Enacting Border Governance through Multi-scalar Violence: Exclusion and discrimination of Rohingya people in Rakhine state

While international focus has been on armed violence and Rohingya refugee flows from Rakhine state, this article pays attention to the myriad forms of ‘everyday discrimination’ that Muslim Rohingya people have experienced over a prolonged time. These forms of discrimination were observed by the author and reported by Rohingya informants in three areas of Rakhine state during research conducted in 2015. The article argues that systemic discrimination against Rohingya people can be understood as the violent enactment of bordering processes by both state and non-state actors at multiple scales, thus contributing to border governance. Bordering processes can be observed at the national level through the construction of citizenship in law and documentation; at the sub-national level through the restriction of travel and mobility at the township and village levels in Rakhine state; at the household level through household registrations and the control of births, marriages, and family relationships; as well as at the individual level through arrests, detention, and acts of violence. The border is enacted through such processes, with Rohingya people treated as an embodiment of both a political boundary between Myanmar and Bangladesh, and a social boundary constructing the Muslims as ‘fearsome and disgusting others’ by the country's non-Rohingya groups, particularly by the majority Bamar Buddhist population.

The US–Mexican War

Usually thought of as a two-year-long conflict between the United States and Mexico, the US–Mexican War (1846–1848) represents the culmination of a much longer struggle over the control of what became the American Southwest. Years before Mexico declared its independence, early citizens of the United States resolved to seize Spain’s North American possessions. Devastated by a decade of revolt, Mexico lacked the unity needed to halt American efforts to acquire land at its expense. The US–Mexican War revealed an important divide among Mexicans over the issue of federalism. In the end, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo defined the modern political boundary between the two nations. Far from bringing peace to either nation, though, the war generated internal strife for both the United States and Mexico. The historic conflict still affects the relationship between the two nations.

MALAYSIAN-OMANI HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL RELATIONSHIP: IN CONTEXT OF HALWA MASKAT AND BAJU MASKAT

The current re-emergence of global maritime activity has sparked initiative from various nations in re-examining their socio-political and cultural position of the region. Often this self-reflection would involve the digging of the deeper origin and preceding past of a nation from historical references and various cultural heritage materials. From this, realisation of the pattern in maintaining an empire or enterprise from the immediate ancestral society could be turned into a model or benchmark in developing the present and future planning of the nation. In the context of Islamic civilisation development along the Indo-Pacific seaboard the Omani and Malay nations are the two integral entities that had assumed their central role as seafarers, traders, rulers, and travellers in maintaining the dynamics of the region and this happened as early as the Islamic period of the 9th and 10th century CE up till 16th and 19th century when series of European colonial infiltration disrupted greatly the balance of this classical network. The Kitab at-Tarikh Silsilah Negeri Kedah, for instance, presented a vivid story of an Omani captain and his ship in the early 1700s who had met Kedahan people. The cultural heritage of the Arabian Gulf brought mainly by the Omanis could even be found there such as a fabric product known as Baju Maskat and a kind of delicacy known as Halwa Maskat which signal that the cultural hegemony of the Omanis indeed exceeded their immediate political boundary.

The Soviet West? The Shifting Bounderies of Estonian Culturescape

The notion “Soviet West” that is addressed in this chapter had its own political and cultural past during Soviet times that lived on in the collective memory of the Estonian and Russian communities on both sides of the border. In the nineteenth century, the crucible of modernity, the identity of both cultural spaces began to be shaped and take shape, despite the fact that the political boundary was shared; Estonia was part of the Russian Empire. As part of this process, identity boundaries were drawn for each cultural space using history. As an outcome of this long lasting process, Estonian cultural elites decided “to become Europeans”; in parallel Russia began to stress the unique character of their culture. The respective historical and art historical narratives were constructed. These boundaries persisted in collective consciousness, having become stronger and transmuted, in the latter half of twentieth century, constantly perpetuating oppositions and hierarchies. It was particularly the case of Estonian very small culture that felt to be threatened under the Soviet rule, as the active russification process started in the 1970s. However, one should bear in mind that unlike physical boundaries, Soviet-era cultural borders were characterized by permeability and the filtration or translation capability, which – as history has shown us – turned them into elastic cultural exchange elements, even if the national agenda (as in the case of Estonia) or political regime (like the Soviet Union) did not favour this process.

