scholarly journals Straddling the Border: A Marginal History of Guerrilla Warfare and ‘Counter-Insurgency’ in the Indonesian Borderlands, 1960s–1970s

2011 ◽  
Vol 45 (6) ◽  
pp. 1423-1463 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL EILENBERG
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Guerrilla Warfare ◽  
Nation State ◽  
National Belonging ◽  
West Kalimantan ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Nation ◽  
International Border

AbstractPost-independence ethnic minorities inhabiting the Southeast Asian borderlands were willingly or unwillingly pulled into the macro politics of territoriality and state formation. The rugged and hilly borderlands delimiting the new nation-states became battlefronts of state-making and spaces of confrontation between divergent political ideologies. In the majority of the Southeast Asian borderlands, this implied violent disruption in the lives of local borderlanders that came to affect their relationship to their nation-state. A case in point is the ethnic Iban population living along the international border between the Indonesian province of West Kalimantan and the Malaysian state of Sarawak on the island of Borneo. Based on local narratives, the aim of this paper is to unravel the little known history of how the Iban segment of the border population in West Kalimantan became entangled in the highly militarized international disputes with neighbouring Malaysia in the early 1960s, and in subsequent military co-operative ‘anti-communist’ ‘counter-insurgency’ efforts by the two states in the late 1960–1970s. This paper brings together facets of national belonging and citizenship within a borderland context with the aim of understanding the historical incentives behind the often ambivalent, shifting and unruly relationship between marginal citizens like the Iban borderlanders and their nation-state.

International Human Rights, Religious Pluralism and the Future of Chieftaincy in Ghana

Exchange ◽  
2006 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 360-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abamfo Atiemo
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Religious Pluralism ◽  
Local Governance ◽  
Religious Commitment ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Future ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Religious Reasons ◽  
Customary Practices

AbstractA revolutionary development that resulted from Africa's experience of colonialism was the emergence of the nation-state made up of previously separate ethnic states. By the end of the colonial period the rulers of these ethnic states — the chiefs — had lost most of their real political and judicial powers to the political leaders of the new nation-states. But in spite of the loss of effective political power the chiefs continued to wield moral influence over members of their ethnic groups. The limited reach of the nation-state in the post-colonial era has also meant a dependence on the chiefs, in many cases, for aspects of local governance. This, for example, is the case of Ghana. However, in the modern context of religious pluralism the intimate bond between the chiefs and the traditional religion exacerbates tension in situations of conflict between people's loyalty to the traditional state and their religious commitment. In some cases, chiefs invoke customary laws in attempt to enforce sanctions against individuals who refuse to observe certain customary practices for religious reasons. But this has implications for the human rights of citizens. This article discusses the implications of this situation for the future of chieftaincy as well as prospects for the protection of the human rights of citizens who for religious reasons choose to stay away from certain communal customary practices.

The Old Story: Sovereign Nation-States and Myths of National Identity

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Nadeau
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Values ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Protestant Reformation ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Religious Traditions ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
Personal Qualities ◽  
Catholic Churches

When members of a society coordinate their activities based on a broadly disseminated and reinforced set of dogmatic beliefs in their mythological or religious traditions, anthropologists refer to these beliefs as useful myths. The aim of this chapter is to reveal that the dogmatic beliefs associated with the construct of the sovereign nation-state are useful myths that can no longer be viewed as useful because they are effectively undermining efforts to resolve the environmental crisis. This situation is greatly complicated by the fact that the sovereign nation-state is a normative construct, or a construct that is assumed to be a taken-for-granted and indelible aspect of geopolitical reality. The large problem here is that this normative construct constitutes one of the greatest conceptual barriers to resolving the environment crisis. This brief account of the origins and transformations of the construct of the sovereign nation-state is intended to accomplish four objectives. The first is to demonstrate that the construct of the sovereign nation-state emerged in Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries in a series of narratives that transferred the God-given power and authority of sovereign monarchs to the states governed by these monarchs. The second is to reveal that the narratives about nationalism and national identity that emerged during and after the Protestant Reformation abused the truths of religion in an effort to convince core populations living within the borders of particular nation-states that they were a chosen people possessing superior cultural values and personal qualities. The third is to show that the dogmatic beliefs legitimated and perpetuated by these narratives eventually resulted in the creation of churches of state with sacred symbols, rites, and rituals similar to those in Protestant and Catholic churches. And the fourth objective is to provide a basis for understanding how these dogmatic beliefs eventually became foundational to a system of international government, the United Nations, predicated on the construct of the sovereign nation-state. The history of this construct is much more complex and far more detailed than the brief account in this chapter suggests.

