| 1. |
- Achiri, Emmanuel, et al.
(författare)
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Navigating the legal liminalities of a de facto state: Migrant precarity and placeholder identity papers in Northern Cyprus
- 2024
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Ingår i: Migration Studies. - 2049-5838 .- 2049-5846. ; 12:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article studies the contested legal–political dynamics around forced migration flows to and through an unrecognized state: the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus (TRNC). We adopt an analytical perspective drawn from the literature on performative politics and the legal anthropology of documents to explore how migration dynamics interact with the contested legal status of the TRNC. Our two main questions are: What practical shape do the human rights of refugees and asylum seekers take in an interstitial legal space, where the foundation of law is itself subject to ambiguity, suspension, and contestation? And what implications—opportunities and hazards—does this constellation have for refugees and asylum-seekers? Drawing on interviews, lived experience and fieldwork observations, we make two arguments. First, we contend that the interstitial status of the TRNC represents both an opportunity for refugees and a threat. Secondly, we argue that a purely legal or technical understanding of legal identity and concurrent rights is inadequate; we must subject these phenomena to a politically informed analysis of the everyday practices through which legal norms and spaces are continuously shaped and reshaped.
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| 2. |
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| 3. |
- Klem, Bart, 1979
(författare)
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'A Garuda in my Heart, a Tiger in my Stomach': Brokering an Informal Economic Border Enclave in the Borneo Highlands
- 2021
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Ingår i: Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. - : Informa UK Limited. - 1444-2213 .- 1740-9314. ; 22:4
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This article studies the life histories of two broker figures from the Borneo highlands to explore the changing borderland dynamics of Krayan, an Indonesian region bordering on Malaysia. Rather than a lagging or rebellious periphery, the region can best be understood as a site of experimentation. Krayan's history is strongly shaped by shifting patterns of infrastructural connectivity and mobile networks. This, I posit, has resulted in an indigenous version of an informal special economic zone which is economically integrated with Malaysia but leverages political clout in Indonesia. The regular cross-border caravan of pick-up trucks has started to receive government attention. The highland elite now seeks to formalise Krayan's constellation into a special administrative status by showcasing its links to Malaysia, thus leveraging the governmental pride and anxiety vested in the border. Rather than evading the state, I argue that this manoeuvring centres on improving the terms of opting in.
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| 4. |
- Klem, Bart, 1979
(författare)
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Decay or Fresh Contact? The Morality of Mixture after War's End : Klem, Bart (2021) "Decay or Fresh Contact? The Morality of Mixture after War's End", in Ghassan Hage (ed) Decay. Duke University Press, pp. 73-85.
- 2021
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Ingår i: Decay (edited by Ghassan Hage). - Durham, North Carolina. : Duke University Press. - 9781478014737 ; , s. 73-85
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The sudden increase in circulation after the end of Sri Lanka’s civil war gave rise to a broad range of cultural interpretations. Drawing on Jonathan Spencer and Karl Mannheim, this essay argues that we must interrogate the political work that such narratives do. The dominant narrative interprets the sudden changes at war’s end in terms of decay and purity: the opening flood gates to the world bring unwanted mixture and require purification. To confront the implied exclusivist, patriarchic and potentially xenophobic positioning of this narrative, I suggest an alternative reading: rather than decay, exposure breeds fresh contact.
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| 5. |
- Klem, Bart, 1979
(författare)
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Demos at war: Revisiting the democratic boundary problem with a performative lens
- 2023
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Ingår i: Social Sciences and Humanities Open. - 2590-2911. ; 8:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This essay revisits a classic conceptual puzzle in democratic theory – the democratic boundary problem – to shed new light on contentious politics and separatist conflict in Sri Lanka. This theoretical problem is congruent with the core disagreement of this conflict – whether or not the Tamils comprise a nation that is entitled to its own state. Democratic theory struggles to adjudicate between competing political projects that pivot on different conceptions of the demos. Sri Lanka's conflict protagonists have advanced a wide range of institutional forms for their competing ideological projects. To understand these efforts, I posit, we need to look beyond legal strictures and formal delineations of democratic institutions by conceptualizing politics as a performative arena. This opens up analytical space to understand how institutions may be valorised or mocked, reenacted, sidelined or reversed. This article comprises a sequence of empirically based reflections organised around five keywords, which elucidate some of the central tenets and historical shifts of ethno-political contestation in Sri Lanka: Constitution, election, court, checkpoint, and Prime Minister. Contentious forms of political performativity around each of these five institutions unmask the self-referential nature of constitutional and democratic legitimacy. I thus argue we must mitigate the problematic tendency to accept as real and legitimate those political entities that emerged from history as part of recognised sovereign states, while the efforts of sovereign aspirants are shrugged aside as a problem that needs be explained and addressed.
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| 6. |
- Klem, Bart, 1979, et al.
