Humanitarianism from the Suburbs: Australian Refugee Relief and Activism during the 1971 Bangladeshi Liberation War

The Bangladesh Liberation War against West Pakistan in 1971 triggered an exodus of ten million refugees, the deaths of approximately 1.5 million people and widespread destruction of villages, crops and infrastructure. Preoccupied with the Cold War and domestic politics, powerful nations such as the US and UK did not intervene directly and reluctantly provided aid. The Australian government, for its part, was particularly slow to offer aid, trailing efforts of New Zealand and most Western European governments. While the McMahon administration remained indifferent, Australians from diverse backgrounds engaged with this conflict by raising public awareness, fundraising and lobbying the Australian government to increase its aid contribution to Bangladeshis displaced by war. At a time when Australian government policies focused on the war in Indo‐China, Cold War politics and development in south‐east Asia and the south Pacific, I consider the ways Australian individuals offered aid to Asian, non‐Christian refugees, some of whom held Maoist views. Using archival materials, historical newspapers and census data, this article argues that, paradoxically, it was individuals with little political capital who spearheaded Australian efforts to aid Bangladeshi refugees. In short, the Bangladesh Liberation War provoked a groundswell of suburban activism that acted independently of government policies.     

For King,For Country: Changing “Good” Behaviour in Victoria, 1930s and 1950s

Far from being incidental, what is taught at primary school can reveal key beliefs about the world and its future held at a given period. I compare Victorian primary school curricula and reading resources of the 1930s and 1950s, attending particularly to references to war and cultural difference. I find that in the 1930s war was to be avoided by valuing cultural differences, whereas in the later decade the aim was effacement of difference through modernisation. I argue that this attitude to difference, combined with the imperialism and internationalism of the 1930s, engendered a moral form of identity in Victorian primary school children. In contrast, under the economic nationalism of the 1950s, children were taught to be good citizens taking little moral responsibility to those who were not Australian.     

IN/SECURITY

This article highlights the impact of international politics and war upon refugees' lives, asserting that the humanitarian aid that refugees receive is contingent upon interstate and intrastate politics. Indeed, the role of the state becomes contentious as it becomes the source of security as well as insecurity in the lives of refugees. This role is guided by self-interest rather than humanitarian concerns. In the Afghan case, we find that humanitarian aid has sometimes been used to perpetuate endless wars and violence in Afghanistan. This aid was also been used to portray a picture of Afghanistan pivoted on an anti-Soviet struggle through the strengthening of fundamentalist strains in Afghan thinking. The latter affected women and children negatively as different actors within the camps–the Afghan political leadership, donor agencies, and Pakistani administrative structures–manipulated particular images of the ideal family and of the role of women. Women have had to face multiple levels and layers of violence just as men have had to contend with an intensified view of masculinity that naturalizes inflicting violence upon others. Refugees have unnecessarily borne the brunt of the aftermath of regional and international politics, as they have had to contend with both direct and structural violence.     

Old ‘counter-revolution’, new ‘terrorism’: historicizing the framing of violence in Xinjiang by the Chinese state

ABSTRACT

China has declared a war on terrorism in Xinjiang, identifying violence in the region as a top security threat. However, what nowadays is officially constructed as ‘terrorism’ was framed as ‘counter-revolution’ in the past. Informed by the concept of macrosecuritization and the agenda of critical terrorism studies, this article examines the changing nature of Chinese state framing of violence in Xinjiang. Through a comparative analysis of the discursive construction of the Baren (1990) and Maralbeshi (2013) violent incidents, I find that the terror lexicon has replaced old narratives of counter-revolution to legitimize a sustained crackdown under a novel geopolitical context. The construction of violence in Xinjiang as terrorism, I argue, is contingent, limited and unstable. It marginalizes factors other than an extremist or separatist agency in the incubation of the violence, in particular the frictions created by the crackdown with which the Chinese government is trying to placate the unrest.     

Between Two Fires: Mayangna Indians in Post‐Revolutionary Nicaragua, 1979–1990

The predominant Mayangna narrative of the Nicaraguan Civil War holds that the Miskitu tricked them into joining the conflict. However, I argue here that the Mayangna leadership and the Sandinista government were also responsible, as Sandinista denial of the importance of ethnic difference in Nicaragua allowed Miskitu nationalists, using the language of religion, to co‐opt Mayangna leaders, while subsequent Sandinista violence turned Mayangna civilians against the revolution. Accusations of trickery stem from later Mayangna disillusion with the war and from problems with the autonomous political system set up in its wake, which encourages the Mayangna to underplay the role of their own leaders and the Sandinista government in embroiling them in the conflict. This one‐sided narrative, however, increasingly defines Mayangna interpretations of their very identity as a people.     

