Journal articles on the topic 'National India-Pakistan Conflict'

According to Johan Galtung’s theory, war journalism and peace journalism are two frames. Peace journalism is a solution oriented while war journalism escalates conflicts. This study aims at comparatively exploring the nature of coverage during a conflict. This paper examines the role of the Pakistani and Indian elite press after the Pulwama attack, leading to the Balakot airstrike. For the collection of data, researchers have selected four leading elite newspapers i.e. two from Pakistan and two from India. The researchers have collected two month’s data after the incident of Pulwama leading to air craft conflict between the two states. Data is collected through content analysis which is further analyzed. The findings indicated that the media with dominate war frames compromise national security.

Pakistan is blessed with rich natural resources in which water resources are the major ones. Yet the level of this important resource has been reached at an alarming level due to myriad factors such as misuse, mismanagement, and politics in water sectors at both levels national and international. The study is presenting an overview of the state of the Indus Water Treaty, Indus River Basin, and conflict between India and Pakistan in the wake of the Indus Water Treaty (IWT). The focus of the study is to reveal the hegemony of India on international waters and its relations with the outer world. Moreover, the research study has presented root causes of the water crisis, hydro politics in the South Asia region, the hegemony of India on international waters. Water management policies and co-operation mechanism is required between Pakistan and India to cope with the challenge of water shortage.

International conflict reporting and national media discourse of warring nations continue to dominate existing scholarship on media–conflict relationships. The literature on the subject lacks significant consideration towards understanding the relevance of local and sub-national media narratives in conflict situations. The existing literature on the media–conflict relationship in the conflict territory of Kashmir shows that the issue has been largely studied from the perspective of national news media in India and Pakistan. This study while engaging with the local news media in the Kashmir region, draws empirical evidence from the local newspapers in the context of the 2014 State Assembly election campaigns which took place amid unprecedented political polarization in the region. The findings from the content analysis revealed that the contested political issues between the political parties found higher resonance in the campaign news while the deliberation regarding the conflict in the region and its resolution had the least prevalence in the news discourse. This not only confirms the significant relevance of local news media and internal political dynamics in redefining the media–conflict relationship in the Kashmir conflict but also suggests the further need to engage with local and regional news narratives in conflict situations.

The book Pakistan Chronicle--authored by Morrice James, who had twentyyears of experience in South Asia, of which nine years were in Pakistan asdeputy and head of the United Kingdom's diplomatic mission-may not be anexcellent academic research document, but it deserves credit for certain merits.The psychoanalyses and behavioral studies of some Pakistani military and politicalelite, especially Ayub, Bhutto, and Zia, are some of the book's outstandingcontributions. The book contains excellent discussions on different pacts andtreaties Pakistan conducted, such as the Mutual Assistance Pact with the UnitedStates (1954), the Indus Water Treaty (1960), the Tashkent Declaration (1966);the crises Pakistan faced, such as the anti-Qadiani Riots in 1953, the Kashmir dispute, and the Bangladesh War in 1971; and the Afghan conflict that involvedthe two superpowers. In the 1960s. the author observed that India consideredKashmir an integral part of itself and nonnegotiable, and that position has notyet changed.As the British high commissioner, the author could give a firsthand descriptionof national and international forces that strained Pakistan’s relationship withthe West, especially Britain and America, and of how Pakistan gradually developeda pro-Chinese foreign policy ...

This study concentrates on the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir and on those displaced people who, for the past six and a half decades, have remained invisible against the high profile background of the conflict between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir region. Their difficult situation arises in large part from the identity-based politics of Kashmir Valley which has led to the failure of the state (both national and regional) fully to respond to their very significant conflict-induced displacement resettlement requirements. This essay will address two distinct types of displacement which occurred in 1947 in the wake of Partition and the tribal invasion of the Princely State: the one involving the West Pakistan Refugees (WPR) who moved from Pakistani towns adjacent to the State of Jammu and Kashmir and had not been citizens of the Princely State of Jammu and Kashmir; and the other involving the Pakistan Occupied Kashmir Displaced People (PoKDP), citizens of the State, who moved from the Pakistan-administered part of Kashmir to the Indian-administered Kashmir, mainly the Jammu region and surrounding areas. Both groups belonged predominantly to the Hindu community. While the former, the WPR, remain stateless with no citizenship rights in J&K, the latter, the PoKDP, are considered by the State as temporary migrants, and thus have received only temporary relief.

The study aims at analyzing the conflict coverage of Kashmir in the mainstream English press of India and Pakistan along with and draws its theoretical support from Galtung’s ideas of peace and war journalism. The main concern of the study is to test the hypothesis that war frames are given prominence over peace frames while covering the case of Burhan Wani in the Indian and Pakistani press. The coverage was analyzed through the content analysis of news stories and columns which were published on the national, international, and opinion pages of The Daily Dawn and The Daily Times of India from July 8, 2016, to Oct 8, 2016. A total of 121 stories were randomly selected from a total sample frame of 242 items for content analysis. To add a qualitative perspective to the study, in-depth interviews of 12 purposively selected Indian and Pakistani journalists who had covered Kashmir Conflict were also conducted. Both statistical analysis of the content of selected dailies and qualitative interviews supports the hypothesis. Consequently, the coverage given to the Kashmir Conflict by Indian and Pakistani press contributed to escalating the conflict instead of deescalating it.

The global change in perception following the Cold War from deterrence by punishment in the form of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) to deterrence by denial has multiplied the utility of the Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD). India’s willingness to acquire and develop the advanced BMD shield is inspired, especially by Reagan’s Star Wars and the global shift in using it as an instrument of deterrence by denial. But as the application of its offensive-defensive paradox, India is raising a multi-layer air defense system to enhance its freedom of action and to acquire impunity in carrying out what New Delhi believes as its ‘limited war’ strategy against Pakistan. However, despite having a number of air defense systems in place including the recently acquired advanced S-400 air defense system, India is unable to shield itself completely from the counter-force or counter-value strikes by Pakistan as evident by the Balakot debacle. This is not only because India lags behind in BMD technology but also because of its inability to afford a comprehensive pan-national BMD shield. Therefore, the paper argues that, India’s attempt to build a multi-layer air defense system, rather than ensuring balance of power, destabilizes it and the delicate deterrence in place. This is because the threat asymmetry allows Pakistan to develop advanced nuclear capabilities including BMD evading delivery vehicles like MIRV as the offensive firepower to communicate the threat as an effective deterrence. Resultantly, the employment of BMD in South Asia disturbs strategic parity, fractures deterrence, drags down nuclear threshold and hence raises the cost of conflict between Pakistan and India with an elevated threat of annihilation.

Among non-traditional threats to security, the problem of refugees is an important one. Because of political turmoil in several parts of the world, refugee flows are going beyond the capacity of the international system of handle. In South Asia, because of the ongoing conflict between two major nations, India and Pakistan, the issue assumes a serious dimension. We can understand this by studying the following two case studies: the Bangladesh war and the Afghan war. In both cases, the number of refugees was massive and in both cases, America was the principal external actor. But while in the case of Bengali refugees, the host state tried to take advantage of the situation for promoting its foreign policy goals, in the case of Afghan refugees, the host nation tried to use the situation to promote its foreign policy as well as domestic political goals. Although every host state had to face unforeseen consequences, in the long run, it underlines the relevance of the discourse of the refugee-security interface.

One of the major challenges before the “mainstream Indian nationalists” at the dawn of India’s independence was the political integration of the “Northeast” with India envisaged as a nation-state. Some parts of the colonial frontier, such as the Naga Hills, had already witnessed a parallel nationalist discourse with the imagination of sovereignty before India’s independence. With independence, the Indian nation-state project was made difficult by the geopolitical significance of the region, shaped by the experience of the partition, which separated India and Pakistan (East and West), creating a milieu of not-so-favorable international politics. The postcolonial history of the troubled periphery has been marked by an imposed notion of homogeneity and a binary of the nation-state (or the Indian mainstream) and the Northeast. Political theorists have long refuted the notion of national homogeneity. Nevertheless, the dichotomy between the plains and the valley constructed by the colonial logic was and is reinforced by the nation-state ideology, turning the periphery into a cauldron of conflict. This article engages critically with the history of conflict witnessed in the region since independence, against the backdrop of colonial interventions and the integrationist logic of the nation-state. This article argues that the political and developmental strategies, adopted by the Indian state to integrate the region, have led to the perpetuation of conflict in different forms.

Entangled in history awash with events of war and conflict, both India and Pakistan have ensured the representation of national narratives in their respective media. Being apprehensive neighbours since the day of partition, the sensation of patriotism has led these nations towards three major wars and numerous skirmishes on the borders, claiming lives of the peoples on both sides of the border. The mutual derision for the 'other' has secured the text, both written and visual. Besides endeavours to justify stances of conflicts, these narratives of history have also created space for standoffs. An attempt to such reconciliation and shatter the image of 'other' is investigated in Indian movies, Border and Bajrangi Bhai Jan, through grammatology of image. The signification in the image is explored by applying Multimodal introduced by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen. The multimodal by the theorists have been appropriated by utilizing Halliday's theoretical Systemic Functional Grammar. Both of the movies have been selected to compare the occasions depicted the historical backdrop of war and fear-based oppression and occasionally delineated attempts of reconciliation.

More than half a century has elapsed since China and India fought a War in October–November 1962. The War saw the Chinese Army coming out with flying colours. India as a nation was shocked and had to strain every sinew to reorganise itself to win the ensuing wars with Pakistan in 1965 and 1971. There are many questions as regards the causes of the War, the events which preceded the conflict and what actually happened that led to the debacle. The article addresses these issues comprehensively and analyses the War in detail. Overall it was a failure to assess the Chinese threat in correct perspective. The Indian government did not expect China to fight a War against India. The obvious question to ask is what is the way ahead? The concluding portion of the article deals with the current situation and measures to be taken to deter China from undertaking a military adventure. There is a need to have a National Security Strategy as also leave no stone unturned to build our Comprehensive National Power. In this, our Armed Forces must be modernised to meet the Chinese forces. The Chinese Navy has of late gained strength and is making forays into the Indian Ocean. We should be prepared for this aspect and build our military diplomacy with the United States, Japan and Vietnam. Last of all to understand China, we must create nodes of excellence in our country.

ABSTRACTA month into his viceroyalty, Lord Mountbatten took time out from sounding Indian political opinion about independence to discuss the future security of British residents with his provincial governors. By this stage, the concerns stemmed from fears of a general breakdown in law and order and Hindu–Muslim conflict rather than nationalist assault. Detailed plans were developed for a sea-borne evacuation. In the event, the only Britons who were evacuated were those airlifted from Srinagar in November 1947 as they were in the path of an invasion of the disputed Kashmir territory by Pakhtun tribesmen from Pakistan. Despite numerous articles on the British departure from India and the aftermath of Partition, little has been written about either the airlift or the broader strategic planning for European evacuation. The paper will focus on this neglected corner of the history of the transfer of power. It argues that while anti-British sentiment declined from a peak around the time of the Indian National Army trials, of 1945–6, the memories of the wartime chaotic flight from Burma and Malaya and the irreparable damage this had done to British prestige in Asia coloured the safety first approach adopted in 1947.

Political cartoons play a significant role in the image construction of nations on the basis of foreign policies and relationships. Therefore, this paper is an attempt to examine the treatment of English newspapers of Pakistan and India to portray the Indo-Pak relationship in their political cartoons. This paper also analyzes the signs and symbols used to construct images during conflicts. Political cartoons of Dawn, Express Tribune from Pakistan and Times of India and The Hindu from India published June 2014 to July 2017 are selected. The methods of quantitative content analysis and semiotics are applied under the umbrella of framing theory. It concludes that political cartoons follow national interests in both countries with reference to rivalry between India and Pakistan and constructed the image as “we are the best” and “they are the worst”. It also highlights that terrorism is the most depicted issue by the cartoonists of both sides.

This paper analyses the narrative of Bollywood film Sarfarosh which portrays the ethnic, cultural and religious issues between majority Hindu-minority and Muslim communities in India with projection of identifying politics between India and Pakistan. Further, it t reveals that Pakistan army constitutes spies who are behind the plot of cross border terrorism and supplies of arms through their local agents in the Indian state of Rajasthan. The agents and their activities are projected as the machineries that are firmly responsible for a series of havocs and killings of innocent people in the most of cities and towns within their reach. Through crafting the notions of national (in) securities, the film picks up an Urdu Ghazal singer, the Pakistani who migrated from Rajasthan during the partition of the subcontinent in 1947. The singer as a metaphor of terrorism often sings Ghazals among Indian dignitaries in the front of his weaponry smuggling to India. The paper finds out that the historical traumatic event of partition is used for posing the Muslim minorities, „Other? as cultural methodological device, whereas Pakistanis understood as extremely dangerous enemy of the Indian nation. The identity politics of the film results the conflicting ideologies of Hinduism and Islam. This is due to the cultural industry?s ideological apparatus for making strategies to manage and maximize the profits by seeking wider audiences through its well- established capitalist system. Bollywood cinematic apparatus should be cautious of essentialist form of nationalist narratives and the post partition conflicts should be avoided for authentic peaceful culturalsocial relationships between India and Pakistan.

