Shyamal Kataria

While students of nationalism, ardent primordialists aside, will be fully aware that all nations are, at their core, artificial constructs, there is nonetheless an implicit acceptance that some nations are more artificial than others. To suggest that certain nations are more artificial than others is not, on its own, an absurd claim, providing, of course, that appropriate criteria are used to measure this “artificiality” against. One country that has had to bear such charges is India, namely because, it is said, its people are far too diverse to be realistically considered members of a singular nation and because it lacks sufficient antiquity as a nation. This article will seek to respond to such charges by providing a glimpse into India’s past and ancient belief systems that many laypeople remain ignorant of, the knowledge of which will significantly help to challenge the claim that India is nothing but an artificial construct.

Purpose: This study seeks to assess the adherence to international law in the 2001 U.S.-led military intervention in Afghanistan, prompted by the September 11 attacks. Additionally, it aims to investigate the impact of the Greater Middle East Initiative on U.S. policy towards the Islamic World, specifically Afghanistan, providing insights into legal intricacies and broader consequences. Theoretical Framework: This article engages in discussions among Western scholars on the Afghanistan war and U.S. military involvement but distinguishes itself by incorporating insights from Middle Eastern scholars. It aims to enrich the discourse by integrating perspectives from within the Middle Eastern scholarly community, offering a comprehensive view of these complex subjects. Methodology: Employing historical, descriptive, and in-depth analytical research methods, this study examines events around September 11, 2001, providing essential context for the subsequent U.S. military intervention. Descriptive methods offer a detailed account of the post-9/11 shift in U.S. policy, while in-depth analytical methods scrutinize legal dilemmas arising from the intervention, contributing to a comprehensive understanding of historical context, U.S. policy decisions, and legal complexities. Results: The results and discussion section explores the historical evolution of U.S. military engagement in 21st-century Afghanistan, analyzing its strategic shifts and the Taliban's adaptation to guerrilla warfare. It critically evaluates the international legal aspects of the Afghan War, assessing the legitimacy of the U.S.-led military intervention based on UN conventions, historical precedents, and key principles such as the right to legitimate defense, urgency, and proportionality. Conclusions: The aftermath of September 11, 2001, marked a transformative moment in U.S. policy towards Afghanistan and the broader Middle East, leading to the consequential Afghan War. Despite its geopolitical significance, the absence of explicit UN Security Council authorization prompts a critical examination of the war's legitimacy, revealing lapses in meeting criteria for the right to individual or collective legitimate defense and urging a reevaluation of established narratives in international relations and global politics.

The partition of India in 1947 was, and undoubtedly remains, the most turbulent episode in the recent history of the subcontinent. Of course, the reading of Partition history, be it through its humanitarian or political dimension, is anything but uniform. It is observable that a group narrative of Partition exists for each community directly affected by the event – that is to say, Hindu, Muslim and Sikh respectively. What this article intends to do is focus in on one of these groups – the Sikhs, by demonstrating how their group narrative of Partition has evolved in the period since 1947.

Humans have, since time immemorial, contested over territory and, given its connection to resource access, attached great importance thus. Contestation over territory, especially when it is of significant scale, typically occurs via group-level articulation rather than individual. Such claims are all too often rooted in, legitimised by, and resisted on the grounds of, the ethnicity of the group(s) in question—hence ethno-national conflict. Indeed, conflict between ethnic groups, be it violent or non-violent, while not a constant, has been a frequent feature of our modern age. This article aims to identify the key contributory factors that sit behind ethno-national conflict. Particular attention will be paid to factors spanning across categories that hold a considerable amount of explanatory sway, namely, structural, political, and economic. However, light attention will also be given to ‘other factors’ such as those that fall within environmental and cultural categories. For all the contributory factors identified, supportive empirical evidence will be used to demonstrate their relative value.

The Khalistan Movement was an armed secessionist struggle led by the Sikhs of Punjab, in northern India. Perhaps the most haunting memories associated with the insurgency relate to the Indian Army’s brutal raid upon the ‘sanctum-sanctorum’ of the Sikh faith, the Golden Temple complex in Amritsar. While the support for Sikh political separatism pre-dates India’s independence, many scholars, albeit somewhat synthetically, attempting to place a fixed timeframe around the Khalistan movement tend to commence their chronology of events from 1981 and end them in 1993. This is largely because it was during this time period that Punjab endured a heightened level of Sikh militancy. What this article aims to do is to carefully detail the significant events that occurred during that period.

The term ‘refugee’ – defined as someone who has been forced to flee his or her country because of persecution, war or violence – carries with it many connotations, ranging from ‘victim’, ‘helpless’, ‘destitute’, on the sympathetic side, to a ‘societal burden’ or ‘bogus’ on the more cynical. In this vein, the link between refugees and the phenomenon known as ethno-national conflict, for the most part, seems a clear one – principally that refugees are the victims, or by-products, of ethno-national conflict in their homelands. This linkage is by no means a controversial one, nor one that this paper seeks to dispute. Rather, what this paper sets out to do is convey that the relationship between refugees and ethno-national conflict is by no means one-directional, by demonstrating that the arrival of refugees, specifically those who had faced ethnic persecution in their homelands, actually generates, under certain conditions, subsequent ethno-national conflict.

Ethnicity, very much like gender, has long been viewed an inescapable facet of our social reality. All humans have an ethnicity, or at least are ascribed one throughout of lives. As such, there is a huge amount of scholarly intrigue attached to ethnicity from across both the biological and social sciences. In this respect, much of the focus has been on explaining how and why ethnicities form and persist through time. Two principal schools of thought on ethnicity are primordialism and instrumentalism. This article aims to impartially review and, where possible, scrutinise both perspectives in an attempt to arrive at a more precise and considered understanding of ethnicity.

The Khalistan movement was an armed secessionist struggle carried out by the Sikhs of Punjab, northern India, which spanned the period between 1981 and 1993. In parallel with other such insurgencies around the world, it is evident that the Khalistan movement had a strong ideological underpinning which not only helped to fuel its rise, but also helped to sustain it throughout its tenure. In this regard, the reference point for ideological justification was very much the past experiences and episodes of the Sikh community, or, to be precise, their ‘historical memory’ of these. This article focuses its attention on identifying, describing and interrogating the strength of the ideological justifications that were extracted from Sikh historical memory in support of Khalistan.