scholarly journals Archaeology and Ethnicity

2010 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-149
Author(s):  
Staša Babić
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Constructivist Approach ◽  
Cultural Group ◽  
Collective Identities ◽  
Archaeological Investigation ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ethnic Affiliation ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of

The paper examines the history of archaeological investigation into collective identities in the past. Culture-historical approachis fully based upon the concept of cultural group , deeply influenced by the modern understanding of nation-states – unity of territory, material culture, language and ethnic affiliation. The application of this concept led to devastating political abuses of archaeology, most notoriously in the case of Gustaf Kossinna in the Nazi Germany. The realisation that the very essence of thus conceived group identity in the past inevidably leads into the projection of the modern model of nation-state, resulted in thorough reconsideration. Over the last decades, archaeologists are investigating other possible paths of research into the group and individual identities in the past, informed by the constructivist approach.

Beyond Nationalism and Revolution in Southeast Asia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
John T. Sidel
Keyword(s):  
Southeast Asia ◽  
State Power ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Growing Body ◽  
Asian History ◽  
New Nation

This chapter offers a composite picture of the Philippine, Indonesian, and Việtnamese revolutions that goes beyond both established understandings of these revolutions as nationalist in nature and the various strands of the growing body of literature on the various cosmopolitan connections cited above. The chapter intends to provide a new descriptive overview of the three major revolutions in Southeast Asian history. In so doing, the chapter provides a critical counterpoint to those understandings and accounts of these revolutions that, consciously or unconsciously, follow official nationalist narratives in which the rise of national consciousness produces nationalists who make national revolutions. It works to undermine efforts to appropriate these revolutions — and the making of these three new nation-states — for the nationalist elites who came to occupy state power in the aftermaths of these revolutions and throughout the postindependence era. By providing alternative narratives, the chapter suggests ways these revolutions might be understood not only in terms of their victories and their victors but in light of their betrayals and their victims, as the diverse and diverging emancipatory energies that helped to fuel revolutionary mobilization were in various ways absorbed, appropriated, and eviscerated by postrevolutionary (nation-)states.

The Transnational Consensus: Fascism and Nazism in Current Research

2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-252
Author(s):  
Ángel Alcalde
Keyword(s):  
National Socialism ◽  
Review Article ◽  
Transnational History ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Comparative History ◽  
Global History ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of

Transnational History emerged in the 1990s as a methodological perspective aiming to transcend the nation state as a prevalent unit of analysis. Akin to comparative history, transnational history focuses on transfers between countries and nations, cross-border exchanges and circulation of people and ideas, thus changing our understanding of modern historical phenomena and contributing to the development of global history. Today there is probably no modern historical subfield that has not heeded the new transnational insights. This review article argues that the history of fascism and national socialism have benefitted considerably from this epistemological advancement, and that this renewal has revolutionised our understanding of these ideologies, movements and regimes. Previously historians believed that fascism had emerged as a solution to the interwar crisis in different European nation states; ‘native’, ‘home-grown’ fascist movements, unique ultranationalist revolutionaries, spontaneously reacted to endogenous national problems and attempted a counterrevolution or national rebirth with different degrees of success. After the transnational turn, historians instead see fascism as a single transnational and global phenomenon that violently expanded throughout Europe and beyond by processes of transfer, mutual inspiration, hybridisation, interaction, entanglement and cross-border exchange.