The factors affecting the relationship between China and India can be divided into three categories: structural factors, hard factors, and soft factors. The structural factors are mainly geopolitical factors determined by national strength, geographical features and international status. Hard factors mainly include border conflicts, Tibetan issues, China–Pakistan relations and water disputes, which are difficult to solve and highly sensitive. Soft factors include a trade imbalance, visa issues, different notions of history, strategic differences, and the relationship between the two countries on the international stage. These three kinds of factors are differentiated. Their importance and influence on China–India relations are also changing. Geopolitical factors have begun to play more important role in the bilateral relationship of the two rising countries in the past few years, leading to their strategic competition. This competition has grown despite the fact that the two countries have not yet achieved a status as leaders of world politics. This premature strategic competition will hinder the development of the two countries and will make the “Asian century” hard to realize. For the security and interests of both nations and Asia as a whole, China and India must establish a more stable geopolitical relationship, promote bilateral cooperation in the field of hard and soft factors, and find opportunities for cooperation in new areas and spaces. Finally, China and India need to build a new type of power relations.

The United States’ South Asia strategy has been based on the calculation of its overall national security priorities. In practice, when U.S. priorities are at odds with those of other regional powers, Washington tends to adopt a “no-expectations” psychological approach toward its regional partners to avoid disappointment, a technical “de-hyphenation strategy” to improve policy efficiency, and practical cost-benefit analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of its South Asia strategy. However, Washington often has to come to terms with the realities on the ground with regard to its leadership role in South Asia. For the time being, Washington has articulated its strategic objective in South Asia, that is, a regional balance of power in favor of the United States vis-a-vis its perceived competitor, China. Therefore, it has conducted conditional cooperation with Pakistan and Afghanistan on land, and committed support for India on security issues in the Indian Ocean, so as to hedge against China’s growing presence in South Asia. The enhancement of U.S.-India defense and security cooperation has fueled China’s suspicion of India’s intention to join the U.S.-led coalition against it. By the logic of balance of power, the United States will continue to regard India as a strategic counterweight to China, which is likely to increase the possibility of strategic tensions and conflicts between China and India that may finally entangle the United States.

The One Belt One Road (OBOR) initiative of China is an attempt to ‘remake’ or recreate the ancient Silk Road or Silk Route, symbolising not only trade network but more importantly cultural interaction. It is an ambitious Eurasian strategy with large financial support, which aims to draw linkages from China to various regions of the world. The connectivity and cooperation presented by China between itself and the rest of Eurasia has two main components: the land-based ‘Silk Road Economic Belt’ (SREB) and ocean-going ‘Maritime Silk Road’ (MSR). The ‘Belt’ includes countries geographically situated on the original Silk Road through Central Asia, West Asia, Russia and Europe and has six main corridors. Countries on the Belt and Road—especially those with underdeveloped infrastructure, low investment rates and per capita income—could experience a boost in trade flow and benefit from infrastructure development. The main challenge for China and for the initiative is the potential for conflicts or geopolitical tensions that could emerge with other powers. This project will increase United States’ attention on Central Asia and South Asian region. This will have consequences for the smooth implementation of the strategy. There is an expected resistance from Russia and Russian-led Eurasian Union (EU) that may divide the relevant countries along the route, leaving them torn between choosing to pursue stronger ties with Russia or with China. India also remains cautious of the project and still has not expressed its full support. It sees the initiative not as an opportunity, but as a threat or a form of competition. India’s objections are rooted in issues of sovereignty and territorial integrity. For instance, India opposes the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), a pilot project of the trade initiative, due to its route passing through Gilgit-Baltistan, which is a disputed area between Pakistan and India. India has its own agenda of connectivity and cooperation. This article shall first discuss the strengths and challenges of this project and analyse the regional, national and international situations. The Chinese initiative will be discussed, focusing on China’s domestic constraints along with regional economic situation and political tensions in neighbourhood. The Indian perspective related to this initiative shall be discussed in detail, including the ‘Look East-Act East’ policy. Planning and implementation of the project and its impact on bilateral relations shall be discussed. The author shall also analyse the South Asian perspective as a whole, which is plagued by territorial conflicts, bad governance, security threats, impaired transparency, energy crisis, poor infrastructure, fragile institutions and limping economies.

Peacekeeping, conceptually, was designed to be traditionally defensive in nature with a neutral, unarmed, multinational force maintaining or monitoring peace. The first major example of a United Nations peacekeeping force dates to the initial Arab-Israeli conflict with the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNSTO), established in May 1948. The peacekeepers were there to observe and maintain the ceasefire and assist in any terms of the armistice agreements following the initial fighting with the partition of the British Mandate in Palestine and the later declaration of the State of Israel. The Security Council Resolution “Instruct[ed] the United Nations Mediator in Palestine, in concert with the Truce Commission, to supervise the observance of the above provisions, and decide[d] that they shall be provided with a sufficient number of military observers.” UNTSO was followed by a variation, the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan, which was to observe and report violations of the ceasefire along the contested border. Both of these original UN peacekeeping operations are still in existence after seventy years. This original concept of peacekeeping was based upon the United Nation's principle that the organization would act to prevent conflict between states following the atrocities committed during World War II through its neutrality. However, the term “peacekeeping” is not found anywhere within the United Nations Charter. It is instead inferred under both Chapter VI and Chapter VII powers to resolve disputes.


 From its beginning, mankind suffered injuries through falling, fire, drowning and human aggression [1]. Although the frequency and the kinetics modifiy over millennia, trauma continues to represent an important cause of morbidity and mortality even in the modern society [1]. Significant progresses in the trauma surgery were due to military conflicts, which next to social sufferance came with important steps in injuries’ management, further applied in civilian hospitals. The foundation of modern trauma systems was started by Dominique Jean Larrey (1766-1842) during the Napoleonic Rin military campaign from 1792. The wounded who remained on the battlefield till the end of the battle to receive medical care, usually more than 24 hours, from that moment were transported during the conflict with flying ambulances to mobile hospitals. Starting with the First World War, through the usage of antiseptics, blood transfusions, and fracture management, the mortality decreased from 39% in the Crimean War (1853–1856) to 10%. One of the most preeminent figures of the Second World War was Michael DeBakey, who created the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (MASH), concept very similar to the Larrey’s unit. In 1941, in England, Birmingham Accident Hospital was opened, specially designed for injured people, this being the first trauma center worldwide. During the Golf War (1990–1991) the MASH were used for the last time, being replaced by Forward Surgical Teams, very mobile units satisfying the necessities of the nowadays infantry [1].
 Nowadays, trauma meets the pandemic criteria, everyday 16,000 people worldwide are dying, injuries representing one of the first five causes of mortality for all the age groups below 60 [2]. A recent 12-month analysis of trauma pattern in the Emergency Hospital of Bucharest revealed 141 patients, 72.3% males, with a mean age of 43.52 ± 19 years, and a mean New Injury Severity Score (NISS) of 27.58 ± 11.32 [3]. The etiology was traffic related in 101 (71.6%), falls in 28 (19.9%) and crushing in 7 (5%) cases. The overall mortality was as high as 30%, for patients with a mean NISS of 37.63 [3].
 At the scene, early recognition of severe injuries and a high index of suspicion according to trauma kinetics may allow a correct triage of patients [4]. A functional trauma system should continuously evaluate the rate of over- and under-triage [5]. The over-triage represents the transfer to a very severe patient to a center without necessary resources, while under-triage means a low injured patient referred to a highly specialized center. If under-triage generates preventable deaths, the over-triage comes with a high financial and personal burden for the already overloaded tertiary centers [5]. To maximize the chance for survival, the major trauma patients should be transported as rapid as possible to a trauma center [6]. The initial resuscitation of trauma patients was divided into two time intervals: ten platinum minutes and golden hour [6]. During the ten platinum minutes the airways should be managed, the exsanguinating bleeding should be stopped, and the critical patients should be transported from the scene. During the golden hour all the life-threatening lesions should be addressed, but unfortunately many patients spend this time in the prehospital setting [6]. These time intervals came from Trunkey’s concept of trimodal distribution of mortality secondary to trauma, proposed in 1983 [7]. This trimodal distribution of mortality remains a milestone in the trauma education and research, and is still actual for development but inconsistent for efficient trauma systems [8].
 The concept of patients’ management in the prehospital setting covered a continuous interval, with two extremities: stay and play/treat then transfer or scoop and run/ load and go. Stay and play, usually used in Europe, implies airways securing and endotracheal intubation, pleurostomy tube insertion, and intravenous lines with volemic replacement therapy. During scoop and run, used in the Unites States, the patient is immediately transported to a trauma center, addressing the immediate life-threating injuries during transportation.
 In the emergency department of the corresponding trauma center, the resuscitation of the injured patients should be done by a trauma team, after an orchestrated protocol based on Advanced Trauma Life Support (ATLS). The modern trauma teams include five to ten specialists: general surgeons trained in trauma care, emergency medicine physicians, intensive care physicians, orthopedic surgeons, neurosurgeons, radiologists, interventional radiologists, and nurses. In the specially designed trauma centers, the leader of the trauma team should be the general surgeon, while in the lower level centers this role may be taken over by the emergency physicians.
 The implementation of a trauma system is a very difficult task, and should be tailored to the needs of the local population. For example, in Europe the majority of injuries are by blunt trauma, while in the United States or South Africa they are secondary to penetrating injuries. In an effort to analyse at a national level the performance of trauma care, we have proposed a national registry of major trauma patients [9]. For this registry we have defined major trauma as a New Injury Severity Score higher than 15. The maintenance of such registry requires significant human and financial resources, while only a permanent audit may decrease the rate of preventable deaths in the Romanian trauma care (Figure 1) [10].
 Figure 1 - The website of Romanian Major Trauma Registry (http://www.registrutraume.ro).
 
 USA - In the United States of America there are 203 level I centers, 265 level II centers, 205 level III or II centers and only 32 level I or II pediatric centers, according to the 2014 report of National Trauma Databank [11]. USA were the first which recognized trauma as a public health problem, and proceeded to a national strategy for injury prevention, emergency medical care and trauma research. In 1966, the US National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council noted that ‘’public apathy to the mounting toll from accidents must be transformed into an action program under strong leadership’’ [12]. Considerable national efforts were made in 1970s, when standards of trauma care were released and in 1990s when ‘’The model trauma care system plan’’[13] was generated. The American College of Surgeons introduced the concept of a national trauma registry in 1989. The National Trauma Databank became functional seven years later, in 2006 being registered over 1 million patients from 600 trauma centers [14].
 Mortality from unintentional injury in the United States decreased from 55 to 37.7 per 100,000 population, in 1965 and 2004, respectively [15]. Due to this national efforts, 84.1% of all Americans have access within one hour from injury to a dedicated trauma care [16].
 Canada - A survey from 2010 revealed that 32 trauma centers across Canada, 16 Level I and 16 Level II, provide definitive trauma care [18]. All these centers have provincial designation, and funding to serve as definitive or referral hospital. Only 18 (56%) centers were accredited by an external agency, such as the Trauma Association of Canada. The three busiest centers in Canada had between 798–1103 admissions with an Injury Severity Score over 12 in 2008 [18].
 Australia - Australia is an island continent, the fifth largest country in the world, with over 23 million people distributed on this large area, a little less than the United States. With the majority of these citizens concentrated in large urban areas, access to the medical care for the minority of inhabitants distributed through the territory is quite difficult. The widespread citizens cannot be reached by helicopter, restricted to near-urban regions, but with the fixed wing aircraft of the Royal Flying Doctor Service, within two hours [13]. In urban centers, the trauma care is similar to the most developed countries, while for people sparse on large territories the trauma care is far from being managed in the ‘’golden hour’’, often extending to the ‘’Golden day’’ [19].
 Germany - One of the most efficient European trauma system is in Germany. Created in 1975 on the basis of the Austrian trauma care, this system allowed an over 50% decreasing of mortality, despite the increased number of injuries. According to the 2014 annual report of the Trauma Register of German Trauma Society (DGU), there are 614 hospitals submitting data, with 34.878 patients registered in 2013 [20]. The total number of cases documented in the Trauma Register DGU is now 159.449, of which 93% were collected since 2002. In the 2014 report, from 26.444 patients with a mean age of 49.5% and a mean ISS of 16.9, the observed mortality was 10% [20].
 The United Kingdom - In 1988, a report of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, analyzing major injuries concluded that one third of deaths were preventable [21]. In 2000, a joint report from the Royal College of Surgeons of England and of the British Orthopedic Association was very suggestive entitled "Better Care for the Severely Injured" [22]. Nowadays the Trauma Audit Research network (TARN) is an independent monitor of trauma care in England and Wales [23]. TARN collects data from hospitals for all major trauma patients, defined as those with a hospital stay longer than 72 hours, those who require intensive care, or in-hospital death. A recent analysis of TARN data, looking at the cost of major trauma patients revealed that the total cost of initial hospital inpatient care was £19.770 per patient, of which 62% was attributable to ventilation, intensive care and wards stays, 16% to surgery, and 12% to blood transfusions [24].
 
 
 
 
 
 Global health care models
 
 
 Countries where is applied
 
 
 Functioning concept
 
 
 Total healthcare costs from GDP
 
 
 
 
 Bismarck model
 
 
 Germany
 
 
 Privatized insurance companies (approx. 180 nonprofit sickness funds). Half of the national trauma beds are publicly funded trauma centers; the remaining are non-profit and for-profit private centers.
 
 
 11.1%
 
 
 
 
 Beveridge model
 
 
 United Kingdom
 
 
 Insurance companies are non-existent. All hospitals are nationalized.
 
 
 9.3%
 
 
 
 
 National health insurance
 
 
 Canada, Australia, Taiwan
 
 
 Fusion of Bismarck and Beveridge models. Hospitals are privatized, but the insurance program is single and government-run.
 