(författare)
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Legal identity and rebel governance: A comparative perspective on lived consequence of contested sovereignty : Fortin, Katharine, Bart Klem, and Marika Sosnowski (2021) "Legal identity and rebel governance: A comparative perspective on lived consequence of contested sovereignty", in Tendayi Bloom and Lindsey N. Kingston (eds) Statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship. Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 125-137.
- 2021
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Ingår i: Statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship (edited by Tendayi Bloom and Lindsey N. Kingston). - Manchester : Manchester University Press. - 9781526156419
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Legal identity in the context of civil war comprises a highly significant but vastly understudied field of inquiry with huge humanitarian significance. This chapter studies insurgent movements that confer legal identity, including forms of citizenship. It asserts that to capture the coercive, performative and legal aspects of this phenomenon, we need diverse conceptual lenses. The chapter combines specific elements of political science, anthropology, and international law to answer two questions. First, what are the key similarities and differences in how insurgent groups instil legal identity? Second, and based on this comparative mapping, how can legal identity in relation to rebel governance be conceptualised? The newly opening field of research reviewed in this chapter is relevant to practitioners and academics alike. The issuance of legal identity documents by armed groups raises a broad range of empirical, conceptual, normative and humanitarian questions about sovereignty, the foundation of law, state-society relationships and the materiality of identity documents.
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| 7. |
- Klem, Bart, 1979, et al.
(författare)
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Legal identity in a looking-glass world: documenting citizens of aspirant states
- 2023
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Ingår i: Citizenship Studies. - 1362-1025 .- 1469-3593. ; 27:7
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This introductory article, and the additional 11 contributions that comprise this special issue of Citizenship Studies, uses political science, international law and anthropology literature to unmoor the primacy of the nation-state as the sole entity able to confer legal identity on individuals. It does this by examining legal identity documents, and their ramifications, in entities that exist physically but do not exist (entirely) legally or politically, what we term aspirant states. We find that doing so highlights that these aspirant states are not a set of problems to be redressed by integrating these anomalous spaces into the international order with better governance or juridical disambiguation. Rather, legal identity documents issued by aspirant states raise more fundamental questions about contemporary citizenship regimes in general and about the way law and state authority are constructed and reproduced. Such arguments force us to contest and reconsider the violent and circular logic of the current nation-state system and how legal identity, and citizenship, is conferred and maintained.
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| 8. |
- Klem, Bart, 1979
(författare)
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Performing Sovereign Aspirations: Tamil Insurgency and Postwar Transition in Sri Lanka
- 2024
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Bok (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In a society that experiences secessionist conflict, many things are not what they seem. This book adopts a performative perspective to understand the peculiar institutional landscape the ensued around the Tamil separatist conflict in Sri Lanka, both during and after the civil war. It draws on two decades of fieldwork across towns and villages in northern and eastern Sri Lanka, ethnography within Sri Lanka’s civil service, and privileged access to Norwegian-facilitated peace process. This yields a compelling analytical narrative that shows how political institutions are enacted and witnessed, rather than cataloguing them in the strictures of the law. This provides a fertile vantage point to address the to-be-or-not-to-be dilemmas that we face when seeking to interpret the legitimacy, legality, and validity of the institutions that separatist movements create in aspiration of sovereign status. And as such, this book provides food for thought for broader conceptual debates concerning armed conflict and insurgency.
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| 9. |
- Klem, Bart, 1979
(författare)
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Sri Lanka in 2019 The Return of the Rajapaksas
- 2020
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Ingår i: Asian Survey. - : University of California Press. - 0004-4687 .- 1533-838X. ; 60:1, s. 207-212
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Sri Lanka was confronted with three interrelated crises in 2019: the unresolved gridlock of last year's constitutional crisis; the Easter bombings and their turbulent aftermath; and the coming to a head of fiscal shortfalls and debt burdens. Growth is stalling, living costs are rising, deficits are widening, and the price of Sri Lanka's debt is weighing heavily on the government budget. In the presidential elections, Gotabaya Rajapaksa, heir of the Rajapaksa dynasty, prevailed with a landslide.
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| 10. |
- Klem, Bart, 1979, et al.
(författare)
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Sri Lanka in 2021 Vistas on the Brink
- 2022
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Ingår i: Asian Survey. - : University of California Press. - 0004-4687 .- 1533-838X. ; 62:1, s. 201-210
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The Rajapaksa government consolidated its position with new laws, special task forces, and public-sector appointments. With the opposition wiped out, Sri Lanka now has a unipolar political landscape. Two successive waves of COVID-19 infections caused a rising death toll and necessitated severe lockdowns. The resulting economic problems exposed structural weaknesses in Sri Lanka's macroeconomic constellation, with depleting foreign exchange and an acute debt burden. These interlocking crises triggered new forms of protest and a new convergence of previously disparate societal opposition.
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