Civilian victimization during the Tajik civil war: a typology and strategic assessment

Tajikistan experienced a brutal civil war shortly after independence, in which an estimated 50,000 people died. Yet the scope, patterns and effects of civilian victimization in Tajikistan remain under-examined. This article explores two key questions: (1) What types of civilian victimization were utilized by the war's victor, the Popular Front of Tajikistan (PFT)? (2) What were the strategic effects and outcomes of civilian victimization by the PFT? The aim is to disaggregate civil war violence in Tajikistan and enable new avenues of research into its patterns and effects. The article's key findings are that civilians were victimized primarily through targeted violence and displacement, and that victimization was generally a successful strategy for the PFT.     

Native rhythms in the city: embodied refusal among Uyghur male migrants in Ürümchi

Over the past two decades, state-directed Han settlement and capitalist development in the Uyghur homeland in Chinese Central Asia have uprooted thousands of Uyghurs, causing them to move to the city. In this article, I explore how low-income male Uyghur migrants and Uyghur culture producers build a durable existence despite these challenges. Based on analysis of migrant responses to the Uyghur-language urban fiction and indigenous music as well as ethnographic observations of Uyghur migrants from Southern Xinjiang, I argue that indigenous knowledge provides underemployed male Uyghurs a means to refuse the alienating effects of settler colonialism and economic development. By broadening the scope of what counts as ‘resistance’ to Chinese attempts to eliminate aspects of Uyghur society, I show that ‘refusal’ can be a generative way of embodying sovereignty, particularly when confronted by structural violence.     

Explaining State Violence in the Guatemalan Civil War: Rebel Threat and Counterinsurgency

Literature on the Guatemalan Civil War has debated whether or not state violence was triggered by rebel activities. Did the government respond to each insurrection caused by the rebels, or did it blindly target regions where antigovernment antipathy and movements had historically prevailed? Because state violence was extensive during the civil war period, the dynamism of the war could have been the reason for its occurrence. Relying on the threat‐response model of state violence, this article argues that human rights violations occurred when the government perceived a rebel threat that would have seriously degraded its capability in future counterinsurgencies. The article employs propensity score matching to address the problem of confounding in empirical analysis, and reveals that rebel attacks, particularly those targeting security apparatus and resulting in human injury, increased the likelihood of state violence in the Guatemalan Civil War.     

Remembering Paul Schiemann (1876–1944)

Abstract

This paper explores how population displacement operated in Lithuania in the immediate post-WWI period. In 1918 the disintegration of the old imperial polity led to the emergence of a Lithuanian state. Beyond the field of battle, the struggle to maintain the independence of Lithuania was characterised by an intense process of state and nation-building. All this hectic activity was accompanied by population displacement on a scale first witnessed in 1915–16.

Unlike the military campaigns, these state-building efforts did not come to an end in 1920. My argument is that population displacement presented the Lithuanian authorities with an opportunity to claim and to establish Lithuanian refugees as potential members of a new nation-state, thereby defining its spatial, demographic and cultural boundaries. The newly formed Lithuania offered a potential political homeland for tens of thousands of war refugees of various ethnic groups who had lived in the former north-western provinces before 1914, but who were displaced by war. According to rough estimates, the total number of Lithuanian refugees who settled in the Russian interior stood at 550,000 at the beginning of 1918. My paper explores their fate in the post-war period as well as official policies of the new Lithuanian state adopted towards the refugees.

The logic of the homogenising national state required that the refugees had to be persuaded or forced to abandon their divergent and multiple identities born in exile and rooted down in the single space of the national homeland. Nevertheless, the spatial pattern of ‘the homeland’ was still in flux, due to the border wars between Lithuania, Soviet Russia and Poland in 1918–20. As a result, some refugees were excluded from the ranks of Lithuanian citizenry. Their difficult situation was further aggravated by famine in Russia in 1921, which called for cooperation between Soviet Russia, Lithuania, Poland and Latvia. Thus, on the one hand, the refugees served as a focus for the propaganda of the belligerent states, while on the other hand their uncontrollable movement compelled governments to co-operate.

The paper is based on two collections of primary documents: the files of the Lithuanian Ministries of the Interior and Foreign Affairs.     