 
 11.2% for Canada
 
 
 
 
 The out-of-pocket model
 
 
 India, Pakistan, Cambodia
 
 
 The poorest countries, with undeveloped health care payment systems. Patients are paying for more than 75% of medical costs.
 
 
 3.9% for India
 
 
 
 
 GDP – gross domestic product
 
 
 
 
 Table 1 - Global health care models with major consequences on trauma care [17].
 Traumas continue to be a major healthcare problem, and no less important than cancer and cardiovascular diseases, and access to dedicated and timely intervention maximizes the patients’ chance for survival and minimizes the long-term morbidities. We should remember that one size does not fit in all trauma care. The Romanian National Trauma Program should tailor its resources to the matched demands of the specific Romanian urban and rural areas.

Using the example of some countries of Asia and Africa, we considered the phenomenon of the development of federal states, experiencing the influence of the ethnolinguistic factor, which is of particular relevance in the era of global instability and ideological and political transformations. The goal is to evaluate the degree of stability or instability of state formations burdened by multi-ethnicity and tribalism. We analyzed both more successful (India) and less successful federations (Pakistan) in Asia, which do not formally tie their territorial and administrative division to the ethnic composition of the country. A description of the movement towards ethnic federalism by a number of states that faced ethnic conflicts under the influence of external and internal circumstances at the beginning of the 21st century (Nepal, Iraq) is given. The exceptional difficulties of state building on the African continent in the conditions of ethno-tribal hostility and tribalism are shown. The alternative ways of development of federations are given: with the help of careful disaggregation of the subjects (Nigeria) and on the basis of their declared ethnic organization and self-organization (Ethiopia). In the comparative-state study, a proposal is made to abandon radical experiments with ethnic relations in federations and to limit ourselves to more familiar schemes of territorial-administrative or mixed (territorial and national) organization of subjects, as in Russia.

The Sri Lankan civil war began in 1983 and lasted until 2009. The tension stems from Sri Lanka's colonial period and subsequent post-colonial policies that harmed the Tamil people. Without viable alternatives, a part of the Tamil population resorted to the degree of brutality that precipitated a second civil war. Regional, domestic, and global attempts to bring the war to a halt have been futile, though some more local measures have been active. A ruthless military campaign brought the conflict to an end. However, nothing has been done in the aftermath of the war to try to resolve the civil war, including its roots. Sri Lanka's civil war exemplifies the uncertain existence of civil war resolution. With this in mind, the war's conclusion was unquestionably the product of a strategic triumph. However, the civil war should have ended; a unique constellation of structural, state, and national forces collaborated to allow for unrestricted military aggression. As long as the dominant forces, including the United States and significant European countries, understood that enough bloodshed had happened, the country's aggression could be brought to a stop. China and India, with India abstaining, voted to support the Sri Lankan government in its major offensive against insurgents. Internationally, the newly restored government used the full might of the forces against the rebels. As a consequence, those variables are deemed unusable in other situations.
 Tamil-Sinhala rivalry stretches all the way back to Sri Lanka's colonial period. The Tamil community took advantage of numerous market opportunities under British rule, which lasted from 1815 to 1948. Additionally, many group members attended school in colonial countries owing to a shortage of educational facilities in their home countries. With the exception of a few, the Sinhalese culture, on the other side, maintained its isolation from the British. As could be anticipated, the proportion of Tamils employing in the civil service, academia, and law increased dramatically following Sri Lanka's independence in 1948. Historically, the Sinhalese population has been hesitant to accept pluralism, having collaborated with the British to effect a shift of domination since the 1930s. When Sri Lanka's compulsory adult franchise was expanded to all citizens in 1931, there were no arrangements for minority rights. Tamil and Muslim community members shared discontent in the inconsistency with which their desires are pursued. T was dissatisfied with current political developments, and a large number of Tamils boycotted the elections conducted in compliance with this document. Also immediate liberty was abolished in 1947 by the Soulbury Constitution. The argument that no individual should be discriminated against on the grounds of racial origin or faith, though, proved to be a procedural impediment. Finally, in effect, it established a unitary and majoritarian state.

Tulip (Tulipa gesneriana L.) is an important and highly valuable flower of the cut flower industry. The most critical step in its cultivation is to break dormancy in order to initiate the growth, especially in tropical and sub-tropical areas of the world. Therefore, the current research was conducted to break bulb dormancy and foster the growth of tulip in Potohar region with the help of different primers. The objective of this study was the selection of best primer at appropriate concentration level to enhance growth, yield and vase life of the flower. Tulip bulbs were treated with different primers: T0 (distilled water), T1 (chitosan @ 5 g/L), T2 (gibberellic acid @ 0.15 g/L), T3 (humic acid 160 g/L), T4 (imidacloprid 19 g/L) and T5 (salicylic acid 0.1 g/L) for 24 hours, respectively. The experiment was laid out using Complete Randomized Design (CRD) with three replications. Statistical results revealed that characteristics including early germination, plant height, number of leaves, stalk length, fresh and dry weight of flower, weight of bulbs, diameter of bulbs and number of daughter bulbs were significantly increased in T2. Whereas, leaf area, diameter of stem and flower was maximum in T0. Plants under T3 showed an increase in chlorophyll content of leaves. While floral characteristics like early formation and opening of flower bud, more number of flowers and vase life were improved in T1. Thus, statistical results showed that priming can effectively help to improve morpho-physiological attributes of tulip.Key wordTulip, primers, dormancy, chitosan, gibberellic acid, humic acid, imidacloprid, salicylic acid.INTRODUCTIONTulip (Tulips gesneriana L.) is the most popular and lucrative spring blooming bulbous plant of Liliacae family. It is famous for its distinctive flower shape; size and vibrant color range that make it stand out aesthetically among other ornamental flowers. There are about 150 to 160 species of tulip that can be grown in gardens. In addition to this, they are also used as cut flowers. In cut flower industry, it is ranked as 3rd most desirable flower after rose and chrysanthemum (Singh, 2006; Ahmad et al., 2014). This flower holds a significant importance on societal events like Valentine’s Day, Easter, New Year and Mother’s Day. Along with ornamental uses, its bulb can be used for cooking purposes in place of onions and petals can be used to treat rough skin. As a result of its immense beauty and multiple uses, it is day by day becoming more eminent and favorite among people globally (Buschman, 2004; Jhon and Neelofar, 2006). The demand for cut flowers in Pakistan is also gaining popularity. In Pakistan, where floriculture industry is still struggling to make its way towards development, the annual production of cut flowers is estimated to be 10,000 to 12,000 tons per annum (Younis et al., 2009). Main cut flower crops produced includes: rose, carnation, gerbera, statice, tuberose, narcissus, gladiolus, freesia and lilies (Ahsan et al., 2012). Despite of tulip’s high demand, it is not among the few cut flowers that are produced at commercial level in Pakistan. However, some of the wild species of tulip (Tulipa stellate) are found in the country, as they wildly grow in West and North West Himalayan region of the world. (Nasir et al., 1987). This perennial plant needs several weeks of low temperature (temperature < 50C) to break its dormancy for producing beautiful flowers, as a result, its cultivation is restricted to temperate areas (Koksal et al., 2011). It is widely grown in areas with 5-100C night and 17-200C day temperature throughout the growing season (Singh, 2006). Although, it has high demand worldwide but there are only 15 tulips producing countries in the world. Among few tulip producing countries, Netherlands tops the list due to her favorable climatic conditions. The total production area of tulips in Netherlands is 10,800 hectares that contributes 60% of the world’s total production. The reason behind its limited production in the world is the inability of tulip bulbs to break dormancy under unfavorable climatic conditions. Dormancy is a state in which flower bulbs do not show any physical growth due to physical and physiological barriers. Therefore, dormancy breaking is the utmost important step while growing tulips anywhere in the world (De Klerk et al., 1992). Thus, aforementioned restrictions and sensitivity of crop towards its growth requirements has also affected its production in Pakistan. Its cultivation is restricted to Murree, Abottabad and Swat only. Some other parts of the country, including the Potohar region have great potential to grow tulip by putting in a little effort to cope with the challenge of dormancy breaking due to relatively high temperature. The winter period in Potohar region is from November to March. Moreover, December, January and February are the coldest months with a mean annual temperature between 100C to 150C. As a result, the time of planting is very critical for dormancy breaking and fast growth in such areas, as late planting would cause an abortion of flowers due to a raised field temperature at the time of flowering. In order to grow tulips in areas with mild winters different techniques are adopted that includes: pre- chilling, seed priming and protected cultivation method to achieve early growth and high yield of flowers before the temperature rises. Out of all additional efforts, seed priming can be an effective method for growing tulips in open fields because it promotes early growth and good yield (Anjum et al., 2010; Benschop et al., 2010; Kumar et al., 2013; Ramzan et al., 2014; Sarfaraz et al., 2014; Khan, 2019). Seed priming is a method of soaking seeds in solution with high osmotic potential which provides optimum level of hydration and aggravates the germination process, but don’t show the radical emergence by prolonging the lag phase. Lag phase makes the seed metabolically active and helps to convert the stored food reserves into the available form to be used during germination (Taylor et al., 1998; Reid et al., 2011; Nawaz et al., 2013). Application of different chemicals as primmer including salts (chitosan), growth regulator (gibberellic acid), plant hormone (salicylic acid), organic compounds (humic acid) and insecticides (imidacloprid) can result in a reduced forcing period, enhanced growth, early flowering and high flower yield. Therefore, careful selection of variety and use of priming as dormancy breaking technique is the essential step of Tulip cultivation in the Potohar area (Horii et al., 2007; Shakarami et al., 2013; Nakasha et al., 2014; Baldotto et al., 2016).OBJECTIVES Keeping in view that tulip is an excellent cut flower and its demand is increasing globally, present study was designed to analyze and study the effects of best concentration of different primers on early growth (vegetative and reproductive), yield and vase life of tulip in the Potohar region of Northern Punjab, Pakistan. MATERIALS AND METHODSExperimental site and planting material: The experiment on Tulipa gesneriana L. was conducted at the experimental area, Department of Horticulture, PMAS-Arid Agriculture University, Rawalpindi with longitude 73.070 E and latitude 33.60 N, during the year 2017-2018. Tulipa gesneriana L. was established through bulbs. Tulip bulbs were purchased from reliable sources and were planted by the end of November in pots after priming treatment in open field conditions.Maintenance practice: Regular watering and fortnightly fertilizer application of NPK (Grow more (17:17:17) @ 10g/m2 was done to maintain plant health.Priming treatments: Tulip bulbs were treated with different primers including: T0 (distilled water), T1 (chitosan @ 5 g/L), T2 (gibberellic acid @ 0.15 g/L), T3 (humic acid 160 g/L), T4 (Imidacloprid 19 g/L) and T5 (salicylic acid 0.1 g/L) for 24 hours, respectively.Parameters: Both vegetative and reproductive parameters were analyzed to determine the efficacy of primers including days to sprouting of bulbs (days), plant height (cm), leaf area (cm2), number of leaves, diameter of flower stem (mm), days to flower bud formation (days), days to flower opening stage (days), diameter of flower (mm), number of flowers per plant, stalk length (cm), fresh weight of flower (g), dry weight of flower (g), diameter of bulbs (mm), weight of bulbs (g), number of daughter bulbs per plant and vase life (days).Statistical analysis: Experiment was laid out randomly using Complete Randomized Design (CRD).The collected data was analyzed through appropriate statistical package i.e. MSTAT-C. Statistical significance was compared with LSD test at 5% level of significance (Steel et al., 1997).RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONEffect of priming on vegetative growth attributes: Results were exhibiting significant difference among vegetative growth attributes of the treated plants (table 1). The 0.15 g/L of gibberellic acid treated plants showed early sprouting (25 days) and maximum increase in plant height (33cm), number of leaves (6), stalk length (29.05cm) and diameter of flower stem (9.66mm), followed by 5 g/L of chitosan, 160g/L of humic acid and 19 g/L of Imidacloprid, respectively. Minimum plant height (15.6cm), number of leaves (4), stalk length (12.33cm) diameter of flower stem (6.04mm) and delayed bulb sprouting (31 days) was observed in 0.1 g/L of salicylic acid. Improvement in vegetative characteristics shown by T2 plants revealed that gibberellic acid helped in dormancy breaking, cell division and elongation in actively growing plant parts (Kumar et al., 2013). As further result confirmed that the maximum leaf area (39.07cm2) was observed in control plants and treated plants didn’t show significant increase in leaf area, because of the use of energy in increasing plant height and number of leaves. Previous studies also showed that plants with more number of leaves had a less leaf area and color of the leaves was also lighter (Khangoli, 2001; Janowska and Jerzy, 2004). Moreover, the maximum amount of chlorophyll content (62) was observed in 160 g/L of humic acid followed by 5 g/L of chitosan, 0.15 g/L of gibberellic acid and 19 g/L of Imidacloprid, respectively. Whereas, minimum amount of chlorophyll content was observed in 0.1 g/L of salicylic acid (58). Tulip bulbs treated with Humic acid effectively increased photosynthetic activity of the plant which in result increased the chlorophyll content of the leaves and produced more plant food. Leaf area of the humic acid treated plants was also increased as compared to other treatments that also caused an increase in the chlorophyll content of the leaves (Chanprasert et al., 2012; Salachna and Zawadzińska, 2014). Furthermore, bulb characteristics were also improved under the influence of priming. Maximum diameter (41mm) and weight of bulbs (26g) was observed in 0.15g/L of Gibberellic acid followed by 0.1g/L of salicylic acid, 5 g/L of chitosan, 19 g/L of Imidacloprid and 160 g/L of humic acid respectively. Whereas, minimum diameter (36mm) and weight (21g) of bulbs was observed in control treatment which proved the efficacy of primers in enhancing characteristics of tulip bulbs. Bulb diameter and weight was increased because of the presence of good amount of food in the bulb which helped in its growth (Arteca, 2013). Furthermore the number of daughter bulbs were maximum in 0.15 g/L of gibberellic acid (4.22) and 5 g/L of Chitosan (4.22) followed by 0.1 g/L of salicylic acid and 160 g/L of Humic acid respectively. Minimum number of bulb-lets was observed in 19 g/l of Imidacloprid (3.11). Increased rate of cell division and multiplication, plus availability of good nutrition in bulbs helped to increase the number of daughter bulbs in the treated plants (Shakarami et al., 2013). Thus, results confirmed that 0.15 g/L of gibberellic acid effectively improved both plant (figure 1) and bulb (figure 2) characteristics. Effect of priming on reproductive growth attributes: Results showed significant differences in plants for reproductive growth attributes in response to priming (table 2). Minimum days of bud formation (122 days) and flower opening stage (124 days) were showed by 5 g/L of chitosan followed by 0.15 g/L of gibberellic acid, 160g/L of humic acid and 19 g/L of Imidacloprid, respectively. Whereas, 0.15 g/L of salicylic acid took maximum days in the formation (127 days) and opening (129 days) of flower buds. Chitosan helps plant in maintaining its vegetative and reproductive growth under stress conditions like drought and high temperature. As a result, the plant maintains its growth under stress conditions and give early flowers, because its reproductive growth attributes remain unaffected under any abiotic stress, as previously studied in orchid as well (Saniewska, 2001; Uthairatanakij et al., 2007). Moreover, the number of flowers per plant were maximum in 5 g/L of Chitosan (3.33) and 0.15 g/L of gibberellic acid (3.33), followed by 160 g/L of humic acid. Whereas, 19 g/L of Imidacloprid (2.33) and 0.1 g/L of Salicylic acid (1.44) gave minimum flower yield. Along with enhancing the defense mechanism, chitosan also helped in increasing flower number in Freesia and other flowers, previously (Salachna and Zawadzińska, 2014). Furthermore, maximum fresh weight (33g) and dry weight of flower (2g) were observed in 0.15 g/L, of gibberellic acid followed by 5 g/L of chitosan, 160 g/L of humic acid and 19 g/L of imidacloprid, respectively. Minimum fresh weight of flower (12 g) and dry weight of flower (0.98 g) was observed in 0.1 g/L of salicylic acid. Gibberellic acid effectively increases plant height and diameter of stem that caused an increase in fresh and dry weight of flower due to presence of more plant nutrients and maintenance of turgidity. Diameter of the flower was maximum (40mm) in control plants, this showed priming of tulip bulbs didn’t have any effect on increasing flower size due to increase in flower number (Rashad et al., 2009; Hashemabadi, 2010). Thus, the aforementioned results confirmed that 5 g/L chitosan was most effective in improving floral attributes (figure 3) of tulip.Effect of priming on vase life: According to results (table 3), 5 g/L of Chitosan and 0.1 g/L of salicylic acid showed maximum vase life (8 days) followed by 19 g/L of imidacloprid, 0.15 g/L of gibberellic acid and 160 g/L of humic acid, respectively. Flowers under control treatment showed minimum vase life (6) as compared to treated plants. Chitosan improved the quality of flower by maintaining its size, color and freshness, but most importantly, it provided protection against many pathogenic fungi that can attack tulip and cause senescence of the flower. As a result of fungal protection and resistance against abiotic stresses, Tulip flower showed increased post-harvest quality and vase life (Saniewska, 2001). In Lilium flower it helped to decrease the production of ethylene and respiration rate and helped in increasing its vase life (Kim et al., 2004).CONCLUSIONPresent research proved that treatment of tulip bulbs with different primers at their best selected concentration levels was an effective method of enhancing early growth and yield in an area with relatively high temperature as compared to temperate region. The Tulip plants showed improvement in sprouting, plant height, number of leaves, chlorophyll content of leaf, leaf area, early flowering, flower size, number of flowers, stalk length, stem diameter, bulbs weight and diameter, number of bulb-lets and vase life. Thus, this method can be used in future for the production of Tulips under tropical and sub-tropical areas.CONFLICT OF INTERESTAuthors have no conflict of interest.REFERENCESAhmad, A., H. Rashid, R. Sajjad, S. Mubeen, B. Ajmal and M. Khan, 2014. 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This paper analyses how Pakistani print news media framed two armed conflict that occurred between India and Pakistan post-Pulwama attack in 2019 using five framing categories; conflict, morality, responsibility human interest, and solution. Using census approach subset of data; 282 opinions and editorials were collected from a population of 1,321 published number of items. Results from content analysis showed that media published a significant amount of content in editorials and opinions regarding armed conflicts. Content analysis disclosed that Pakistani print media placed emphasis on the use of conflict frame, and the use of human-interest frame was seen slightly low in numbers across all the newspapers during framing of Balakot airstrike and Pakistani retaliation after the Pulwama attack. However, there was no significant difference found between framing categories used by print news media. Findings are discussed in the context of journalistic priorities in selecting specific frames during framing of armed conflicts that holds national and international prominence.

