When the British Crown imposed rule on India by force (and through the East India Company), it reordered the subcontinent in many profound ways that persist to this day. The very act of determining citizenship, where the state sets rules to decide who is and isn’t legally allowed to live where they are based on documented claims of residency, can be traced back to colonial rule.

In “Deprivation of Citizenship as Colonial Violence: Deracination and Dispossession in Assam,” authors Rudabeh Shahid and Joe Turner turn to Assam, a northeastern province of India, as a case study for how the categories of citizenship are used to inflict material harm.

To ground their study in the present, the authors open by talking about the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), passed in December 2019 by the Indian parliament, which amended the National Register of Citizenship (NRC) in Assam.

“The registry aims to catalog ‘genuine’ inhabitants of the state and effectively purge Assam of so-called illegal migrants,” the authors write. The CAA is a tool to grant citizenship to Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Jain, Parsi, and Christian communities. “However, what the CAA effectively did was focus on the dispossession of rights on Muslim communities who were left off the list of protected religions and turned into ‘illegal migrants.’”

When encountered by the British, Assam was full of Indigenously-tended and maintained forests and fields, leading British settlers and colonists to determine that the land was mostly wasteland, and thus ripe for reorganization. “In order to make the land ‘productive,’ the colonial state introduced an extractive model of tea plantations in Assam and a system of forced and waged labor, networking the region into the imperial economy,” the authors write.

This forced and wage labor included locals pressed into service, as well as people from diverse communities brought together in competition by British-driven movements. These categories became enshrined in the laws of British rule and then, following the 1947 partition of British colonies into India and Pakistan, became national identities.

“What we argue is that in acts of deprivation that make ‘citizens’ into ‘migrants’ — or more often ‘illegal migrants’ and stateless subjects — this relies upon the racialized conditions under which it becomes possible and thinkable to deprive someone of their rights,” write the authors. “Attempts to categorize the demographic makeup of the state were focused on delineating those ‘original inhabitants’ from ‘outsiders’ while erasing the economic and historical conditions of colonization and imperialism that created population movements.”

Colonization, partition, war, and now exclusionary rules imposed by the national government all build toward the same purpose. Citizenship is seen not as a right of every person, but as a privilege that can be pulled away from those deemed outsiders or undesirable.

“Because of the colonial logic underpinning citizenship, altered rather than fully transformed by the postcolonial state, certain populations are never recognized within codes of citizenship in the first place. The recent NRC and CAA create hierarchies of belonging and illegality that are already partially rooted in Indian citizenship,” conclude the authors.

Johanna Mendelson Forman stewed over the role of cooking in wartime. Speaking with residents of Ukraine, she found that dining out in Kyiv became an act of solidarity and a promise of normalcy, compared to the brutal scarcity of spring 2022. “Shelling means that everyone in Ukraine is always in danger. It also means that the work schedules are unpredictable,” Mariya Ruban, a food writer and publicist, told Forman. The air raids, drone strikes, and missiles have all made life in the capital less safe, but with the front far from the city, people are still making do, sharing what joy and routine they can together between air raid warnings.

Halima Gikandi observed Nigeria’s presidential election, where tens of millions of voters took to the polls. Before the election, Gikandi spoke with many young voters who were politically activated by 2020’s #EndSARS protests against police brutality, and who have flocked to support a strong third-party challenge from a labor candidate. New technologies, like biometrics, promised greater accountability in voting, but old forms of sabotage persist. “Voter Anthony Ogwo said that armed men had accosted voters at his polling station,” reported Gikandi. “He said the men took the presidential ballot box, and dumped their completed paper ballots into a nearby gutter. He pointed to a pile of dirty, torn ballots littering the ground.”

Kristina Jovanovski reported from southeastern Turkey, where survivors of the 7.8 earthquake on Feb. 6, 2023, are struggling to find shelter and get their basic needs met. “We need everything in order to build a new life. I don’t have anything left. I don’t even have salt,” Zeynep Koca, a 49-year-old mother of two, told her. The disaster tore away shelter for millions in the affected area, staining existing resources and incoming aid, while threatening new disasters. Without the basics of sanitation provided by homes, diseases can spread in the quake’s wake. Looming behind the disaster is the memory of Turkey’s 1999 earthquake, and an open question of where specific tax funds to prepare for the next quake went.

Simply in awe of the wordsmithing on display here.

International blockbusters created shared metaphors for heroism and new cross-cultural frontiers for cringe.

Spinning import barriers and a crashed economy as a return to local traditions isn’t just ham-fisted, it’s sausage-fingered.

Once fired, explosive rounds can live a strange unlife, waiting decades or even centuries before striking again.

In the cold void of virtual space, everyone can see you meme.

The most haunting distance between two points is a straight line on a curved surface.

The grainier the photo, the more convinced I am that it is historical proof, or at least some kind of art I don’t get.