This chapter explores denationalization, focusing on Indonesian foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs). Post-9/11 and during the Arab Spring, Western democracies tightened border control to combat terrorism, enabling the stripping of citizenship from involved individuals. Denationalization, via law or public-authority decisions, emerged as a contentious counter-terrorism tool. Indonesia, as a Muslim-majority Southeast Asian nation, partially embraced denationalization, refusing to repatriate Indonesian FTFs. This aligns with global security concerns but raises statelessness questions. The chapter examines denationalization’s legal framework, international obligations, and the blurred line between de jure and de facto statelessness. Critics argue that disproportionately applying denationalization to Muslims undermines human rights, inter-state cooperation and international justice. Refusal to repatriate Indonesian FTFs raises concerns about long-term consequences and due process. Understanding denationalization nuances is vital, considering its impact on the citizenship rights of individuals involved in terrorism.

The eighteenth century was a time of change. Some elites responded by forging new relations with layfolk mediated by Sindhi poetry (Chapters 4 and 5). These communities were not regional, which is to say they were not Sindh-wide. Rather, they were local, rooted, in the case of Hashim, in Thatta, and, in the case of Latif, in Bhit. At the same time, they were networked more broadly. Hashim's descendants moved out to Oman and Gujarat. His contacts extended all the way to the Hijaz. Latif, in turn, enjoyed recognition in Kachch and Jaisalmer. Unlike Mir Masum and Yusuf Mirak, their networks did not follow the circuits of the Mughal state but rather moved along different infrastructures of communication.

Under Ghulam Shah Kalhoro, the state had intervened in favor of these new experiments. Ghulam Shah had passed Hashim's decree in 1759, enforcing a form of Sunni public order in Thatta while also patronizing Latif's tomb sometime after Latif's death in 1751. Historically based in upper Sindh and Balochistan, the Kalhora had not cultivated close ties with the elites or people of Thatta and lower Sindh. Between 1757 and 1761, Ghulam Shah was forced into lower Sindh as a result of a succession struggle with his brothers. His patronage was most likely meant to build ties here in the context of fraternal conflict. These overtures may not have been wholehearted. In 1759, Ghulam Shah ordered the construction of Hyderabad, a new Kalhora capital in lower Sindh, passing over Thatta as a base of power. Yet the literary innovations of lower Sindh left an impact. During the reign of Sarfaraz Shah (1772–75), Ghulam Shah's son and successor, Sindhi poetry was incorporated into courtly culture, marking a major milestone in Sindhi literature.

It was another eighteenth-century resident of Thatta, Mir Ali Shir Qani (d. 1788–89), who synthesized the diverse developments of the century into an overarching vision of regional social order, connecting individual with region and Thatta and Sindh with the rest of the world. Qani belonged to a landholding sayyid family from the city. His

The evolution of banking regulation and banking crises are highly intertwined. The post–World War Two period was marked the globalisation of banking and increased banking instability. This initiated a trend towards harmonised frameworks for banking regulation, leading to a common framework for measuring capital adequacy in 1988 (Basel I). The path towards the Basel framework in 1988 was very different in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland. When statutory capital requirements were introduced in Switzerland in 1935, most banks were indifferent. This indifference changed towards the end of the 1950s, when capital regulation became a bottleneck for growth. The United Kingdom lacked the experience of a solvency crisis during the 1930s, resulting in capital in banking becoming an almost irrelevant topic. It took until the secondary banking crisis in 1973/4 for banks’ regulation to be reconsidered. The United States did experience a deep banking crisis in the 1930s but introduced statutory capital requirements only in the 1980s, following increased domestic banking instability and the threat of potentially high losses from the Latin American debt crisis.

In the Introduction, I referenced a coin minted under the emperor Titus (Fig. E.1). On one side appeared the figure of the emperor sitting amid a heap of weapons, a reference to his roles in the Jewish War, the capture of Jerusalem, and the construction of the building depicted on the coin’s opposite side, the Flavian Amphitheater. The coin adopts an unusual perspective, showing the Colosseum’s façade while also permitting a glimpse into the building. We spy the columns tracing the uppermost reaches of the interior and a few heads peeping out between them. Lower down two more rings of spectators are visible, the lower one pierced by an entrance and split into wedges by staircases. When we last examined the coin, we remarked about how only one individual appeared – the emperor – while everyone else was merely an undifferentiated head.