<p><em>The history of Indian Subcontinent is the history of friendship and hatred, trust and suspicion and conflict and cooperation between the two communities Hindus and Muslims. The two nation states (and later three), that were carved out of this subcontinent formed the part of the single nation which was the undivided India. The two countries India and Pakistan despite being the parts of one single civilization are generally seen as the arch rivals of one another.</em></p><p><em>In many ways there are no two countries in the world which have so much in common as India and Pakistan. Parts of the same state, India and Pakistan have more common heritage and interests than probably any other two countries in the world. Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa in Pakistan are as much part of India’s history as Delhi, Agra, Ajmer and Lucknow are of Pakistan; at least four languages are spoken commonly in both the countries and the two national languages of Pakistan are two national languages of India as well; the same literary figures are held in the highest esteem – Tagore and Iqbal, Nazrul Islam and Waris Shah, Ghalib and Sarat Chandra Chatterjee; dresses are common in large parts of India and Pakistan, food habits, manners, customs and even the humor are common. Music and dancing, art and painting draw common inspirations and observe common forms<sup>1</sup>. For centuries, people of both the countries have lived on the same land mass, have faced the heat and dust, the cold and snow together have gone through the national calamities such as famine and drought and floods together. And then together they saw the rulers come from the far away land and they tasted the dust of common humiliation. And in the initial stages, they even started fighting the foreign ruler together. The bondage of history, geography and culture is too strong to be overlooked. </em></p>

Building on Sand brought together scholars with high profile roles as public intellectuals whose work is engaged in three very different geographic areas: Australia, Israel/Palestine and India/Pakistan. Each of these, as the conjoined names of two suggest, are sites of conflict over the nature of the civil and social authority which holds power and the peoples who claim to belong there. History has been a central theme in the rhetoric of these political conflicts, in which a unitary and authoritative history for a ‘nation’ and a ‘state’ has been built on the shifting sands of always-emerging historical evidence and its interpretations. In each of these three regions, a history which celebrated national formation and unity was challenged by ‘new’ historians in the 1970s [or 1980s or 1990s]. They used a similar set of methodologies like oral history, popular culture and the built environment: the toolkit of researching ‘history from below’ for a generation of social and cultural historians. Such new histories have been now been challenged themselves by a reassertion of the validity of a celebratory ‘national’ history based on unproblematic, ‘factual’ evidence. These recent conflicts between the ‘new’ historians and the (even newer) re-asserters of a ‘national’ history have been bruising encounters, with high stakes in terms of individual reputations, public emotions and the real, personal safety in some cases of the participants and, more importantly, of vulnerable oppositional communities.

AbstractSince the 1960s China and India have engaged in a dispute about the demarcation of their shared border. This territorial dispute led to a brief war in 1962, and recurring flare-ups over the following decades, including during the summer of 2020. The potential for further escalation of this dispute poses significant risks to Indian and Chinese civilians, US foreign policy objectives, and the stability of the international economic system. Despite the importance of this dispute, there have been relatively few attempts to understand the correlates of Chinese incursions. This paper addresses this important question by leveraging past work on the study of conflicts between states to derive a set of testable explanations about the impact of China–India relations, internal political affairs, international political issues, and domestic economic factors on the likelihood of incursions. The study uses 15 years of original data on monthly Chinese incursions into India along with a monthly dataset containing 18 independent variables, to develop a detailed statistical understanding of the factors that trigger Chinese incursions across the Indian border with a lead time between 1 and 6 months. The quantitative study finds that Chinese incursions are more likely when Chinese leadership is early in their tenure, but more likely when Indian leadership is in the later stages of their tenure. The results also show that closer cooperation between India and the US may trigger additional Chinese incursions into India. Finally, lower consumer confidence in the Chinese economy is consistently related to an increased likelihood of incursions. These findings have implications for the maintenance of peace and India’s national security policies. Periods of Chinese uncertainty, particularly when their economy exhibits weakness and when Chinese leaders are in the early stages of their tenure are more likely to experience incursions. Further, the strengthening of the US–Indian alliance, as well as increased conflict between India and Pakistan, create the potential for an elevated risk of incursions. During these periods India should likely be on higher alert, while India and Indian allies should signal the importance of diplomatic solutions for the dispute.

The United States’ increasing dependence on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), more commonly referred to as drones, to carry out targeted killings has captured the attention of several countries across the globe seeking to amplify their military capabilities. While most of the current literature focuses on the strategic value of UAVs as a tool for combating terrorism, scholars have largely overlooked the use of drones as a key to maintaining security between states. This project, in contrast, investigates the implications of drones for security dilemmas between countries. It examines the case of India due to its long-standing rivalry with Pakistan, its border dispute with China, and the prevalence of terrorism in the region. It anticipates that India’s leaders view the possession of drones by their rivals as a threat to their own national security, and thus aim to acquire similar technology to maintain the power balance. A content analysis of newspaper articles related to India’s drone acquisition indicates that drones are perceived by India’s leaders to be almost equally useful in fighting terrorism and balancing a state rival, which demonstrates that, contrary to popular belief, drones do carry significance in interstate conflict.

Although it has a rich and ancient history, India is a fairly new state. This subcontinent is the second most crowded country in the world. In administrative terms, it consists of 28 states and seven union regions. While Hindi and English are the official languages, 22 regional languages are spoken in different states. India has been the birth place of four religions; Hinduism,approximately, ( 80 % of the population, Buddhism, Jainism and Sikhism. Nearly 14 % of the population) belongs to Islam, thus composing the world's largest Muslim minority population. Despite such diversity, serious domestic and international conflicts, high poverty and illiteracy rates, India has successfully maintained to be a democratic state until present time. India has the fourth largest army in the world. According to George Friedman, the Indian army has three major functions. The first is to balance Pakistan, the second is to protect the northern border from Chinese invasion. The last, but not the least, is to keep the nation's internal security (1).


 
 
