Hyphenated Identities: Voices from the Watchtower During the Cypriot Civil War

As an implication of the ethnically and nationally diverse nature of Mediterranean polities, identification-driven boundary-making strategies bear considerable relevance for their political processes, both in the contemporary context and in the historical past. By utilizing a Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA), this study provides an interpretative exploration of Greek-Cypriot elite discursive framing strategies regarding Turkish-Cypriot and Greek-Cypriot ethno-national identity during the Cypriot Civil War (1963–1967). The available historical interpretations of this period lead us to expect an exclusionary strategy of boundary contraction to be more prevalent than the inclusionary one of boundary expansion in the discourse of Greek-Cypriot elites. Through an examination of a sample of primary textual sources, the analysis disconfirms such an expectation, as elite figures primarily constructed broader, inclusive frames of ethno-national identity during the civil war. The relative absence of boundary contraction and the prevalence of boundary expansion indicate the applicability of Wimmer’s (2008) universalist approach to ethnic boundary-making, in contrast to the expectations that are built by the Cyprus-specific historical evidence. This study thus lays the groundwork for future research to delineate the discursive framing strategies of elite figures in Cyprus and beyond the ethno-nationally divided island.

My Brother the “Other”: Use of Satire and Boundary‐Making by Venezuelan Migrants in Peru

While the criminalization and hyper‐sexualization of Venezuelanmigrants and refugees across South America have received growing scholarly attention, fairly little is known about the coping strategies of migrants in this context. In this article, we build on quantitative and qualitative data from a survey (N = 100), 72 in‐depth interviews, and five focus groups with Venezuelan immigrants in five Peruvian cities, collected between 2018 and 2020, to explore how they make sense of, and react to, negative shifts in public opinion on immigration and the criminalization of Venezuelan nationals. We identify two broad coping mechanisms: (a) opposition to their criminalization, including its satirical ridiculing, and (b) intra‐group boundary‐making and “othering.” Our findings make an important contribution to the literature on migrant responses to criminalization and intra‐group relations in the Global South.

Boundary-Aware Hashing for Hamming Space Retrieval

Hamming space retrieval is a hot area of research in deep hashing because it is effective for large-scale image retrieval. Existing hashing algorithms have not fully used the absolute boundary to discriminate the data inside and outside the Hamming ball, and the performance is not satisfying. In this paper, a boundary-aware contrastive loss is designed. It involves an exponential function with absolute boundary (i.e., Hamming radius) information for dissimilar pairs and a logarithmic function to encourage small distance for similar pairs. It achieves a push that is bigger than the pull inside the Hamming ball, and the pull is bigger than the push outside the ball. Furthermore, a novel Boundary-Aware Hashing (BAH) architecture is proposed. It discriminatively penalizes the dissimilar data inside and outside the Hamming ball. BAH enables the influence of extremely imbalanced data to be reduced without up-weight to similar pairs or other optimization strategies because its exponential function rapidly converges outside the absolute boundary, making a huge contrast difference between the gradients of the logarithmic and exponential functions. Extensive experiments conducted on four benchmark datasets show that the proposed BAH obtains higher performance for different code lengths, and it has the advantage of handling extremely imbalanced data.

Ethnic categorization practices and boundary (re)making in a multiethnic borderland of Ukraine

Multiethnic borderlands, like Transcarpathia in Western Ukraine, are characterized by ethnic-linguistic-confessional complexity where ethnic boundary-making and ethnic categorization are constructed and rooted in politics. The present study aims to analyze how the mechanisms of ethnic categorization and boundary-making play out on a local level. Based on data analysis and fieldwork conducted in Hudya/Gődényháza in Transcarpathia, a village with ethnically, linguistically, and denominationally diverse population, we describe how “ethnicity” is getting blurred and reconstructed in the narrative strategies of residents. We examine the characteristics of the various classification systems (external classification, self-reporting) and their relation to each other. It is found that the ethnic, linguistic, and denominational affiliations in the village (and its wider region) are often divergent, which is reflected in the significant discrepancy between the data gathered in various ethnic classification systems. We argue that denomination is the prime factor of both self-identification and external classification, obscuring the boundaries between religious and standard ethnic terms. We further point to the formation of new boundaries between autochthonous and allochthonous populations. Although this cleavage emerged a few decades ago and has been transgressed by dozens of marriages among autochthonous and newcomers, it can easily get ethnicized, thus it adds an extra layer to the existing distinctions.

