Aug 2026· Nations and Nationalism· 0 citations· 63 references
Abstract
There is a longstanding and global history of fierce opposition to
internal
migration across regions. Yet despite the salience of this issue, there is a relative dearth of scholarship on the politics around domestic population movements. This paper critically engages three interrelated concepts in conversation: nativism, sons of the soil and autochthony. This comparative conceptual analysis considers how varied expressions of hostility towards internal migrants can manifest across diverse geographical and sociopolitical contexts in the Global North and Global South. The analysis highlights the need to bridge parallel literatures and empirical worlds as this reveals the diverse ways in which internal migration dynamics can fuel contentious politics of belonging. Though conceptually distinct, we argue these concepts similarly describe how exclusionary language targets internal migrants by emphasizing a hierarchy of belonging based on place‐based identities when ‘natives’ fear future marginalization vis‐à‐vis migrant ‘outsiders’.
Assamese identity, as it is understood today, is not a static or primordial category but a historically layered construct shaped by successive waves of migration, statecraft, religious reform, colonial intervention, and postcolonial politics. This paper traces the evolution of Assamese identity from the ancient kingdom of Kamarupa through the six-hundred-year Ahom polity, the socio-religious transformation initiated by the Neo-Vaishnavite movement of Srimanta Sankardeva, the disruptions of colonial conquest and administrative reorganization, the consolidation of linguistic nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and the turbulence of the Assam Movement and subsequent citizenship debates. It argues that Assamese identity has always been a negotiated and composite formation, built through the assimilation of diverse ethnic, linguistic, and religious communities under shared political and cultural institutions, even as this inclusive core was periodically contested by narrower ethnolinguistic definitions. Understanding this layered history is essential to making sense of the region's present-day debates over language, migration, and belonging.
Satrishna Bonia· International journal of res...· 0 citations
This paper builds on two trajectories of our recent scholarship: (1) the study of indigenous motifs in Priestly and pre-Priestly literature, and (2) an examination of Zionist and scholarly debates in the formative years of the State of Israel concerning a Jewish ‘right to the land’. The ancestral traditions in Genesis articulate belonging to the land through genealogies, covenants, treaties, and shared ancestry rather than through conquest, defining Israel’s identity in relation to surrounding peoples rather than in opposition to them. These traditions, preserved especially in the Priestly materials of Genesis, emerged in contexts of dispossession and exile, where aspirations for unconditional belonging existed alongside forms of coexistence with neighboring groups. It is therefore illuminating to consider how these traditions have been received, adapted, and reinterpreted within modern Zionist scholarship.
G. Kugler, Mark G. Brett· Journal for the Study of the...· 0 citations
Abstract This editorial introduction presents a thematic issue of Sociologias devoted to diaspora, identity, and inter-group relations in post-Soviet and Central Asian societies. The issue departs from conventional treatments of diaspora as a marginal social condition, repositioning it instead as a lens through which to examine questions of belonging, civic life, cultural reproduction, and economic security. Four empirical studies are brought together around a shared concern with the social consequences of population movement in societies shaped by Soviet legacies, post-1991 border reconfigurations, and ongoing demographic pressures. The first study examines interethnic tolerance among youth in Kyrgyz-Uzbek border zones; the second analyses a state-sponsored civic identity model implemented through higher education in Kyrgyzstan; the third investigates how emigration, aging, and low birth rates compound economic vulnerabilities in Armenia relative to its South Caucasus neighbours; and the fourth conducts a comparative analysis of Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Karakalpak epic traditions as mechanisms of folk pedagogy and collective memory transmission. Together, the contributions illuminate how diaspora operates simultaneously as a political, pedagogical, cultural, and demographic phenomenon. The issue calls for further comparative scholarship engaging with societies underrepresented in mainstream sociological literature.
I. Tsyrfa, Venera Sabirova· Sociologias· 0 citations
This article examines the peculiar conjuncture of decolonial theory and contemporary far‐right ideology. It argues that their shared fixation on the dualism of native and settler is immanent to the development of advanced capitalism, particularly the sharpening of its contradictory tendency to undermine labour as the source of value, and to the crisis‐driven accumulation of fictitious capital over recent decades. Mahmood Mamdani's critique of the settler–native binary and Moishe Postone's critique of romantic anti‐capitalism together illuminate how such nativist ideology privileges the ‘concrete’ over the ‘abstract’ — use value over exchange value — thereby reproducing an ideology that remains blind to the concrete historical totality from which this dualism arises and that can only flourish in the absence of dialectical mediation.
Aylin Bademsoy, Neil Larsen· Development and Change· 0 citations
This paper takes as its centerpoint the critical category of “internal colonialism,” an important concept in both social movements and in sociology across different contexts. We trace a world‐historical genealogy of the concept, focusing on North America (the United States), Latin America (Mexico and Bolivia), and South Asia (India), evaluating its epistemic‐political values for critical theory, social research, and a politics of liberation today. While many scholars consider the concept passé, we argue, following scholars such as Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, that internal colonialism is a key analytical framework that continues to be relevant. We emphasize three points. First, against internal colonialism formulations that characterize it as a US theory of race grounded upon debates of the 1960s–70s, we note its internationalist and transnational dimensions, and locate its significance in both framing struggles for self‐determination and in critiques of the modern territorial state (national and/or imperial) and uneven development. Second, we locate internal colonialism as a category that can be brought into conversation with settler‐colonial studies, the “decolonial turn,” and racial capitalism—an encouraging trend we already observe in recent literature. Third, we recenter internal colonialism's significance in formulating a historically grounded, anti‐capitalist, antiauthoritarian framework that eschews a liberal politics of multiculturalism and a neat Global North/South divide, calling instead for a transcalar methodology.
Upasana Bibha, Agustín Laó-Montes· Sociological forum (Randolph...· 0 citations
South Africa’s socio-historical context is shaped by the country’s various phases of colonial domination: Dutch then British and finally, the institutionalisation of strict racial segregation through apartheid. This was followed by democratic governance from 1994 to the present day. Within postcolonial literary discourse, racism and its related practices of stereotyping and “othering” remain prominent themes. These concerns are especially pronounced in literary representations of Johannesburg, a city that has continually transformed alongside South Africa’s shifting political regimes, functioning as a critical site for the persistence and reconfiguration of racial ideology across historical periods. While existing scholarship on Herman Charles Bosman has largely focused on the immanent theme of racism mainly in his bushveld short stories, his city writings, with the exception of his novel, Willemsdorp, have received little critical attention. Addressing this gap, this study employs a postcolonial theoretical lens to offer a comparative analysis of how racialised perceptions shape urban experience in Johannesburg as depicted by two South African writers working in distinct yet connected historical moments: Bosman’s writing during the British dominion years of South Africa and into the early years of apartheid (1920–1951), and Ivan Vladislavić’s fiction published between 1996 and 2006. The diachronic comparison reveals the authors’ shared socio-political concerns, their yearning for transformation and demonstrates how racialised modes of seeing, entrenched during colonial and apartheid rule, persist despite the shift in South Africa’s political order.
Farzanah Loonate· Journal of Literary Studies· 0 citations