Contemporary art on the current refugee crisis: the problematic of aesthetics versus ethics

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on contemporary artworks outlining the current refugee flow from the Middle East to the West, namely to European countries together with the US and Canada. Drawing primarily on Jacques Rancière’s conceptualization of ethical art versus aesthetics, I explore how various journeys of refugees in its many forms have been represented in the contemporary art scene. My aim is to concretize the theoretical debate surrounding the ‘political’ engagement of critical art on the issue of refugee representation through various prominent artworks and art practices starting with the well-known image of Alan Kurdi’s and Ai Weiwei’s replication of this image in his artwork. I will analyse when and in which configurations aesthetics and ethics can be found in contemporary art on the issue of the ‘refugee crisis’. I argue that art on refugees can be grouped into two primary categories that I define as ‘human condition assessment’ and ‘agency empowerment’. As such, I demonstrate in practice how contemporary art on the current refugee crisis both employs and moves beyond the ethical subject matters by challenging abject victimhood as well as the ideal of egalitarian art for the underrepresented and thus assumingly voiceless, depoliticized refugees.     

The Syrian conflict and public opinion among Syrians in Lebanon

Whom do ordinary Syrians support in their civil war? After decades of repression, the Syrian uprising unleashed an outpouring of political expression. Yet the study of Syrian public opinion is in its infancy. This article presents survey evidence from a large, diverse sample of Syrian refugees in neighbouring Lebanon, one of the first of its kind, and examines their support for the different factions fighting in the civil war. In so doing, it demonstrates that many conventional narratives of the conflict are oversimplifications of a more complex reality. The survey shows that the majority of Syrian refugees support one faction or another of the opposition, but a large minority sympathizes with the government. In line with existing accounts of the war, the government draws its popular support base from wealthier and less religious Syrians, as well as minorities. Nonetheless, large numbers of Sunni Arabs also side with the government, belying sectarian narratives of the war. The survey also finds that supporters of the opposition Islamists and non-Islamists are similar in many regards, including religiosity. The main distinction is that the non-Islamist support base is far more politically attentive than are Islamist sympathizers, in contrast to existing narratives of the war.     

El aleph de memorias y los modos de documentar la división de Corea en la contemporaneidad

The aftermath of the Korean War (1950–1953), the North Korean refugees and political prisoners in the South, the separation of families, and others painful traces of the division of Korea (1945), have occupied a central place in South Korean cinema. However, for decades, the cinematic representations of the ideological conflict did not take into account the way in which violence and horror struck the Korean diaspora. The presence of these memories in Our School (2006) and Grandmother's Flower (2008) has produced a new challenge to the ways of seeing and narrating the historical memories in visual images. In this article, I will focus on revealing the values of the past in terms of memory space. I suggest a reading from a peculiar understanding of violence, oppression and discrimination. By comparing these two acclaimed films, I have attempted to rethink the boundaries and dispute processes of appropriating historical traumas and its relation to the multiple locations of historical memories.     

The 1948 Wartime Resettlement of Former Arab Areas in West Jerusalem

The 1948 war resulted in a sweeping spatial transformation of areas included in the bounds of the newly formed Jewish state, including that of the western Jerusalem. Arab neighbourhoods were almost totally depopulated during fighting and shortly after resettled by Jews, most of which has been war refugees from Jerusalem's Jewish neighbourhoods or newly arrived immigrants. The effect of war on human spatial structures is in many cases abrupt and sweeping. Yet, due to the limited use of heavy weaponry by both belligerent sides, the damage to built-up structures and infrastructure systems was not inclusive. Repopulation of former Arab areas by Jews was of large scale and carried out by different local and national institutions. Yet it seems as in many cases it was personal initiatives, especially of war refugees that sought for alternative housing that had a crucial effect over the newly formed settlement pattern. One way or another, the spatial structure of Jerusalem that was formed in decades of urban dynamic development was drastically transformed after a short period of fighting between December 1947 and early 1949, that affects the spatial structure of Israel's capital city until now.     

Aid and transition from a war economy to an oligarchy in post-war Tajikistan

Exclusion and violence persist in post-conflict states, despite international assistance aimed at the demilitarization of politics. Through a field-based study of Tajikistan, this paper argues that aid focuses on economic liberalization, not the implementation of peace agreements, in the initial stage of post-war transition. Such an organization of aid empowers a particular group of elites who have privileged access to state assets at the time of civil war settlement, allowing them to establish institutional frameworks that will consolidate their personal and monopolistic control of resources. This leads to the collapse of power-sharing arrangements, as the incumbent regime seeks to remove wartime commanders and opposition leaders from the administrative apparatus. In Tajikistan, the incumbent regime has also prosecuted many of these former allies and opponents on account of corruption through state agencies established with donor assistance. Aid thus institutionalized exclusion and sustains patterns of violence along civil war divisions, rather than transforming wartime power structures.     