Movement, party and electoral dynamics. Syriza’s electoral success as a movement effect (2010-2015)

In this article we approach SYRIZA's electoral success between 2012 and 2015 as a movement effect. We focus on SYRIZA's features, strategy and message that have been developed on the grounds of its movement activity, as well as on the external political conditions which SYRIZA seems to take advantage of. We argue that the anti-austerity campaign created the necessary preconditions for the electoral and political rise of SYRIZA, namely the emergence of a new political boundary between pro- and anti-Memorandum forces and a subsequent majoritarian socio-political category that could be transformed into a privileged electoral pool for SYRIZA.

The Early Mediaeval Slav-German border (Limes Sorabicus) in the light of research into Y-chromosome polymorphism in contemporary and historical German populations

n the 8th century, the first political boundary between Germany (the land of the Franks) and the Slav people – known as Limes Sorabicus – followed the line of the Rivers Elbe and its tributary the Saale. In later centuries this was breached under the influence of an eastwards political expansion of Germany also characterised by developing German colonisation in that same direction (of the so-called Ostsiedlung). The consequence was for German regional communities to take shape to the east of the old Limes Sorabicus. Alongside the emigrants from the west, further participants in the process where autochthonous Slavs and Balts. This mixed origin of the new communities arising is revealed in historical accounts, but also via the results of scientific analyses of various profiles. The genetic research carried out to date supports the above contention, as well as a conclusion that the zone around the old Limes Sorabicus, despite its running through the centre of what is today an ethnically-German area, continues to represent a separation of populations whose ancestors are mainly of distinct origins.

Nidirana chapaensis (Bourret, 1937), one additional anuran species for the amphibian fauna of China

The China-Vietnam border region is a well-known biodiversity hotspot, harboring a striking diversity of species and endemism. However, the largest part of this region is so far understudied due to restrictions by political boundaries and difficulties in accessibility. Consequently, many species have only been reported from one side of the political boundary, despite the presence of continuous habitat on both sides. In this study, we present our discovery of the frog Nidirana chapaensis in southern Yunnan Province, China. This species was previously known only from Vietnam. All major morphometric characters of these Chinese specimens were found to match with the Vietnamese specimens. In addition, our mitochondrial phylogeny suggests that the Chinese population is monophyletic with respect to topotypic Nidirana chapaensis, with uncorrected pairwise distances of 0.2% at the COI gene fragment analyzed. Therefore, we report Nidirana chapaensis as a new member of amphibian fauna of China, describe the morphological variation of the Chinese population, and provide additional natural history data of this species based on our observation from China.

Notes on taxonomic identity and typification of Fagraea coromandelina (Gentianaceae)

The genus Fagraea Thunberg (1782: 132), belonging to the family Gentianaceae, is represented by 70 species in the world (Struwe et al. 2002). It is distributed in India, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, Malay Peninsula, Borneo, New Guinea, French Polynesia, China, Philippines and Australia. Clarke (1885) reported 5 species from the present political boundary of India, of which 2 species were recorded by Gamble (1921) from South India. The genus includes glabrous epiphytic trees or shrubs, with simple, opposite and coriaceous leaves, fragrant flowers and pulpy berries with a persistent calyx.

The Mysterious Case of Disappearing Family Law and the Shrinking Vulnerable Subject

This article seeks to critically examine the implications that the new eligibility requirements for legal aid as implemented by the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act 2012 are having on the ways in which private family law governs families. It makes use of a theoretical lens drawn from the work of Valverde (2009, 2014a, 2014b) on ‘jurisdiction’ to map the shift that has taken place within family law as a result of the political boundary that the act has drawn between ‘vulnerable’ litigants eligible for legal aid and the rest of families engaging with private family law, for whom self-sufficiency and responsibility is encouraged and expected. It argues that in reserving legal aid for a narrow group of vulnerable litigants, the formal scale of family law has shrunk, there being at the same time an increased reliance on more informal sources of law such as advice-based resources. This has led to a diversification of formal and informal scales of governance which operate according to different ‘logics’, which impact negatively on access to family justice for families from various backgrounds and circumstances. The article concludes with a call for family law researchers to be mindful of the need to look at both formal and more informal sources of family law in order to fully appreciate developments within the jurisdiction, particularly pernicious ones, and to be able to respond to them appropriately.