 Introduction I am a transmigrant who has moved back and forth between the West and the Rest. I was born and raised in a Muslim family in a predominantly Muslim country, Bangladesh, but I spent several years of my childhood in Pakistan. After my marriage, I lived in the United States for a year and a half, the Middle East for 5 years, Australia for three years, back to the Middle East for another 5 years, then, finally, in Australia for the last 12 years. I speak Bengali (my mother tongue), Urdu (which I learnt in Pakistan), a bit of Arabic (learnt in the Middle East); but English has always been my medium of instruction. So where is home? Is it my place of origin, the Muslim umma, or my land of settlement? Or is it my ‘root’ or my ‘route’ (Blunt and Dowling)? Blunt and Dowling (199) observe that the lives of transmigrants are often interpreted in terms of their ‘roots’ and ‘routes’, which are two frameworks for thinking about home, homeland and diaspora. Whereas ‘roots’ might imply an original homeland from which people have scattered, and to which they might seek to return, ‘routes’ focuses on mobile, multiple and transcultural geographies of home. However, both ‘roots’ and ‘routes’ are attached to emotion and identity, and both invoke a sense of place, belonging or alienation that is intrinsically tied to a sense of self (Blunt and Dowling 196-219). In this paper, I equate home with my root (place of birth) and route (transnational homing) within the context of the ‘diaspora and belonging’. First I define the diaspora and possible criteria of belonging. Next I describe my transnational homing within the framework of diaspora and belonging. Finally, I consider how Australia can be a ‘home’ for me and other Muslim Australians. The Diaspora and Belonging Blunt and Dowling (199) define diaspora as “scattering of people over space and transnational connections between people and the places”. Cohen emphasised the ethno-cultural aspects of the diaspora setting; that is, how migrants identify and position themselves in other nations in terms of their (different) ethnic and cultural orientation. Hall argues that the diasporic subjects form a cultural identity through transformation and difference. Speaking of the Hindu diaspora in the UK and Caribbean, Vertovec (21-23) contends that the migrants’ contact with their original ‘home’ or diaspora depends on four factors: migration processes and factors of settlement, cultural composition, structural and political power, and community development. With regard to the first factor, migration processes and factors of settlement, Vertovec explains that if the migrants are political or economic refugees, or on a temporary visa, they are likely to live in a ‘myth of return’. In the cultural composition context, Vertovec argues that religion, language, region of origin, caste, and degree of cultural homogenisation are factors in which migrants are bound to their homeland. Concerning the social structure and political power issue, Vertovec suggests that the extent and nature of racial and ethnic pluralism or social stigma, class composition, degree of institutionalised racism, involvement in party politics (or active citizenship) determine migrants’ connection to their new or old home. Finally, community development, including membership in organisations (political, union, religious, cultural, leisure), leadership qualities, and ethnic convergence or conflict (trends towards intra-communal or inter-ethnic/inter-religious co-operation) would also affect the migrants’ sense of belonging. Using these scholarly ideas as triggers, I will examine my home and belonging over the last few decades. My Home In an initial stage of my transmigrant history, my home was my root (place of birth, Dhaka, Bangladesh). Subsequently, my routes (settlement in different countries) reshaped my homes. In all respects, the ethno-cultural factors have played a big part in my definition of ‘home’. But on some occasions my ethnic identification has been overridden by my religious identification and vice versa. By ethnic identity, I mean my language (mother tongue) and my connection to my people (Bangladeshi). By my religious identity, I mean my Muslim religion, and my spiritual connection to the umma, a Muslim nation transcending all boundaries. Umma refers to the Muslim identity and unity within a larger Muslim group across national boundaries. The only thing the members of the umma have in common is their Islamic belief (Spencer and Wollman 169-170). In my childhood my father, a banker, was relocated to Karachi, Pakistan (then West Pakistan). Although I lived in Pakistan for much of my childhood, I have never considered it to be my home, even though it is predominantly a Muslim country. In this case, my home was my root (Bangladesh) where my grandparents and extended family lived. Every year I used to visit my grandparents who resided in a small town in Bangladesh (then East Pakistan). Thus my connection with my home was sustained through my extended family, ethnic traditions, language (Bengali/Bangla), and the occasional visits to the landscape of Bangladesh. Smith (9-11) notes that people build their connection or identity to their homeland through their historic land, common historical memories, myths, symbols and traditions. Though Pakistan and Bangladesh had common histories, their traditions of language, dress and ethnic culture were very different. For example, the celebration of the Bengali New Year (Pohela Baishakh), folk dance, folk music and folk tales, drama, poetry, lyrics of poets Rabindranath Tagore (Rabindra Sangeet) and Nazrul Islam (Nazrul Geeti) are distinct in the cultural heritage of Bangladesh. Special musical instruments such as the banshi (a bamboo flute), dhol (drums), ektara (a single-stringed instrument) and dotara (a four-stringed instrument) are unique to Bangladeshi culture. The Bangladeshi cuisine (rice and freshwater fish) is also different from Pakistan where people mainly eat flat round bread (roti) and meat (gosh). However, my bonding factor to Bangladesh was my relatives, particularly my grandparents as they made me feel one of ‘us’. Their affection for me was irreplaceable. The train journey from Dhaka (capital city) to their town, Noakhali, was captivating. The hustle and bustle at the train station and the lush green paddy fields along the train journey reminded me that this was my ‘home’. Though I spoke the official language (Urdu) in Pakistan and had a few Pakistani friends in Karachi, they could never replace my feelings for my friends, extended relatives and cousins who lived in Bangladesh. I could not relate to the landscape or dry weather of Pakistan. More importantly, some Pakistani women (our neighbours) were critical of my mother’s traditional dress (saree), and described it as revealing because it showed a bit of her back. They took pride in their traditional dress (shalwar, kameez, dopatta), which they considered to be more covered and ‘Islamic’. So, because of our traditional dress (saree) and perhaps other differences, we were regarded as the ‘Other’. In 1970 my father was relocated back to Dhaka, Bangladesh, and I was glad to go home. It should be noted that both Pakistan and Bangladesh were separated from India in 1947 – first as one nation; then, in 1971, Bangladesh became independent from Pakistan. The conflict between Bangladesh (then East Pakistan) and Pakistan (then West Pakistan) originated for economic and political reasons. At this time I was a high school student and witnessed acts of genocide committed by the Pakistani regime against the Bangladeshis (March-December 1971). My memories of these acts are vivid and still very painful. After my marriage, I moved from Bangladesh to the United States. In this instance, my new route (Austin, Texas, USA), as it happened, did not become my home. Here the ethno-cultural and Islamic cultural factors took precedence. I spoke the English language, made some American friends, and studied history at the University of Texas. I appreciated the warm friendship extended to me in the US, but experienced a degree of culture shock. I did not appreciate the pub life, alcohol consumption, and what I perceived to be the lack of family bonds (children moving out at the age of 18, families only meeting occasionally on birthdays and Christmas). Furthermore, I could not relate to de facto relationships and acceptance of sex before marriage. However, to me ‘home’ meant a family orientation and living in close contact with family. Besides the cultural divide, my husband and I were living in the US on student visas and, as Vertovec (21-23) noted, temporary visa status can deter people from their sense of belonging to the host country. In retrospect I can see that we lived in the ‘myth of return’. However, our next move for a better life was not to our root (Bangladesh), but another route to the Muslim world of Dhahran in Saudi Arabia. My husband moved to Dhahran not because it was a Muslim world but because it gave him better economic opportunities. However, I thought this new destination would become my home – the home that was coined by Anderson as the imagined nation, or my Muslim umma. Anderson argues that the imagined communities are “to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6; Wood 61). Hall (122) asserts: identity is actually formed through unconscious processes over time, rather than being innate in consciousness at birth. There is always something ‘imaginary’ or fantasized about its unity. It always remains incomplete, is always ‘in process’, always ‘being formed’. As discussed above, when I had returned home to Bangladesh from Pakistan – both Muslim countries – my primary connection to my home country was my ethnic identity, language and traditions. My ethnic identity overshadowed the religious identity. But when I moved to Saudi Arabia, where my ethnic identity differed from that of the mainstream Arabs and Bedouin/nomadic Arabs, my connection to this new land was through my Islamic cultural and religious identity. Admittedly, this connection to the umma was more psychological than physical, but I was now in close proximity to Mecca, and to my home of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Mecca is an important city in Saudi Arabia for Muslims because it is the holy city of Islam, the home to the Ka’aba (the religious centre of Islam), and the birthplace of Prophet Muhammad [Peace Be Upon Him]. It is also the destination of the Hajj, one of the five pillars of Islamic faith. Therefore, Mecca is home to significant events in Islamic history, as well as being an important present day centre for the Islamic faith. We lived in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia for 5 years. Though it was a 2.5 hours flight away, I treasured Mecca’s proximity and regarded Dhahran as my second and spiritual home. Saudi Arabia had a restricted lifestyle for women, but I liked it because it was a Muslim country that gave me the opportunity to perform umrah Hajj (pilgrimage). However, Saudi Arabia did not allow citizenship to expatriates. Saudi Arabia’s government was keen to protect the status quo and did not want to compromise its cultural values or standard of living by allowing foreigners to become a permanent part of society. In exceptional circumstances only, the King granted citizenship to a foreigner for outstanding service to the state over a number of years. Children of foreigners born in Saudi Arabia did not have rights of local citizenship; they automatically assumed the nationality of their parents. If it was available, Saudi citizenship would assure expatriates a secure and permanent living in Saudi Arabia; as it was, there was a fear among the non-Saudis that they would have to leave the country once their job contract expired. Under the circumstances, though my spiritual connection to Mecca was strong, my husband was convinced that Saudi Arabia did not provide any job security. So, in 1987 when Australia offered migration to highly skilled people, my husband decided to migrate to Australia for a better and more secure economic life. I agreed to his decision, but quite reluctantly because we were again moving to a non-Muslim part of the world, which would be culturally different and far away from my original homeland (Bangladesh). In Australia, we lived first in Brisbane, then Adelaide, and after three years we took our Australian citizenship. At that stage I loved the Barossa Valley and Victor Harbour in South Australia, and the Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast in Queensland, but did not feel at home in Australia. We bought a house in Adelaide and I was a full time home-maker but was always apprehensive that my children (two boys) would lose their culture in this non-Muslim world. In 1990 we once again moved back to the Muslim world, this time to Muscat, Sultanate of Oman. My connection to this route was again spiritual. I valued the fact that we would live in a Muslim country and our children would be brought up in a Muslim environment. But my husband’s move was purely financial as he got a lucrative job offer in Muscat. We had another son in Oman. We enjoyed the luxurious lifestyle provided by my husband’s workplace and the service provided by the housemaid. I loved the beaches and freedom to drive my car, and I appreciated the friendly Omani people. I also enjoyed our frequent trips (4 hours flight) to my root, Dhaka, Bangladesh. So our children were raised within our ethnic and Islamic culture, remained close to my root (family in Dhaka), though they attended a British school in Muscat. But by the time I started considering Oman to be my second home, we had to leave once again for a place that could provide us with a more secure future. Oman was like Saudi Arabia; it employed expatriates only on a contract basis, and did not give them citizenship (not even fellow Muslims). So after 5 years it was time to move back to Australia. It was with great reluctance that I moved with my husband to Brisbane in 1995 because once again we were to face a different cultural context. As mentioned earlier, we lived in Brisbane in the late 1980s; I liked the weather, the landscape, but did not consider it home for cultural reasons. Our boys started attending expensive private schools and we bought a house in a prestigious Western suburb in Brisbane. Soon after arriving I started my tertiary education at the University of Queensland, and finished an MA in Historical Studies in Indian History in 1998. Still Australia was