Up to 150,000 people in northern Afghanistan are said to be fleeing from advancing Taliban forces and making their way to the Tajikistan border. European aid workers in the area say the refugees are in a desperate situation – without food, shelter or medicines. The refugees are sheltering in the Pamir Mountains, a remote and inaccessible area near the international border, which has been closed by the Tajikistan government. […] ‘These people have nowhere to go. There is no food, no shelter, no equipment or medicine’, Afghan affairs expert, Ahmed Rashid, told BBC World Service radio from Lahore, Pakistan. […]

Aid workers say they are unable to reach the refugees because of the remoteness of the area. UN officials are now in Kabul trying to persuade the Taliban to allow aid convoys through before snow blocks roads and leaves the refugees stranded. The winter in the Pamir Mountains is only six weeks away and there is an urgent need to get food stocks to the refugees to last them through the winter months. The Taliban, which captured power in 1996, control 90 per cent of the country with just a small bit of territory in the north holding out. They have made several attempts to capture the remaining 10 per cent and extend their rule to the entire country.

Introduction

Sri Lanka is among the societies which are ageing the fastest in the developing world. During the intercensal period, 1981–2001, the proportion of the population in the age group over 60 years has increased from 6.6 per cent to 9.2 per cent. According to the available standard projection, the elderly will account for approximately 20 per cent of the total population in 2026. This process of ageing, which is being witnessed in Sri Lanka is the outcome of policies and programmes which rapidly reduced mortality over a period of 50 years and increased the average lifespan from 46 years in 1946 to 74 years in 2001. Fertility reached the replacement level in the mid 1990s and has continued to decline further below this level, resulting in a corresponding decline in the share of the population under 15 years of age from 35 per cent in 1981 to 26 per cent in 2001.

Sri Lanka has undergone the demographic transition at a relatively early stage of economic development and at a low level of per capita income. The rapid changes that have taken place are imposing severe constraints on the capacity of the country's economy as well as its social institutions to provide the standards of economic and social security that should accompany the demographic changes and the process of ageing. While these problems affect the ageing population as a whole they become more acute in the case of elderly females.

In this article, I will argue that the changing international order has hyperbolized international borders where profiling of the world's people takes place. Knowledge about contemporary border practices is inadequate. The aim of this study shows how the drama of processing of people at the border is related to wider political imageries in the US and in Europe. […]

INTRODUCTION

The widely socially shared and often personally lived experiences at the border greatly influenced the way in which the citizens have been educated about the nation state, but they also affect how people are conditioned into contemporary world order. Moreover, it can be claimed that the border related experiences provide an increasingly important loci for political pedagogy. Airports, border crossings and seaports supply not only the physical but also the mental templates into acknowledging the logic and method of separating people into various entities: e.g. into states, communities, nations, ethnicities, cultures and civilizations because a sovereign state's power can be said to be at its most definitive and explicit at the international borders, the recent change towards hierarchical world order has wide ramifications. […]

During the twentieth century, the spread of the universalistic idea of citizenship replaced the particularistic and elitist notions of the past. The border practices in the West were, at least nominally, based on a system of random checks, whereby most, if not all people were inspected for travel documents and for security.

What is the relationship between learning and enjoyment? A schoolroom at Crunchem Hall in the film Matilda displays a sign warning ‘If you are having fun you are not learning’. In contrast, one of the slogans of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation in The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is ‘Share and enjoy’. Does that mean we've got something to look forward to? Or is the place of enjoyment becoming more complex as our subjective experience of pleasure at learning is drawn into the equation as a necessary function of what it is to attain knowledge? Perhaps we are being recruited into a kind of psychoanalytically structured regime of truth in which we are subject to a senseless superegoic imperative to enjoy. I enjoy learning, but I wonder if I am now obeying a command to learn and then feeling increasingly anxious that my students should enjoy their work.

Education is changing fast, and it sometimes seems as if the transformation in our relation to knowledge under capitalism is speeding up. This transformation is twofold. First, there is a bureaucratization of education institutions. This is proceeding apace in secondary education under ‘New Labour’ in Britain with the enforcement of Standard Attainment Tests (SATs). Not only does this bureaucratization mean that as much energy is put into assessment and recordkeeping as into instruction, with an increased administrative load on teachers, but the competition between schools that SATs-based league tables produces is also reflected in the strategies that individual schools and school students adopt.

What is psychoanalytic myth, today? The answer to this question is not simple, for in speaking of psychoanalysis we are necessarily drawn into a series of representations that concern us, each of us. And psychoanalytic myth structures and reproduces itself through a variety of media in such a way as to pull us into it even when we do not speak about it explicitly, or, we might say, ‘consciously’. We first need to draw into the open the thought that psychoanalytic myth is a representational practice.

Psychoanalytic myth is a representational practice

Of course, it is a type of speech, but this representational practice operates through the symbolic forms that make our speech possible so as to induct us also, at the very same moment we speak, into the position of a reader. We become, as we speak within psychoanalytic myth, a reader not only of the unconscious lives of others, but of our own speech as it seems to reveal to us something of the secrets that inhabit our own inner lives. This mode of reading, including reading what lies in our own speech, is, at one level, conscious, a consciousness encouraged and facilitated by a psychoanalytic vocabulary that has circulated throughout the world at an incredible rate in the last century.

Introduction

Democracy has a bloody history in many countries. In Kenya, several hundred people were killed in the aftermath of the December 2007 election, generating extensive media coverage around the world. However, this was not the first time Kenya experienced violence around elections. In the 1997 election, more than 100 people were killed ahead of the election and some 100,000 people left Mombasa during the election period. Another 200 people in Rift Valley faced a violent death. The 1992 election has been deemed even more violent. While Kenya has largely been calm in between elections, violence has also proven to intensify or cluster around election times in countries already experiencing violent confrontation or civil war, as has been the case in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yet, despite the prevalence of electoral violence, it has generated scant academic interest.

