Liberal nationalism and the Australian citizenship tests (original) (raw)
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Imagining nation: Women's rights and the transnational movement of Shan women in Thailand and Burma
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International Quarterly for Asian Studies (IQAS), 2022
This article examines the emerging political and social mobilisation of Rohingya women activists in connection with the forced displacement of nearly a million Rohingya from the Rakhine state of Myanmar in August 2017. In exile, a promising number of Rohingya women have become actively engaged in social and political domains that have been historically male-dominated. The findings reveal how the internationalisation and the considerable global attention to the Rohingya refugee crisis have provided the space to navigate traditional gender roles and created an opportunity for Rohingya women to become important civic actors in this relatively nascent diaspora. Varying levels of education, age, technical and linguistic skills, along with diverse opportunities offered by the host countries, impact the (in)ability of Rohingya refugee women to play their part in diaspora activism.
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Through a qualitative thematic analysis of sixty-four semi-structured interviews, this thesis focuses on the situation facing Burmese forced migrants in Thailand. In particular, I look at the ways in which forced migrants, their host government, and humanitarian actors negotiate the meaning of refugee status and what it means to be in a protracted space of transition. Findings for this study point to the ways in which the policies and norms of the Royal Thai Government and the offices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees inadvertently interconnect to complicate the space for refugee protection. The paper also finds that refugee status can be gained or lost through interactions between asylum seekers and various parties on the Thai-Burma border. Certain actors within the refugee community and among local and humanitarian authorities play the role of gatekeepers, granting access to a variety of services and protection at a cost and excluding those who cannot pay the cost. Underlyi...
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This paper examines the interfaces of local community based humanitarian organizations with displaced Karen people in Thai-Burmese border spaces and their claims for cultural rights. It argues that Karen people have to organize themselves in a context where they do not have access to social welfare of the state and in which the state is hostile and oppressive to them. Applying Merry’s thesis on the localization and vernacularization of international rights frameworks in the local context, the paper explores the context of power in which different humanitarian actors intervention in the local conflict zone. The author finds that Karen displaced people have differentiated access to humanitarian assistance and that powerful organizations like the Karen National Union are able to benefit while essentializing Karen culture and suppressing internal difference among the Karen to position itself towards the international donor community, thereby becoming “liked” or “preferred” refugees. The...
Invisible Citizens: The Rohingya's Quest for Identity
Pakistan Social Sciences Review, 2023
The situation in Myanmar represents a distressing case characterized by the plight of the Rohingya, an ethnic minority group that has been systematically denied citizenship rights and forced to seek refuge outside their homeland. This vulnerable community has endured extreme hardships, including genocide, torture, killings, and sexual violence. This academic paper seeks to provide a comprehensive analysis of the root and immediate causes of the conflict, shedding light on the principal actors involved in the Myanmar-Rohingya conflict. Utilizing the Gurr Model of ethnic conflicts, it endeavors to elucidate the multifaceted dynamics at play. The study reveals that the ethnic minority has been systematically deprived of fundamental rights related to personal development, security, recognition, and identity. These injustices have spurred the emergence of insurgent groups that have resorted to armed resistance to reclaim their lost citizenship status and fundamental rights. The military crackdown on the Rohingya population has led to their forced displacement from their homes, compelling them to seek shelter in refugee camps. A comprehensive analysis of the conflict underscores the necessity for active international community involvement in facilitating the restoration of the Rohingya's identity and legal status, a challenge influencing over a million individuals. Resolving this conflict hinges upon compelling major global powers and international organizations to pressure Myanmar's military regime to reinstate democracy and enhance conditions within the Rakhine state, thereby enabling the repatriation of the Rohingya minority. Moreover, the international community must engage in reconstructing essential infrastructures to provide these marginalized individuals with their basic human needs.
The Kurds have historically been subjected to structural forms of oppression such as being denied the right to land, their language, culture, political participation or even a passport and social security number. Within this process the Kurdish women's marginalisation has been doubled as they have been subjected to patriarchal laws, restricting their rights. In the aftermath of the Arabic spring the Syrian government decided to withdraw their forces from the Kurdish region Rojava and instead of turning it into an independent state, the Kurds decided to create a stateless democracy through autonomous cantons. Inspired by the PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan's idea of Democratic Confederalism, Rojava now uses a system of stateless democracy with the help of hundreds of councils that exist in the different communes and villages. The Kurdish women's movement has created autonomous structures with women's academies, houses, tribunals, cooperatives, security forces and military units. In this study I conducted semi-structured interviews with seven female activists from the autonomous women's movement in Rojava. My research question was: How does the Kurdish women's movement make sense of their reclaim of citizenship? I firstly analysed my informants' statements as chronological narratives of their changing citizen-status, beginning when they still were colonised by Syria and ending with their practice of stateless democracy. I discovered that the informants had constructed two identities that represented the Kurdish women's transformation from disempowered non-citizens to empowered citizens: 'The housewife' and 'The female combatant' who are each other's contrasts. Secondly, I analysed the women's practices of citizenship through their use of autonomous women's structures as action spaces. These action spaces made it possible for the women to mobilise their reclaim of citizenship. By using Kabeer's theory of citizenship as a bridge that enables empowerment to turn into gender justice, I found that the women's movement in Rojava were attempting to change gender roles and structures, making their reclaim of citizenship feminist. The thesis contributes to understanding how marginalised people experience citizenship and shows that citizenship is a social construction and thereby something that can be both taken from you as well as reclaimed.
Dissertation abstract: This study examines the impact of new information technologies (NITs) on the Burmese opposition movement-in-exile based in Thailand. The intent of the research is to determine whether NITs, primarily computers and the Internet, are helping to reduce, maintain, or intensify ethnic conflict within the movement. The study explores implications for political mobilization by examining what groups within the movement have access to which technologies, and how these groups understand and use global media and the discourses they produce. The research is a multi-sited ethnography conceived within the epistemological framework of standpoint theory, providing an empirically grounded exploration of the Burmese opposition movement in both its local and global contexts. It employs participant observation, in-depth interviews and discourse analysis to examine the impact of global communications at the local level. The work begins with an historical examination of the development of the modern state in Burma, which provides the context for exploring how militarization, gender and ethnicity have affected the development of nationalisms and conflict defined largely as “ethnic” in nature. This is followed by a discussion of how the history and current state of communications both inside and outside Burma constrain attitudes toward the possible uses of communications technologies and media among the opposition-in-exile. An overview of opposition media investigates the degree to which these media have opened a space for dialogue between groups. Interviews with opposition activists and refugees from Burma demonstrate how the Burmese regime’s militaristic values are both perpetuated and countered within the opposition movement itself. The research finds that the introduction of NITs and patterns of foreign funding have reinforced existing hierarchies within the opposition movement. Finally, this study demonstrates how the “local” reinvents the “global” through the use of a global discourse of human rights which acts subtly but powerfully to shape social conventions within the movement. This results in an unstated hierarchy of human rights that perpetuates the inequitable gender and ethnic composition of the opposition political groups and the hierarchy of access and use of technologies among these groups.