not my home. I kept thinking that we would return to my previous routes or the ‘imagined’ homeland somewhere in the Middle East, in close proximity to my root (Bangladesh), where we could remain economically secure in a Muslim country. But gradually I began to feel that Australia was becoming my ‘home’. I had gradually become involved in professional and community activities (with university colleagues, the Bangladeshi community and Muslim women’s organisations), and in retrospect I could see that this was an early stage of my ‘self-actualisation’ (Maslow). Through my involvement with diverse people, I felt emotionally connected with the concerns, hopes and dreams of my Muslim-Australian friends. Subsequently, I also felt connected with my mainstream Australian friends whose emotions and fears (9/11 incident, Bali bombing and 7/7 tragedy) were similar to mine. In late 1998 I started my PhD studies on the immigration history of Australia, with a particular focus on the historical settlement of Muslims in Australia. This entailed retrieving archival files and interviewing people, mostly Muslims and some mainstream Australians, and enquiring into relevant migration issues. I also became more active in community issues, and was not constrained by my circumstances. By circumstances, I mean that even though I belonged to a patriarchally structured Muslim family, where my husband was the main breadwinner, main decision-maker, my independence and research activities (entailing frequent interstate trips for data collection, and public speaking) were not frowned upon or forbidden (Khan 14-15); fortunately, my husband appreciated my passion for research and gave me his trust and support. This, along with the Muslim community’s support (interviews), and the wider community’s recognition (for example, the publication of my letters in Australian newspapers, interviews on radio and television) enabled me to develop my self-esteem and built up my bicultural identity as a Muslim in a predominantly Christian country and as a Bangladeshi-Australian. In 2005, for the sake of a better job opportunity, my husband moved to the UK, but this time I asserted that I would not move again. I felt that here in Australia (now in Perth) I had a job, an identity and a home. This time my husband was able to secure a good job back in Australia and was only away for a year. I no longer dream of finding a home in the Middle East. Through my bicultural identity here in Australia I feel connected to the wider community and to the Muslim umma. However, my attachment to the umma has become ambivalent. I feel proud of my Australian-Muslim identity but I am concerned about the jihadi ideology of militant Muslims. By jihadi ideology, I mean the extremist ideology of the al-Qaeda terrorist group (Farrar 2007). The Muslim umma now incorporates both moderate and radical Muslims. The radical Muslims (though only a tiny minority of 1.4 billion Muslims worldwide) pose a threat to their moderate counterparts as well as to non-Muslims. In the UK, some second- and third-generation Muslims identify themselves with the umma rather than their parents’ homelands or their country of birth (Husain). It should not be a matter of concern if these young Muslims adopt a ‘pure’ Muslim identity, providing at the same time they are loyal to their country of residence. But when they resort to terrorism with their ‘pure’ Muslim identity (e.g., the 7/7 London bombers) they defame my religion Islam, and undermine my spiritual connection to the umma. As a 1st generation immigrant, the defining criteria of my ‘homeliness’ in Australia are my ethno-cultural and religious identity (which includes my family), my active citizenship, and my community development/contribution through my research work – all of which allow me a sense of efficacy in my life. My ethnic and religious identities generally co-exist equally, but when I see some Muslims kill my fellow Australians (such as the Bali bombings in 2002 and 2005) my Australian identity takes precedence. I feel for the victims and condemn the perpetrators. On the other hand, when I see politics play a role over the human rights issues (e.g., the Tampa incident), my religious identity begs me to comment on it (see Kabir, Muslims in Australia 295-305). Problematising ‘Home’ for Muslim Australians In the European context, Grillo (863) and Werbner (904), and in the Australian context, Kabir (Muslims in Australia) and Poynting and Mason, have identified the diversity within Islam (national, ethnic, religious etc). Werbner (904) notes that in spite of the “wishful talk of the emergence of a ‘British Islam’, even today there are Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Arab mosques, as well as Turkish and Shia’a mosques”; thus British Muslims retain their separate identities. Similarly, in Australia, the existence of separate mosques for the Bangladeshi, Pakistani, Arab and Shia’a peoples indicates that Australian Muslims have also kept their ethnic identities discrete (Saeed 64-77). However, in times of crisis, such as the Salman Rushdie affair in 1989, and the 1990-1991 Gulf crises, both British and Australian Muslims were quick to unite and express their Islamic identity by way of resistance (Kabir, Muslims in Australia 160-162; Poynting and Mason 68-70). In both British and Australian contexts, I argue that a peaceful rally or resistance is indicative of active citizenship of Muslims as it reveals their sense of belonging (also Werbner 905). So when a transmigrant Muslim wants to make a peaceful demonstration, the Western world should be encouraged, not threatened – as long as the transmigrant’s allegiances lie also with the host country. In the European context, Grillo (868) writes: when I asked Mehmet if he was planning to stay in Germany he answered without hesitation: ‘Yes, of course’. And then, after a little break, he added ‘as long as we can live here as Muslims’. In this context, I support Mehmet’s desire to live as a Muslim in a non-Muslim world as long as this is peaceful. Paradoxically, living a Muslim life through ijtihad can be either socially progressive or destructive. The Canadian Muslim feminist Irshad Manji relies on ijtihad, but so does Osama bin Laden! Manji emphasises that ijtihad can be, on the one hand, the adaptation of Islam using independent reasoning, hybridity and the contesting of ‘traditional’ family values (c.f. Doogue and Kirkwood 275-276, 314); and, on the other, ijtihad can take the form of conservative, patriarchal and militant Islamic values. The al-Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden espouses the jihadi ideology of Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966), an Egyptian who early in his career might have been described as a Muslim modernist who believed that Islam and Western secular ideals could be reconciled. But he discarded that idea after going to the US in 1948-50; there he was treated as ‘different’ and that treatment turned him against the West. He came back to Egypt and embraced a much more rigid and militaristic form of Islam (Esposito 136). Other scholars, such as Cesari, have identified a third orientation – a ‘secularised Islam’, which stresses general beliefs in the values of Islam and an Islamic identity, without too much concern for practices. Grillo (871) observed Islam in the West emphasised diversity. He stressed that, “some [Muslims were] more quietest, some more secular, some more clamorous, some more negotiatory”, while some were exclusively characterised by Islamic identity, such as wearing the burqa (elaborate veils), hijabs (headscarves), beards by men and total abstinence from drinking alcohol. So Mehmet, cited above, could be living a Muslim life within the spectrum of these possibilities, ranging from an integrating mode to a strict, militant Muslim manner. In the UK context, Zubaida (96) contends that marginalised, culturally-impoverished youth are the people for whom radical, militant Islamism may have an appeal, though it must be noted that the 7/7 bombers belonged to affluent families (O’Sullivan 14; Husain). In Australia, Muslim Australians are facing three challenges. First, the Muslim unemployment rate: it was three times higher than the national total in 1996 and 2001 (Kabir, Muslims in Australia 266-278; Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 63). Second, some spiritual leaders have used extreme rhetoric to appeal to marginalised youth; in January 2007, the Australian-born imam of Lebanese background, Sheikh Feiz Mohammad, was alleged to have employed a DVD format to urge children to kill the enemies of Islam and to have praised martyrs with a violent interpretation of jihad (Chulov 2). Third, the proposed citizenship test has the potential to make new migrants’ – particularly Muslims’ – settlement in Australia stressful (Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 62-79); in May 2007, fuelled by perceptions that some migrants – especially Muslims – were not integrating quickly enough, the Howard government introduced a citizenship test bill that proposes to test applicants on their English language skills and knowledge of Australian history and ‘values’. I contend that being able to demonstrate knowledge of history and having English language skills is no guarantee that a migrant will be a good citizen. Through my transmigrant history, I have learnt that developing a bond with a new place takes time, acceptance and a gradual change of identity, which are less likely to happen when facing assimilationist constraints. I spoke English and studied history in the United States, but I did not consider it my home. I did not speak the Arabic language, and did not study Middle Eastern history while I was in the Middle East, but I felt connected to it for cultural and religious reasons. Through my knowledge of history and English language proficiency I did not make Australia my home when I first migrated to Australia. Australia became my home when I started interacting with other Australians, which was made possible by having the time at my disposal and by fortunate circumstances, which included a fairly high level of efficacy and affluence. If I had been rejected because of my lack of knowledge of ‘Australian values’, or had encountered discrimination in the job market, I would have been much less willing to embrace my host country and call it home. I believe a stringent citizenship test is more likely to alienate would-be citizens than to induce their adoption of values and loyalty to their new home. Conclusion Blunt (5) observes that current studies of home often investigate mobile geographies of dwelling and how it shapes one’s identity and belonging. Such geographies of home negotiate from the domestic to the global context, thus mobilising the home beyond a fixed, bounded and confining location. Similarly, in this paper I have discussed how my mobile geography, from the domestic (root) to global (route), has shaped my identity. Though I received a degree of culture shock in the United States, loved the Middle East, and was at first quite resistant to the idea of making Australia my second home, the confidence I acquired in residing in these ‘several homes’ were cumulative and eventually enabled me to regard Australia as my ‘home’. I loved the Middle East, but I did not pursue an active involvement with the Arab community because I was a busy mother. Also I lacked the communication skill (fluency in Arabic) with the local residents who lived outside the expatriates’ campus. I am no longer a cultural freak. I am no longer the same Bangladeshi woman who saw her ethnic and Islamic culture as superior to all other cultures. I have learnt to appreciate Australian values, such as tolerance, ‘a fair go’ and multiculturalism (see Kabir, “What Does It Mean” 62-79). My bicultural identity is my strength. With my ethnic and religious identity, I can relate to the concerns of the Muslim community and other Australian ethnic and religious minorities. And with my Australian identity I have developed ‘a voice’ to pursue active citizenship. Thus my biculturalism has enabled me to retain and merge my former home with my present and permanent home of Australia. References Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso, 1983. Australian Bureau of Statistics: Census of Housing and Population, 1996 and 2001. Blunt, Alison. Domicile and Diaspora: Anglo-Indian Women and the Spatial Politics of Home. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. Blunt, Alison, and Robyn Dowling. Home. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Cesari, Jocelyne. “Muslim Minorities in Europe: The Silent Revolution.” In John L. Esposito and Burgat, eds., Modernising Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in Europe and the Middle East. London: Hurst, 2003. 251-269. Chulov, Martin. “Treatment Has Sheik Wary of Returning Home.” Weekend Australian 6-7 Jan. 2007: 2. Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. Seattle: University of Washington, 1997. Doogue, Geraldine, and Peter Kirkwood. Tomorrow’s Islam: Uniting Old-Age Beliefs and a Modern World. Sydney: ABC Books, 2005. Esposito, John. The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? 3rd ed. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999. Farrar, Max. “When the Bombs Go Off: Rethinking and Managing Diversity Strategies in Leeds, UK.” International Journal of Diversity in Organisations, Communities and Nations 6.5 (2007): 63-68. 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Poynting, Scott, and Victoria Mason. “The Resistible Rise of Islamophobia: Anti-Muslim Racism in the UK and Australia before 11 September 2001.” Journal of Sociology 43.1 (2007): 61-86. Saeed, Abdallah. Islam in Australia. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003. Smith, Anthony D. National Identity. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991. Spencer, Philip, and Howard Wollman. Nationalism: A Critical Introduction. London: Sage, 2002. Vertovec, Stevens. The Hindu Diaspora: Comparative Patterns. London: Routledge. 2000. Werbner, Pnina, “Theorising Complex Diasporas: Purity and Hybridity in the South Asian Public Sphere in Britain.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 30.5 (2004): 895-911. Wood, Dennis. “The Diaspora, Community and the Vagrant Space.” In Cynthia Vanden Driesen and Ralph Crane, eds., Diaspora: The Australasian Experience. New Delhi: Prestige, 2005. 59-64. Zubaida, Sami. “Islam in Europe: Unity or Diversity.” Critical Quarterly 45.1-2 (2003): 88-98. 
 