Why are some elections fraught with violence, while others are relatively calm? This article addresses electoral violence in Sri Lanka, with the aim of identifying factors which can explain the variation in electoral violence over time. A comparison is made between three parliamentary elections (2000, 2001 and 2004), which display a variation both in intensity of violence and the geographical focus of the violence. Sri Lanka is an important case to study, since it has experienced substantial electoral violence parallel to an ongoing armed conflict.

INTRODUCTION: NO ALTERNATIVE?

A 1984 quote of Indira Gandhi in her letter to Baba Amte:

Displacement, forcible eviction and dispossession are undeniable realities of life in the coal mining regions of India. Large-scale acquisition of land is the most important driver of this displacement; the Indian constitution, courts and government justify themselves in the name of ‘public good’, as evident in the following statement of the Supreme Court:

The ‘eminent domain’ concept that the Indian Constitution follows gives ‘the highest and most exact idea of property remaining in the government, or in the aggregate body of the people in their sovereign capacity’.

INTRODUCTION

The growth of the international women's rights movement and its emergence as a field of research and advocacy has led to a valuable but increasingly self-contained discourse, often cut off from developments in postcolonial conditionalities (‘Postcoloniality’), on the one hand, and conceptions of the different legal contexts in which international human rights operate, on the other. Such a trajectory of ‘development’ in human rights standards for women have no doubt had an enormous impact on women's lives worldwide, but simultaneously it is also culpable of creating the ‘woman-as-victim’ subject, ‘geographically captive’ in the ‘barbaric’ cultures of the ‘Third World’.

In this article I will briefly map the developments that led to the integration of gender into the international human rights law discourse and examine how the language of ‘violence’ and ‘respectable victim hood’ (from Vienna 1993 to Beijing 1995) has been privileged leading to the dislocation of ‘discrimination’ as envisaged by the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), as the primary index for measuring women's human rights violations. […]

A critique of the international asylum adjudication system is necessary to do a reality check with regard to what it can exactly offer when it comes to drawing the fundamentals of refugee rights guarantees from the basic principles of international human rights law.

North-east India has been experiencing severe internal displacement since it entered into the postcolonial phase over the past five decades. It also received a steady flow of refugees from neighbouring East Pakistan/Bangladesh, Tibet and Myanmar, fleeing political, social, economic, ideological and environmental persecution. In recent years, however, another problem that has been engaging the attention of social scientists and policy analysts is that of internal displacement. […] For us: ‘Internally displaced persons are persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or leave their homes or place of habitual residence, in particular, as a result of, or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalised violence, violation of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognised state border’. […] Society in Assam has historically been multi-racial, multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multi-caste, multi-class and multi-lingual in composition wherein the Asamiyas have constituted the majority national group. Sociologically speaking, Assam's society has been extraordinarily plural in its composition and highly uneven in structure.

Here, we conceptualize the north-east/Assam as a periphery within a larger periphery (India) in the global context. Its peripheral location and its resultant underdevelopment and distorted political response to underdevelopments have made the society in Assam perpetually vulnerable to various kinds of violence, conflict and displacement.

Countries all over the world create fenced-in, geographically delimited ‘enclaves’ within their sovereign territories. Such enclaves have become known as ‘zones’ in economic and business parlances. These zones are distinguished from the rest of the land in terms of their specific administrative authority, benefits enjoyed by industries located in them and availability of better business facilities. Some of the zones are often deliberately conceived as ‘foreign’ territories functioning with a different set of economic laws compared with those applicable to the rest of the country. Being ‘foreign’ also implies that zones are different customs areas. Depending upon their specific purposes, benefits offered, economic regulations and administrative frameworks, the zones are called industrial zone (or estate), free trade zone (FTZ), export processing zone (EPZ), enterprise zone, special economic zone (SEZ) or free economic zone (FEZ). This taxonomy, however, is by no means fully exhaustive.

Zones should not be construed as products of the current phase of globalization that has been driven by breathtaking advances in information and computer technologies (ICT). Though modern zones can be dubbed as post-Second World War creatures with the first such zone coming up at the Shannon International Airport at Ireland in 1956, there are examples of zones during the mediaeval era, as well as in the early twentieth century. Over time, however, the visions of different countries on these zones, particularly in the developing world, have changed significantly.

In a few years from now, India is likely to have one of the largest numbers of zones in the world. With more than 500 SEZs in various stages of growth and maturity – that is functional, notified, formally approved and cleared in-principle – not many countries in the world will come close to India as a ‘land of zones’. At the last count, Asia has 900 plus zones with the US following with 713. But these estimates by the ILO (Boyenge, 2007) will change dramatically once the new Indian SEZs get going. These shall not transform the ‘zone’ landscape only in Asia, but in the entire world.

The change will not be restricted to numbers alone. The economic literature on zones, particularly their impacts, will also enlarge after adding new chapters on the Indian experience. At present, the debate on zones tends to draw most of its inspiration from the Chinese story. Very soon, the Chinese experiences will be compared and contrasted with those from India. This will undoubtedly add more spice to one of the most discussed themes of modern times: the race between the Chinese dragon and the Indian elephant.

The Chinese experience provides an appropriate platform for reflecting on the Indian story. India's SEZ policy was heavily inspired by China. Speaking at a convention organized by the Federation of Indian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) at Delhi on 21 March 2002, the late Mr Murasoli Maran, India's former Commerce Minister and the creator of its SEZs, commented: ‘I had been to Peoples’ Republic of China to observe the success story of SEZ.