Manufacturing Black-on-Black Violence in Africa: A Decolonial Perspective on Mfecane and Afrophobia/Xenophobia in South Africa

The phenomenon of “black-on-black” violence among the people of Africa has, ever since the advent of modernity/coloniality, been articulated in such a way that it presents victims as perpetrators. Thus, from the Mfecane violence of the “pre-colonial” era to the xenophobic/Afrophobic violence of the “post-colonial” era in Africa, incidents of black-on-black violence have always attracted explanations that cast doubt on the humanity of the black subject, through the colonial strategy of inventing and inverting causation. This colonial strategy entails both mis-presenting the epochal history of coloniality by representing it in terms of rupture instead of continuity, as well as representing the indigenous African subject as inherently violent. I argue in this article that black-on-black violence is a product of coloniality—a racist global power structure that makes incidents of “non-revolutionary violence” among the oppressed black subject inevitable. Thus, I deploy the case of the Mfecane violence of the “pre-colonial” era in southern Africa, and the Afro-phobic attacks on foreign nationals in “post-apartheid” South Africa to unmask the longue durée of coloniality, and its role of manufacturing blackon-black violence among the black people of Africa.     

Displaced Persons and the Politics of International Categorisation(s)

Between 1947 and 1952 170,000 Displaced Persons (DPs) arrived in Australia as International Refugee Organisation (IRO)‐sponsored refugees. This article sets out the international historical and political context for the migration of DPs to Australia, and interrogates the “bureaucratic labelling” inherent in the category “Displaced Persons”. The post‐war refugees were presented internationally as “Displaced Persons”, “refugees”, “political refugees” and eventually, in an effort to solve the population crisis, as potential “workers” and “migrants”. This article will describe the historical origin of the terms “Displaced Persons”, “refugees”, “political exiles” and “migrants”— terms which were, and continue to be, relevant and problematic.     

The New Research on Civil Wars: Does It Help Us Understand the Colombian Conflict?

The article synthesizes contributions from the recent comparative research on civil war and the case‐specific literature on Colombia to argue that too often, commentators on this conflict overlook some of its key dimensions. A comprehensive analysis shows that no fewer than six factors are fueling violent conflict in Colombia: economic forces, state weakness, landscape, U.S. policies, long‐duration and spin‐off violence, and malicious opportunism by non‐combatants. The first three are the ones that matter most. The case made here is that when analysts disregard the range and interrelat‐edness of the factors involved, the result is a distortion of reality and a tendency to support policies that will not enhance the prospects for peace.     

Structural and Contingent Inequalities: The Impact of COVID-19 on Migrant and Refugee Populations in South America

In a comparative assessment of the pre-pandemic living conditions of migrants and refugees in six South American countries, we analyse the structural and contingent challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic on these populations. We argue that they are particularly exposed to the harmful effects of the pandemic, given their segmented incorporation into labour markets and their limited and fragmented access to and exercise of health, housing, and other social rights. The evidence points to a significant deterioration in their livelihoods and social inclusion, and potential profound changes in (im)mobility regimes caused by pandemic-induced restrictive measures.     

Material Things

In “Positive Bleeding,” I argue that allusions to blood in contemporary South African art and literature fruitfully link myriad stigmatized experiences and embodiments of self usually considered taboo, including HIV/AIDS, female sexuality, menstruation, and sexual violence. Through Mlu Zondi’s and Ntando Cele’s dance performance piece Silhouette (2005), Zanele Muholi’s mischievous and haunting photographic Period series (2006), and Makhosozana Xaba’s revisionist short story “Inside” (2008), blood is defiantly transformed from a remnant of personal and historic trauma into that which incites female–female pleasure and eroticism. I contend that the politics of visibility operate uncomfortably within all four texts; blood serves as both a reminder of and departure from sensationalized images of violence against lesbians.     

The war in Georgia and the Western response

This article considers Western, and most particularly American, policy towards Tbilisi in the Russo-Georgian war of August 2008. The article does not accept the view of Russian leaders that the United States actively promoted the Georgian attack on South Ossetia. It does, however, argue that Washington's alliance with Georgia was sufficiently close to make President Saakashvili believe he would receive American support in the event of war with Russia. The war, however, was not in America's interest since it threatened its position in the South Caucasus and provided Russia with an opportunity to re-emphasize its growing power in the world.