Possible Citizens: Migration Enforcement as the Performance of Citizenship in the United Arab Emirates

While most boundary-making studies examine native-born citizens’ opposition to immigration, this article explains why immigrants develop anti-immigrant attitudes. Under what conditions do previous generations of immigrants develop solidarity with newcomers? When might immigrants, instead, police national boundaries and oppose further immigration or naturalization? I argue that under uncertain citizenship status, long-term immigrants are unlikely to develop solidarity with newcomers, despite common experience with exclusionary citizenship policies. Drawing on interviews with naturalization applicants in the United Arab Emirates, this article analyses how policies that unevenly distribute rights and protections to non-citizens structure relationships between immigrant groups. Moving beyond citizen/non-citizen binaries, it calls attention to hierarchies among non-citizens, examining how long-term immigrants with partial and conditional rights police national boundaries to navigate exclusionary policies. When states restrict citizenship, making it a scarce good, immigrants may respond to uncertainty by competing and, thus, limiting access to that good for newcomers. When naturalization is arduous, applicants face pressures to continually perform citizenship to prove that they deserve inclusion. Naturalization applicants lacked citizenship, but they immigrated to the UAE before the establishment of its guest-worker program and claimed Emirati identity by differentiating themselves from “migrant workers.” I show how migration enforcement and boundary-policing factored into their perceptions and performances of what it meant to be a “good” Emirati citizen. Ethnic hierarchies and the timing of migration created distinctions between immigrants eligible for naturalization and those who were not. The mere possibility of inclusion in the citizenry may generate hierarchies between immigrants, precluding solidarity, and encouraging boundary-policing.

Drawing Lines at Sea: Australia’s Five Decades of Maritime Boundary Delimitation

Boundaries in the ocean are man-made constructs of importance to everything from oil and gas production, to fisheries and environmental protection. How do states delineate such ownership and rights? These are the core questions examined in this article, which studies Australia’s maritime boundary agreements, starting with Indonesia in 1971 and ending with Timor-Leste in 2019. In addition to depicting and documenting the main drivers and impediments to these agreements whenever Australia has had to negotiate with a third country, it examines Australia’s approach to boundary-making at sea more generally. Drawing on international law and political science, this article shows why we need understand the interplay between security politics, legal considerations and domestic interests in order to understand what motivates states to settle their maritime disputes.

Syrian Displacement, Gender and Boundary-Making in the Turkish Borderlands

This article presents a reflexive ethnographic analysis of ‘refugee lives’ and borders and boundary-making in the Turkish borderlands. Since 2011, the humanitarian crisis as a result of the Syrian civil war, and the arrival at the European border zones of refugees crossing the Mediterranean, have occupied the news outlets of the world. Today the European Union and Turkey look for permanent ‘solutions’ and emphasize ‘integration’ as a durable response to forced migration. This essay explores reflexive dimensions of long-term-fieldwork with Syrian refugees at the Turkey-Syria border through an analysis of ethnographic encounters and the politics of belonging and place-making. Borders are often contested spaces that complicate the researcher’s positionality, which oscillates between a politically engaged subject position and the ‘stranger’ who encounters the ‘other’ and must negotiate her space. By examining the Turkish-Syrian border and Syrian refugees’ experiences in the border city of Antakya, this article offers a critical lens to view the identity and politics of the researcher and embodied geopolitics.