re-entrenched by shared practices of mobility which help to circumvent these forms of administrative marginality, but also mark out those who undertake them as subject to uncertain citizenship. Referred to here as collective mobilities, these practices of movement become a key form of distinction between those whose legal status is secure and those whose isn't.These everyday, practiced, nuances of statelessness are, however, little noted in a literature dominated by legalistic frameworks, leaving the full 'complexity and gravity of the problem of statelessness' (Van Waas, 2009: 133) underexplored. In particular, the category of 'de facto' statelessness remains unclearly delineated, especially in its relationship to limited or ineffective citizenship. This paper therefore proposes the category of liminal statelessness, a conceptualization that focuses on the gray areas between citizenship and statelessness, in order to highlight the multiple heterogenous factors beyond documentation and legal status that combine to influence interaction between communities and the state.After outlining the theoretical, methodological and empirical background to the study, the paper will use data from an ethnographic, multi-sited, study to present this argument in three parts. First, it will highlight the articulated nature of exclusion faced by ethnically Vietnamese communities in C...

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Seeing like the stateless: Documentation and the mobilities of liminal citizenship in Cambodia

Parsons

Lawreniuk

2018

Political Geography

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“…Until recently, research on the India-Bangladesh enclaves was restricted to the perceptions of cartographic anxiety or politics of territorial gain and loss (Jamwal, 2004;Karan, 1966;Whyte, 2002). However, in the past two decades there has been a departure from the statist representation of enclaves (Jones, 2009;Schendel, 2002;Shewly, 2017). Within recent scholarship, some studies look beyond the tropes of the volatile nature of enclaves (Basu, 2011;Cons, 2011Cons, , 2013Ferdoush, 2019), while others attempt to look at the everydayness of enclaves (Jones, 2009;Shewly, 2013).…”

Section: India-bangladesh Border Enclaves In Literaturementioning

confidence: 99%

Women, Marriage and Migration in the Bangladeshi Enclaves in the India–Bangladesh Borderland

Roy

2023

India Quarterly: A Journal of International Affairs

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Based on an ethnographic study of former Bangladeshi enclaves in India, the article explores how the India–Bangladesh border is negotiated and reproduced in the everyday spaces of people living in the borderland that is often overlooked by the usual representation of geopolitical nationalism and hard realities of the barbed wire. Enclaves are fragmented territories surrounded by another state, such as Bangladeshi enclaves surrounded by Indian land and vice versa. Being abandoned by the home state, the former enclave residents were deprived of identity documents, and as a result, precluded from judicial and citizenship rights. The article focuses on marriage-related migration of women that was often used as a way out to overcome the vulnerabilities associated with living in the enclaves. Marriage proposal inside the host country promises access to public goods like a ‘Ration Card’, or identity documents like an ‘Aadhaar card’, thus determining the possible migration of women—their life paths and destinations across the enclaves and the host country. The latitudes of such migratory life courses of women along the border are determined by their religion and economic status. The study shows that these practices, although often necessary for survival, subsequently compromise the agency of the women in the process.

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“…These conspiracy theories are part of an everyday survival mechanism against punitive 'British state attempts to compensate for the global economic crisis' that reveals how 'the logics of social policy terrorises the smallest daily geographies of precarious lives'. This is as true for homelessness in Athens (Bourlessas, 2018), as it is for those stateless in the borders of India and Bangladesh (Shewly, 2013(Shewly, , 2017, for migrant experiences (Ryburn, 2016) or contentious performance of borders by various political actors (Murton, 2019;Wilson & McConnell, 2015). Such work helps to undermine normative understandings of the state as something 'out there', present, and topographical, but insteadas Jeffrey (2013) asserts in his ethnography of Bosnian state-makingthat the state is 'improvised'.…”

Section: Ethnographiesmentioning

confidence: 99%