 
 
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The curtain rose. The howling of desert wind filled the performance hall in the Shanghai Grand Theatre. Into the center stage, where a scenic construction of a mountain cliff and a desert landscape was dimly lit, entered the character of the Daoist priest Wang Yuanlu (1849–1931), performed by Chen Yizong. Dressed in a worn and dusty outfit of dark blue cotton, characteristic of Daoist priests, Wang began to sweep the floor. After a few moments, he discovered a hidden chambre sealed inside one of the rock sanctuaries carved into the cliff.Signaled by the quick, crystalline, stirring wave of sound from the chimes, a melodious Chinese ocarina solo joined in slowly from the background. Astonished by thousands of Buddhist sūtra scrolls, wall paintings, and sculptures he had just accidentally discovered in the caves, Priest Wang set his broom aside and began to examine these treasures. Dawn had not yet arrived, and the desert sky was pitch-black. Priest Wang held his oil lamp high, strode rhythmically in excitement, sat crossed-legged in a meditative pose, and unfolded a scroll. The sound of the ocarina became fuller and richer and the texture of the music more complex, as several other instruments joined in.Below is the opening scene of the award-winning, theatrical dance-drama Dunhuang, My Dreamland, created by China’s state-sponsored Lanzhou Song and Dance Theatre in 2000. Figure 1a: Poster Side A of Dunhuang, My Dreamland Figure 1b: Poster Side B of Dunhuang, My DreamlandThe scene locates the dance-drama in the rock sanctuaries that today are known as the Dunhuang Mogao Caves, housing Buddhist art accumulated over a period of a thousand years, one of the best well-known UNESCO heritages on the Silk Road. Historically a frontier metropolis, Dunhuang was a strategic site along the Silk Road in northwestern China, a crossroads of trade, and a locus for religious, cultural, and intellectual influences since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). Travellers, especially Buddhist monks from India and central Asia, passing through Dunhuang on their way to Chang’an (present day Xi’an), China’s ancient capital, would stop to meditate in the Mogao Caves and consult manuscripts in the monastery's library. At the same time, Chinese pilgrims would travel by foot from China through central Asia to Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka, playing a key role in the exchanges between ancient China and the outside world. Travellers from China would stop to acquire provisions at Dunhuang before crossing the Gobi Desert to continue on their long journey abroad. Figure 2: Dunhuang Mogao CavesThis article approaches the idea of “abroad” by examining the present-day imagination of journeys along the Silk Road—specifically, staged performances of the various Silk Road journey-themed dance-dramas sponsored by the Chinese state for enhancing its cultural and foreign policies since the 1970s (Kuang).As ethnomusicologists have demonstrated, musicians, choreographers, and playwrights often utilise historical materials in their performances to construct connections between the past and the present (Bohlman; Herzfeld; Lam; Rees; Shelemay; Tuohy; Wade; Yung: Rawski; Watson). The ancient Silk Road, which linked the Mediterranean coast with central China and beyond, via oasis towns such as Samarkand, has long been associated with the concept of “journeying abroad.” Journeys to distant, foreign lands and encounters of unknown, mysterious cultures along the Silk Road have been documented in historical records, such as A Record of Buddhist Kingdoms (Faxian) and The Great Tang Records on the Western Regions (Xuanzang), and illustrated in classical literature, such as The Travels of Marco Polo (Polo) and the 16th century Chinese novel Journey to the West (Wu). These journeys—coming and going from multiple directions and to different destinations—have inspired contemporary staged performance for audiences around the globe.Home and Abroad: Dunhuang and the Silk RoadDunhuang, My Dreamland (2000), the contemporary dance-drama, staged the journey of a young pilgrim painter travelling from Chang’an to a land of the unfamiliar and beyond borders, in search for the arts that have inspired him. Figure 3: A scene from Dunhuang, My Dreamland showing the young pilgrim painter in the Gobi Desert on the ancient Silk RoadFar from his home, he ended his journey in Dunhuang, historically considered the northwestern periphery of China, well beyond Yangguan and Yumenguan, the bordering passes that separate China and foreign lands. Later scenes in Dunhuang, My Dreamland, portrayed through multiethnic music and dances, the dynamic interactions among merchants, cultural and religious envoys, warriors, and politicians that were making their own journey from abroad to China. The theatrical dance-drama presents a historically inspired, re-imagined vision of both “home” and “abroad” to its audiences as they watch the young painter travel along the Silk Road, across the Gobi Desert, arriving at his own ideal, artistic “homeland”, the Dunhuang Mogao Caves. Since his journey is ultimately a spiritual one, the conceptualisation of travelling “abroad” could also be perceived as “a journey home.”Staged more than four hundred times since it premiered in Beijing in April 2000, Dunhuang, My Dreamland is one of the top ten titles in China’s National Stage Project and one of the most successful theatrical dance-dramas ever produced in China. With revenue of more than thirty million renminbi (RMB), it ranks as the most profitable theatrical dance-drama ever produced in China, with a preproduction cost of six million RMB. The production team receives financial support from China’s Ministry of Culture for its “distinctive ethnic features,” and its “aim to promote traditional Chinese culture,” according to Xu Rong, an official in the Cultural Industry Department of the Ministry. Labeled an outstanding dance-drama of the Chinese nation, it aims to present domestic and international audiences with a vision of China as a historically multifaceted and cosmopolitan nation that has been in close contact with the outside world through the ancient Silk Road. Its production company has been on tour in selected cities throughout China and in countries abroad, including Austria, Spain, and France, literarily making the young pilgrim painter’s “journey along the Silk Road” a new journey abroad, off stage and in reality.Dunhuang, My Dreamland was not the first, nor is it the last, staged performances that portrays the Chinese re-imagination of “journeying abroad” along the ancient Silk Road. It was created as one of many versions of Dunhuang bihua yuewu, a genre of music, dance, and dramatic performances created in the early twentieth century and based primarily on artifacts excavated from the Mogao Caves (Kuang). “The Mogao Caves are the greatest repository of early Chinese art,” states Mimi Gates, who works to increase public awareness of the UNESCO site and raise funds toward its conservation. “Located on the Chinese end of the Silk Road, it also is the place where many cultures of the world intersected with one another, so you have Greek and Roman, Persian and Middle Eastern, Indian and Chinese cultures, all interacting. Given the nature of our world today, it is all very relevant” (Pollack). As an expressive art form, this genre has been thriving since the late 1970s contributing to the global imagination of China’s “Silk Road journeys abroad” long before Dunhuang, My Dreamland achieved its domestic and international fame. For instance, in 2004, The Thousand-Handed and Thousand-Eyed Avalokiteśvara—one of the most representative (and well-known) Dunhuang bihua yuewu programs—was staged as a part of the cultural program during the Paralympic Games in Athens, Greece. This performance, as well as other Dunhuang bihua yuewu dance programs was the perfect embodiment of a foreign religion that arrived in China from abroad and became Sinicized (Kuang). Figure 4: Mural from Dunhuang Mogao Cave No. 45A Brief History of Staging the Silk Road JourneysThe staging of the Silk Road journeys abroad began in the late 1970s. Historically, the Silk Road signifies a multiethnic, cosmopolitan frontier, which underwent incessant conflicts between Chinese sovereigns and nomadic peoples (as well as between other groups), but was strongly imbued with the customs and institutions of central China (Duan, Mair, Shi, Sima). In the twentieth century, when China was no longer an empire, but had become what the early 20th-century reformer Liang Qichao (1873–1929) called “a nation among nations,” the long history of the Silk Road and the colourful, legendary journeys abroad became instrumental in the formation of a modern Chinese nation of unified diversity rooted in an ancient cosmopolitan past. The staged Silk Road theme dance-dramas thus participate in this formation of the Chinese imagination of “nation” and “abroad,” as they aestheticise Chinese history and geography. History and geography—aspects commonly considered constituents of a nation as well as our conceptualisations of “abroad”—are “invariably aestheticized to a certain degree” (Bakhtin 208). Diverse historical and cultural elements from along the Silk Road come together in this performance genre, which can be considered the most representative of various possible stagings of the history and culture of the Silk Road journeys.In 1979, the Chinese state officials in Gansu Province commissioned the benchmark dance-drama Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, a spectacular theatrical dance-drama praising the pure and noble friendship which existed between the peoples of China and other countries in the Tang dynasty (618-907 C.E.). While its plot also revolves around the Dunhuang Caves and the life of a painter, staged at one of the most critical turning points in modern Chinese history, the work as a whole aims to present the state’s intention of re-establishing diplomatic ties with the outside world after the Cultural Revolution. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, it presents a nation’s journey abroad and home. To accomplish this goal, Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road introduces the fictional character Yunus, a wealthy Persian merchant who provides the audiences a vision of the historical figure of Peroz III, the last Sassanian prince, who after the Arab conquest of Iran in 651 C.E., found refuge in China. By incorporating scenes of ethnic and folk dances, the drama then stages the journey of painter Zhang’s daughter Yingniang to Persia (present-day Iran) and later, Yunus’s journey abroad to the Tang dynasty imperial court as the Persian Empire’s envoy.Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road, since its debut at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People on the first of October 1979 and shortly after at the Theatre La Scala in Milan, has been staged in more than twenty countries and districts, including France, Italy, Japan, Thailand, Russia, Latvia, Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan, and recently, in 2013, at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York.“The Road”: Staging the Journey TodayWithin the contemporary context of global interdependencies, performing arts have been used as strategic devices for social mobilisation and as a means to represent and perform modern national histories and foreign policies (Davis, Rees, Tian, Tuohy, Wong, David Y. H. Wu). The Silk Road has been chosen as the basis for these state-sponsored, extravagantly produced, and internationally staged contemporary dance programs. In 2008, the welcoming ceremony and artistic presentation at the Olympic Games in Beijing featured twenty apsara dancers and a Dunhuang bihua yuewu dancer with long ribbons, whose body was suspended in mid-air on a rectangular LED extension held by hundreds of performers; on the giant LED screen was a depiction of the ancient Silk Road.In March 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping introduced the initiatives “Silk Road Economic Belt” and “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” during his journeys abroad in Kazakhstan and Indonesia. These initiatives are now referred to as “One Belt, One Road.” The State Council lists in details the policies and implementation plans for this initiative on its official web page, www.gov.cn. In April 2013, the China Institute in New York launched a yearlong celebration, starting with "Dunhuang: Buddhist Art and the Gateway of the Silk Road" with a re-creation of one of the caves and a selection of artifacts from the site. In March 2015, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), China’s top economic planning agency, released a new action plan outlining key details of the “One Belt, One Road” initiative. Xi Jinping has made the program a centrepiece of both his foreign and domestic economic policies. One of the central economic strategies is to promote cultural industry that could enhance trades along the Silk Road.Encouraged by the “One Belt, One Road” policies, in March 2016, The Silk Princess premiered in Xi’an and was staged at the National Centre for the Performing Arts in Beijing the following July. While Dunhuang, My Dreamland and Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road were inspired by the Buddhist art found in Dunhuang, The Silk Princess, based on a story about a princess bringing silk and silkworm-breeding skills to the western regions of China in the Tang Dynasty (618-907) has a different historical origin. The princess's story was portrayed in a woodblock from the Tang Dynasty discovered by Sir Marc Aurel Stein, a British archaeologist during his expedition to Xinjiang (now Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region) in the early 19th century, and in a temple mural discovered during a 2002 Chinese-Japanese expedition in the Dandanwulike region. Figure 5: Poster of The Silk PrincessIn January 2016, the Shannxi Provincial Song and Dance Troupe staged The Silk Road, a new theatrical dance-drama. Unlike Dunhuang, My Dreamland, the newly staged dance-drama “centers around the ‘road’ and the deepening relationship merchants and travellers developed with it as they traveled along its course,” said Director Yang Wei during an interview with the author. According to her, the show uses seven archetypes—a traveler, a guard, a messenger, and so on—to present the stories that took place along this historic route. Unbounded by specific space or time, each of these archetypes embodies the foreign-travel experience of a different group of individuals, in a manner that may well be related to the social actors of globalised culture and of transnationalism today. Figure 6: Poster of The Silk RoadConclusionAs seen in Rain of Flowers along the Silk Road and Dunhuang, My Dreamland, staging the processes of Silk Road journeys has become a way of connecting the Chinese imagination of “home” with the Chinese imagination of “abroad.” Staging a nation’s heritage abroad on contemporary stages invites a new imagination of homeland, borders, and transnationalism. Once aestheticised through staged performances, such as that of the Dunhuang bihua yuewu, the historical and topological landscape of Dunhuang becomes a performed narrative, embodying the national heritage.The staging of Silk Road journeys continues, and is being developed into various forms, from theatrical dance-drama to digital exhibitions such as the Smithsonian’s Pure Land: Inside the Mogao Grottes at Dunhuang (Stromberg) and the Getty’s Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China's Silk Road (Sivak and Hood). They are sociocultural phenomena that emerge through interactions and negotiations among multiple actors and institutions to envision and enact a Chinese imagination of “journeying abroad” from and to the country.ReferencesBakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1982.Bohlman, Philip V. “World Music at the ‘End of History’.” Ethnomusicology 46 (2002): 1–32.Davis, Sara L.M. Song and Silence: Ethnic Revival on China’s Southwest Borders. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.Duan, Wenjie. “The History of Conservation of Mogao Grottoes.” International Symposium on the Conservation and Restoration of Cultural Property: The Conservation of Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes and the Related Studies. Eds. Kuchitsu and Nobuaki. Tokyo: Tokyo National Research Institute of Cultural Properties, 1997. 1–8.Faxian. A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms. Translated by James Legge. New York: Dover Publications, 1991.Herzfeld, Michael. Ours Once More: Folklore, Ideology, and the Making of Modern Greece. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.Kuang, Lanlan. Dunhuang bi hua yue wu: "Zhongguo jing guan" zai guo ji yu jing zhong de jian gou, chuan bo yu yi yi (Dunhuang Performing Arts: The Construction and Transmission of “China-scape” in the Global Context). Beijing: She hui ke xue wen xian chu ban she, 2016.Lam, Joseph S.C. State Sacrifice and Music in Ming China: Orthodoxy, Creativity and Expressiveness. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998.Mair, Victor. T’ang Transformation Texts: A Study of the Buddhist Contribution to the Rise of Vernacular Fiction and Drama in China. Cambridge, Mass.: Council on East Asian Studies, 1989.Pollack, Barbara. “China’s Desert Treasure.” ARTnews, December 2013. Sep. 2016 <http://www.artnews.com/2013/12/24/chinas-desert-treasure/>.Polo, Marco. The Travels of Marco Polo. Translated by Ronald Latham. Penguin Classics, 1958.Rees, Helen. Echoes of History: Naxi Music in Modern China. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.Shelemay, Kay Kaufman. “‘Historical Ethnomusicology’: Reconstructing Falasha Liturgical History.” Ethnomusicology 24 (1980): 233–258.Shi, Weixiang. Dunhuang lishi yu mogaoku yishu yanjiu (Dunhuang History and Research on Mogao Grotto Art). Lanzhou: Gansu jiaoyu chubanshe, 2002.Sima, Guang 司马光 (1019–1086) et al., comps. Zizhi tongjian 资治通鉴 (Comprehensive Mirror for the Aid of Government). Beijing: Guji chubanshe, 1957.Sima, Qian 司马迁 (145-86? B.C.E.) et al., comps. Shiji: Dayuan liezhuan 史记: 大宛列传 (Record of the Grand Historian: The Collective Biographies of Dayuan). Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959.Sivak, Alexandria and Amy Hood. “The Getty to Present: Cave Temples of Dunhuang: Buddhist Art on China’s Silk Road Organised in Collaboration with the Dunhuang Academy and the Dunhuang Foundation.” Getty Press Release. Sep. 2016 <http://news.getty.edu/press-materials/press-releases/cave-temples-dunhuang-buddhist-art-chinas-silk-road>.Stromberg, Joseph. “Video: Take a Virtual 3D Journey to Visit China's Caves of the Thousand Buddhas.” Smithsonian, December 2012. Sep. 2016 <http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/video-take-a-virtual-3d-journey-to-visit-chinas-caves-of-the-thousand-buddhas-150897910/?no-ist>.Tian, Qing. “Recent Trends in Buddhist Music Research in China.” British Journal of Ethnomusicology 3 (1994): 63–72.Tuohy, Sue M.C. “Imagining the Chinese Tradition: The Case of Hua’er Songs, Festivals, and Scholarship.” Ph.D. Dissertation. Indiana University, Bloomington, 1988.Wade, Bonnie C. Imaging Sound: An Ethnomusicological Study of Music, Art, and Culture in Mughal India. 