History Regained: A Modern Artist in Baghdad Encounters a Lost Tradition of Painting

2018 ◽  
Vol 35 (1) ◽  
pp. 229-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saleem Al-Bahloly
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Medieval History ◽  
Cultural Renewal ◽  
Nation States ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Creation ◽  
New Nation ◽  
European Modernism

Abstract This essay explores how the re-encounter with a medieval history of manuscript illustration laid a foundation for the practice of modern art in Iraq. It focuses on the artist Jewad Selim (1919–61) and his discovery of Yahya al-Wasiti’s illustrations of the Maqāmāt al-Ḥarīrī, but it also marks the ways in which that discovery was mediated by the enterprise of orientalist scholarship, the context of European modernism, and the broader cultural renewal that occurred with the collapse of the Ottoman empire and the creation of new nation-states in the Middle East.

Post-imperial Europe: Integration through Disintegration

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 62-75
Author(s):  
Vladimir Biti
Keyword(s):  
Central Europe ◽  
Social Stratification ◽  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Nation State ◽  
East Central Europe ◽  
East Central ◽  
Nation States ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Cross National

In the post-imperial East Central Europe after the dissolution of the German, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian empires, disappointment was commonplace. The imperial successor states were involved in revengeful animosities with neighbouring states, torn by their majority population’s hatred of domestic minorities, bereft of tens of millions of their co-nationals who had remained in now foreign nation-states, exposed to huge influxes of refugees, and embittered by the territorial concessions that they were forced to make. By contrast, the newly established nation-states were plagued by miserable social and economic conditions, poor infrastructures, unemployment, inflation, rigid and immobile social stratification, and corrupt and inefficient administrations. Such developments gave rise to huge and traumatic deportations and migrations of populations, which, paradoxically, simultaneously immensely increased the mobility of their imagination. Using the technique of ‘subversive mimicry’, these nationally indistinct elements established cross-national transborder communities as the zones of ‘national indifference’ within the new nation-states. Carried by the energy of their longing, these communities introduced imbalances, fissures, and divisions into the nation-state communities, which determined their belonging.

COLOURING OUTSIDE THE LINES: METHODS FOR A GLOBAL HISTORY OF EASTERN EURASIA 600–1350

2019 ◽  
Vol 29 ◽  
pp. 27-63
Author(s):  
Naomi Standen
Keyword(s):  
Nation State ◽  
Global History ◽  
National Narratives ◽  
The North ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Liao Dynasty ◽  
Neoliberal Economics ◽  
History Of ◽  
Alternative Techniques ◽  
Working Out

ABSTRACTWe are still working out how to do global history, especially for pre-modern periods. How do we achieve the necessary shift in scale without falling back on standard definitions of categories like states, ethnicity, religion, urbanisation, when these are increasingly challenged at the specialist level? This article sets out an approach that could help pre-modern historians ‘going global’ to challenge claims that ‘there is no alternative’ to modern frameworks such as neoliberal economics, and especially the nation-state. Useful alternative techniques include thinking in layers rather than blocks, not seeking narrative arcs, and not using words like ‘China’. These methods are illustrated with analysis of three Liao dynasty (907–1125) cities and three comparators from neighbouring states to the north, south and east of the Liao. The intention is to disrupt the re-emergence in the new venue of global history of essentially national narratives, using the opportunities presented by pre-modern worlds before nation-states to free us from teleological concepts. This article argues that there is indeed an alternative to the putative precursors of modern nation-states, and offers a framework for doing without them.

Revolution in the Hispanic World, 1808–1816

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime E. Rodríguez O.
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Iberian Peninsula ◽  
Civil Wars ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Nation States ◽  
New Nation ◽  
Modern Nation State

The collapse of the Spanish monarchy in 1808 precipitated a political revolution that shattered that worldwide polity into new nation-states, among them Spain itself. In the wake of France's invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, three broad movements emerged in the Spanish world: the struggle against the invaders, the great political revolution that sought to transform the Spanish monarchy into a modern nation-state with one of the most radical constitutions of the nineteenth century, and a fragmented insurgency in America that relied on force to secure home rule. Elections to form a representative government for the Spanish world were held in the midst of a crisis of confidence. As their first act, the deputies to the Cortes of Cádiz declared themselves representatives of the nation and assumed sovereignty. The insurgencies and civil wars that engulfed some regions of Spanish America were a response to the same events that generated the constitutional political revolution. Both movements sought to maintain the Spanish monarchy as an independent political entity and to expand local political authority and representation.

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