Robina Mohammad

Marginalisation, Islamism and The Production of the 'Other's' 'Other'

Drawing on the findings of an empirical study of working-class Pakistani Muslims in southern England, this article considers the links between marginalisation, the politics of identity and the position of Pakistani Muslim women. The author shows how marginalisation (emerging from a nexus of oppressions) reinforces group identity, how women are made central to group identity, and how this centrality serves to legitimate their disempowerment. In this way the border that is erected to contain the group is dependent on internal divisions, the existence of which contradicts the notion of group homogeneity.

Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani (Yet the Heart Remains Indian): Bollywood, the ‘Homeland’ Nation-State, and the Diaspora

Hindi cinema offers a means of examining the evolving geographies of the multisited, multinational Indian diaspora and its relationship to the ‘homeland’. The paper seeks to elaborate an understanding of Bollywoods visibility in the new diaspora as a response to political, economic, and technological transformations that have taken place in India. It maps these shifts and the reconfigured relationship between the Indian diaspora in the UK and its imagined ‘homeland’: the relationship between territory, location, and identity. The paper considers how womens bodies are deeply implicated in—indeed, essential to—the negotiation of these shifts.

Shards and Stages: Migrant Lives, Power, and Space Viewed from Doha, Qatar

Qatar has been projecting power through a series of spectacles, investments, and interventions. These include the new Doha skyline; ownership of the tallest building in Europe (Londons Shard); Al Jazeera media; involvement in the Libyan and Syrian civil wars; and, importantly, hosting global events such as the 2022 soccer World Cup. Qatar also holds 14 percent of all known natural gas reserves and boasts the worlds highest per-capita income. Our article relates Qatars global visibility and presence to processes of power and accumulation in its capital city, Doha. We do this through a focus on migrant workers who, in this highly urbanized state, make up 89 percent of the population. Their lives and labors provide a window on the relationships between different stages of power and accumulation: the spectacle and the work and labor that sustain it. Intersecting geographies of foreign labor and the urban spectacle require scrutiny through sharpened critical and postcolonial lenses on diversity and urban modernity.

Bloodlands: critical geographical responses to the 22 July 2011 events in Norway

These interventions reflect on the crimes that took place on a summers day in Norway on 22 July 2011. But they are less about the figure of their perpetrator (whose motives remain at the centre of legal and psychiatric investigation by the Norwegian authorities) than provisional attempts to place the violence within broader interrogations of the geographies of extremism in contemporary Europe and elsewhere. Our chosen titleö`̀ Bloodlandsöwas intended to evoke both the events of that summers day in Norway and the wider imagined geographies of the European extreme right, which are based on dreams of demographic purification and the restoration of an idealized `original Europe. `Bloodlands is also the term used by the historian Timothy Snyder (2010) to refer to the region stretching from Poznan to Smolensk that suffered a series of occupations and invasions in the 1930s and 1940s and where, he argues, murder and genocide were not incidental consequences of Nazi and Soviet policies, but central to their logics. For Snyder these bloodlands are not simply a metaphor; they describe historical geographies of genocide that the end of the Cold War in Europe has rendered more visibleöand hence nearer to the European present. Snyders book is part of a wider and ongoing historical revaluation of the Second World War that has foregrounded the multiple geographical dimensions and sites of that conflict, as well as its continuing resonances in the present (see also Stone, 2012). When set against the post-1989 `unfreezing of the past in Central and Eastern Europe, including the 1990s Balkan wars (echoing those in Cyprus in 1974 and the 1920s expulsions and pogroms that accompanied the collapse of the Ottoman Empire), Anders Breiviks manifesto Bloodlands: critical geographical responses to the 22 July 2011 events in NorwayÀ

Pakistan—An Ungovernable Space?

In a recent initiative targeting Muslim extremism in Britain, Communities Secretary Hazel Blears referred to ungoverned spaces, actual and virtual social spaces that facilitate the radicalisation of Pakistani Muslim youth in Britain. By extension, in the West in political and popular constructions Pakistan is also made intelligible as an ungovernable space, with the rise in conflicts and violence in Pakistan and the perceived lawlessness of its tribal areas.