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Introduction The genealogy of Feminist Standpoint Theory in the 1970s prioritised “locationality”, particularly the recognition of social and historical locations as valuable contribution to knowledge production. Pioneering figures such as Sandra Harding, Dorothy Smith, Patricia Hill Collins, Alison Jaggar, and Donna Haraway have argued that the oppressed must have some means (such as language, cultural practices) to enter the world of the oppressor in order to access some understanding of how the world works from the privileged perspective. In the essay “Meeting at the Edge of Fear: Theory on a World Scale”, the Australian social scientist Raewyn Connell explains that the production of feminist theory almost always comes from the global North. Connell critiques the hegemony of mainstream Northern feminism in her pyramidal model (59), showing how theory/knowledge is produced at the apex (global North) of a pyramid structure and “trickles down” (59) to the global South. Connell refers to a second model called mosaic epistemology which shows that multiple feminist ideologies across global North/South are juxtaposed against each other like tiles, with each specific culture making its own claims to validity.However, Nigerian feminist Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s reflection on the fluidity of culture in her essay “Fabricating Identities” (5) suggests that fixing knowledge as Northern and Southern—disparate, discrete, and rigidly structured tiles—is also problematic. Connell proposes a third model called solidarity-based epistemology which involves mutual learning and critiquing with a focus on solidarity across differences. However, this is impractical in implementation especially given that feminist nomenclature relies on problematic terms such as “international”, “global North/South”, “transnational”, and “planetary” to categorise difference, spatiality, and temporality, often creating more distance than reciprocal exchange. Geographical specificity can be too limiting, but we also need to acknowledge that it is geographical locationality which becomes disadvantageous to overcome racial, cultural, and gender biases — and here are few examples.Nomenclatures: Global-North and Global South ParadigmThe global North/South terminology differentiating the two regions according to means of trade and relative wealth emerged from the Brandt Report’s delineation of the North as wealthy and South as impoverished in 1980s. Initially, these terms were a welcome repudiation of the hierarchical nomenclature of “developed” and “developing” nations. Nevertheless, the categories of North and South are problematic because of increased socio-economic heterogeneity causing erasure of local specificities without reflecting microscopic conflicts among feminists within the global North and the global South. Some feminist terms such as “Third World feminism” (Narayan), “global feminism” (Morgan), or “local feminisms” (Basu) aim to centre women's movements originating outside the West or in the postcolonial context, other labels attempt to making feminism more inclusive or reflective of cross-border linkages. These include “transnational feminism” (Grewal and Kaplan) and “feminism without borders” (Mohanty). In the 1980s, Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality garnered attention in the US along with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which raised feminists’ awareness of educational, healthcare, and financial disparities among women and the experiences of marginalised people across the globe, leading to an interrogation of the aims and purposes of mainstream feminism. In general, global North feminism refers to white middle class feminist movements further expanded by concerns about civil rights and contemporary queer theory while global South feminism focusses on decolonisation, economic justice, and disarmament. However, the history of colonialism demonstrates that this paradigm is inadequate because the oppression and marginalisation of Black, Indigenous, and Queer activists have been avoided purposely in the homogenous models of women’s oppression depicted by white radical and liberal feminists. A poignant example is from Audre Lorde’s personal account:I wheeled my two-year-old daughter in a shopping cart through a supermarket in Eastchester in 1967, and a little white girl riding past in her mother’s cart calls out excitedly, ‘oh look, Mommy, a baby maid!’ And your mother shushes you, but does not correct you, and so fifteen years later, at a conference on racism, you can still find that story humorous. But I hear your laughter is full of terror and disease. (Lorde)This exemplifies how the terminology global North/South is a problem because there are inequities within the North that are parallel to the division of power and resources between North and South. Additionally, Susan Friedman in Planetary Modernisms observes that although the terms “Global North” and “Global South” are “rhetorically spatial” they are “as geographically imprecise and ideologically weighted as East/West” because “Global North” signifies “modern global hegemony” and “Global South” signifies the “subaltern, … —a binary construction that continues to place the West at the controlling centre of the plot” (Friedman, 123).Focussing on research-activism debate among US feminists, Sondra Hale takes another tack, emphasising that feminism in the global South is more pragmatic than the theory-oriented feminist discourse of the North (Hale). Just as the research-scholarship binary implies myopic assumption that scholarship is a privileged activity, Hale’s observations reveal a reductive assumption in the global North and global South nomenclature that feminism at the margins is theoretically inadequate. In other words, recognising the “North” as the site of theoretical processing is a euphemism for Northern feminists’ intellectual supremacy and the inferiority of Southern feminist praxis. To wit, theories emanating from the South are often overlooked or rejected outright for not aligning with Eurocentric framings of knowledge production, thereby limiting the scope of feminist theories to those that originate in the North. For example, while discussing Indigenous women’s craft-autobiography, the standard feminist approach is to apply Susan Sontag’s theory of gender and photography to these artefacts even though it may not be applicable given the different cultural, social, and class contexts in which they are produced. Consequently, Moroccan feminist Fatima Mernissi’s Islamic methodology (Mernissi), the discourse of land rights, gender equality, kinship, and rituals found in Bina Agarwal’s A Field of One’s Own, Marcia Langton’s “Grandmothers’ Law”, and the reflection on military intervention are missing from Northern feminist theoretical discussions. Moreover, “outsiders within” feminist scholars fit into Western feminist canonical requirements by publishing their works in leading Western journals or seeking higher degrees from Western institutions. In the process, Northern feminists’ intellectual hegemony is normalised and regularised. An example of the wealth of the materials outside of mainstream Western feminist theories may be found in the work of Girindrasekhar Bose, a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, founder of the Indian Psychoanalytic Society and author of the book Concept of Repression (1921). Bose developed the “vagina envy theory” long before the neo-Freudian psychiatrist Karen Horney proposed it, but it is largely unknown in the West. Bose’s article “The Genesis and Adjustment of the Oedipus Wish” discarded Freud’s theory of castration and explained how in the Indian cultural context, men can cherish an unconscious desire to bear a child and to be castrated, implicitly overturning Freud’s correlative theory of “penis envy.” Indeed, the case of India shows that the birth of theory can be traced back to as early as eighth century when study of verbal ornamentation and literary semantics based on the notion of dbvani or suggestion, and the aesthetic theory of rasa or "sentiment" is developed. If theory means systematic reasoning and conceptualising the structure of thought, methods, and epistemology, it exists in all cultures but unfortunately non-Western theory is largely invisible in classroom courses.In the recent book Queer Activism in India, Naisargi Dev shows that the theory is rooted in activism. Similarly, in her essay “Seed and Earth”, Leela Dube reveals how Eastern theories are distorted as they are Westernised. For instance, the “Purusha-Prakriti” concept in Hinduism where Purusha stands for pure consciousness and Prakriti stands for the entire phenomenal world is almost universally misinterpreted in terms of Western binary oppositions as masculine consciousness and feminine creative principle which has led to disastrous consequences including the legitimisation of male control over female sexuality. Dube argues how heteropatriarchy has twisted the Purusha-Prakriti philosophy to frame the reproductive metaphor of the male seed germinating in the female field for the advantage of patrilineal agrarian economies and to influence a homology between reproductive metaphors and cultural and institutional sexism (Dube 22-24). Attempting to reverse such distortions, ecofeminist Vandana Shiva rejects dualistic and exploitative “contemporary Western views of nature” (37) and employs the original Prakriti-Purusha cosmology to construct feminist vision and environmental ethics. Shiva argues that unlike Cartesian binaries where nature or Prakriti is inert and passive, in Hindu Philosophy, Purusha and Prakriti are inseparable and inviolable (Shiva 37-39). She refers to Kalika Purana where it is explained how rivers and mountains have a dual nature. “A river is a form of water, yet is has a distinct body … . We cannot know, when looking at a lifeless shell, that it contains a living being. Similarly, within the apparently inanimate rivers and mountains there dwells a hidden consciousness. Rivers and mountains take the forms they wish” (38).Scholars on the periphery who never migrated to the North find it difficult to achieve international audiences unless they colonise themselves, steeping their work in concepts and methods recognised by Western institutions and mimicking the style and format that western feminist journals follow. The best remedy for this would be to interpret border relations and economic flow between countries and across time through the prism of gender and race, an idea similar to what Sarah Radcliffe, Nina Laurie and Robert Andolina have called the “transnationalization of gender” (160).Migration between Global North and Global SouthReformulation of feminist epistemology might reasonably begin with a focus on migration and gender politics because international and interregional migration have played a crucial role in the production of feminist theories. While some white mainstream feminists acknowledge the long history of feminist imperialism, they need to be more assertive in centralising non-Western theories, scholarship, and institutions in order to resist economic inequalities and racist, patriarchal global hierarchies of military and organisational power. But these possibilities are stymied by migrants’ “de-skilling”, which maintains unequal power dynamics: when migrants move from the global South to global North, many end up in jobs for which they are overqualified because of their cultural, educational, racial, or religious alterity.In the face of a global trend of movement from South to North in search of a “better life”, visual artist Naiza Khan chose to return to Pakistan after spending her childhood in Lebanon before being trained at the University of Oxford. Living in Karachi over twenty years, Khan travels globally, researching, delivering lectures, and holding exhibitions on her art work. Auj Khan’s essay “Peripheries of Thought and Practise in Naiza Khan’s Work” argues: “Khan seems to be going through a perpetual diaspora within an ownership of her hybridity, without having really left any of her abodes. This agitated space of modern hybrid existence is a rich and ripe ground for resolution and understanding. This multiple consciousness is an edge for anyone in that space, which could be effectively made use of to establish new ground”. Naiza Khan’s works embrace loss or nostalgia and a sense of choice and autonomy within the context of unrestricted liminal geographical boundaries.Early work such as “Chastity Belt,” “Heavenly Ornaments”, “Dream”, and “The Skin She Wears” deal with the female body though Khan resists the “feminist artist” category, essentially because of limited Western associations and on account of her paradoxical, diasporic subjectivity: of “the self and the non-self, the doable and the undoable and the anxiety of possibility and choice” (Khan Webpage). Instead, Khan theorises “gender” as “personal sexuality”. The symbolic elements in her work such as corsets, skirts, and slips, though apparently Western, are purposely destabilised as she engages in re-constructing the cartography of the body in search of personal space. In “The Wardrobe”, Khan establishes a path for expressing women’s power that Western feminism barely acknowledges. Responding to the 2007 Islamabad Lal Masjid siege by militants, Khan reveals the power of the burqa to protect Muslim men by disguising their gender and sexuality; women escape the Orientalist gaze. For Khan, home is where her art is—beyond the global North and South dichotomy.In another example of de-centring Western feminist theory, the Indian-British sitar player Anoushka Shankar, who identifies as a radical pro-feminist, in her recent musical album “Land of Gold” produces what Chilla Bulbeck calls “braiding at the borderlands”. As a humanitarian response to the trauma of displacement and the plight of refugees, Shankar focusses on women giving birth during migration and the trauma of being unable to provide stability and security to their children. Grounded in maternal humility, Shankar’s album, composed by artists of diverse background as Akram Khan, singer Alev Lenz, and poet Pavana Reddy, attempts to dissolve boundaries in the midst of chaos—the dislocation, vulnerability and uncertainty experienced by migrants. The album is “a bit of this, and a bit of that” (borrowing Salman Rushdie’s definition of migration in Satanic Verses), both in terms of musical genre and cultural identities, which evokes emotion and subjective fluidity. An encouraging example of truly transnational feminist ethics, Shankar’s album reveals the chasm between global North and global South represented in the tension of a nascent friendship between a white, Western little girl and a migrant refugee child. Unlike mainstream feminism, where migration is often sympathetically feminised and exotified—or, to paraphrase bell hooks, difference is commodified (hooks 373) — Shankar’s album simultaneously exhibits regional, national, and transnational elements. The album inhabits multiple borderlands through musical genres, literature and politics, orality and text, and ethnographic and intercultural encounters. The message is: “the body is a continent / But may your heart always remain the sea" (Shankar). The human rights advocate and lawyer Randa Abdel-Fattah, in her autobiographical novel Does My Head Look Big in This?, depicts herself as “colourful adjectives” (such as “darkies”, “towel-heads”, or the “salami eaters”), painful identities imposed on her for being a Muslim woman of colour. These ultimately empower her to embrace her identity as a Palestinian-Egyptian-Australian Muslim writer (Abdel-Fattah 359). In the process, Abdel-Fattah reveals how mainstream feminism participates in her marginalisation: “You’re constantly made to feel as you’re commenting as a Muslim, and somehow your views are a little bit inferior or you’re somehow a little bit more brainwashed” (Abdel-Fattah, interviewed in 2015).With her parental roots in the global South (Egyptian mother and Palestinian father), Abdel-Fattah was born and brought up in the global North, Australia (although geographically located in global South, Australia is categorised as global North for being above the world average GDP per capita) where she embraced her faith and religious identity apparently because of Islamophobia:I refuse to be an apologist, to minimise this appalling state of affairs… While I'm sick to death, as a Muslim woman, of the hypocrisy and nonsensical fatwas, I confess that I'm also tired of white women who think the answer is flashing a bit of breast so that those "poor," "infantilised" Muslim women can be "rescued" by the "enlightened" West - as if freedom was the sole preserve of secular feminists. (Abdel-Fattah, "Ending Oppression")Abdel-Fattah’s residency in the global North while advocating for justice and equality for Muslim women in both the global North and South is a classic example of the mutual dependency between the feminists in global North and global South, and the need to recognise and resist neoliberal policies applied in by the North to the South. In her novel, sixteen-year-old Amal Mohamed chooses to become a “full-time” hijab wearer in an elite school in Melbourne just after the 9/11 tragedy, the Bali bombings which killed 88 Australians, and the threat by Algerian-born Abdel Nacer Benbrika, who planned to attack popular places in Sydney and Melbourne. In such turmoil, Amal’s decision to wear the hijab amounts to more than resistance to Islamophobia: it is a passionate search for the true meaning of Islam, an attempt to embrace her hybridity as an Australian Muslim girl and above all a step towards seeking spiritual self-fulfilment. As the novel depicts Amal’s challenging journey amidst discouraging and painful, humiliating experiences, the socially constructed “bloody confusing identity hyphens” collapse (5). What remains is the beautiful veil that stands for Amal’s multi-valence subjectivity. The different shades of her hijab reflect different moods and multiple “selves” which are variously tentative, rebellious, romantic, argumentative, spiritual, and ambitious: “I am experiencing a new identity, a new expression of who I am on the inside” (25).In Griffith Review, Randa-Abdel Fattah strongly criticises the book Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks, a Wall-Street Journal reporter who travelled from global North to the South to cover Muslim women in the Middle East. Recognising the liberal feminist’s desire to explore the Orient, Randa-Abdel calls the book an example of feminist Orientalism because of the author’s inability to understand the nuanced diversity in the Muslim world, Muslim women’s purposeful downplay of agency, and, most importantly, Brooks’s inevitable veil fetishism in her trip to Gaza and lack of interest in human rights violations of Palestinian women or their lack of access to education and health services. Though Brooks travelled from Australia to the Middle East, she failed to develop partnerships with the women she met and distanced herself from them. This underscores the veracity of Amal’s observation in Abdel Fattah’s novel: “It’s mainly the migrants in my life who have inspired me to understand what it means to be an Aussie” (340). It also suggests that the transnational feminist ethic lies not in the global North and global South paradigm but in the fluidity of migration between and among cultures rather than geographical boundaries and military borders. All this argues that across the imperial cartography of discrimination and oppression, women’s solidarity is only possible through intercultural and syncretistic negotiation that respects the individual and the community.ReferencesAbdel-Fattah, Randa. Does My Head Look Big in This? Sydney: Pan MacMillan Australia, 2005.———. “Ending Oppression in the Middle East: A Muslim Feminist Call to Arms.” ABC Religion and Ethics, 29 April 2013. <http://www.abc.net.au/religion/articles/2013/04/29/3747543.htm>.———. “On ‘Nine Parts Of Desire’, by Geraldine Brooks.” Griffith Review. <https://griffithreview.com/on-nine-parts-of-desire-by-geraldine-brooks/>.Agarwal, Bina. A Field of One’s Own: Gender and Land Rights in South Asia. 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