Capital/assets ratios in banking declined substantially during the two world wars. Three drivers severely impacted the capitalisation of banks. Banks invested heavily in government debt, which led to an expansion of balance sheets. High inflation ratios devalued the paid-up capital of banks. Moreover, formal and informal constraints restricted banks from issuing capital in wartime. The Second World War, in particular, had long-lasting effects on the evolution bank capital. The United Kingdom controlled capital issuances after 1939 and reinforced the financial repression of banks. The Swiss Banks operated in a regulated but much more liberal framework. In the United States, the belief in informal capital requirement guidelines was very pronounced. By the mid-1930s, the United States had already three federal bank supervisory agencies, which all had developed opinions on how capital adequacy was assessed. However, the rapidly growing government debt in banks’ balance sheets overturned these conventions, leading to the first risk-adjusted measurements for capital and triggering the development of new measurement approaches that became the forerunner of the Basel I guidelines.

There were only 10 minutes left until the adhan (call to prayer) for Maghrib (evening prayer). The evening twilight had spread across the horizon beyond the sprawling mass of bamboo and tarp shelters carved into the hillsides of southeastern Bangladesh. The sky blazed with hues of orange and red; the fleeting colours of dusk began to fade away on that hot summer evening in August 2017. We – Absar the driver, my research assistants and friends Munni and Zia, and myself – sat in a rusty old Toyota on our way towards Balukhali refugee camp from the nearby Kutupalong camp. Gathering dust along the way, the car was slowed down by passing tomtoms (auto-rickshaws) that weaved in and out of the dirt road as we drove past rows upon rows of tightly packed shelters – their orange and blue tarpaulin tents almost unnoticeable as darkness quietly descended.

We reached Balukhali at 6:30 p.m. as darkness started creeping into the alleyways of the camp. I noticed a group of young boys kicking a limp football in the dusty open space that served as a makeshift parking spot. For these kids, this sandy spot had become their stadium, where they could enter a world of respite and aspiration – if only temporarily – to escape the destitution and bleakness that hung like a cloud over the camps. Another group of children playfully made jokes and began to disperse back towards their homes. While Absar and Zia stayed behind in the car, Munni and I made our way through the city of tents, climbing up small hills up to 30 metres high, past food vendors – often local Bangladeshis from neighbouring villages who had found new economic opportunity from the waves of refugees and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) that had entered their once-pristine locale – closing up shop for the night and groups of men in white panjabis (a traditional pant and shirt outfit) and colourfully checked lungis (a type of sarong in South Asia worn only by men) with white tupis (a rounded skullcap often worn for prayer) on their heads making their way to the makeshift mosques.

Traditionally the different states of matter are described by symmetries that are broken. Typical situations include the freezing of a liquid, which breaks the translational symmetry that the fluid possessed, and the onset of magnetism, where the rotational symmetry is broken by the ordering of the individual magnetic moment vectors. In the early eighties of the previous century a completely new organizational principle of quantum matter was introduced following the discovery of the quantum Hall effect. The robustness of the quantum Hall state was a forerunner of the variety of topologically protected states that forms a large fraction of the condensed matter physics and material science literature at present.

Given the rapid strides that this field has made in the last two decades, it is almost imperative that it should become a part of the senior undergraduate curriculum. This necessitates the existence of a textbook that can address these somewhat esoteric topics at a level which is understandable to those who have not yet decided to specialize in this particular field but very well could, if given a proper exposition. This is a rather difficult task for the author of a textbook of a contemporary topic, and this is where the present book is immensely successful.

I am not a specialist in this subject by any means and found the book to be a comprehensive introduction to the area. I am sure the senior undergraduates and the beginning graduate students will benefit immensely from the book.

Jayanta K. Bhattacharjee

School of Physical Sciences,

Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science

Jadavpur, Kolkata

Empire and Border-Crossings

In the dying years of British India and the first flush of postcolonial Indian statehood, a clear continuity of laws and policy can be read, especially in relation to the registration of aliens. The small-scale strife of the Great Game at these Himalayan borders in the town of Kalimpong was coming to a close even as the registration of Chinese nationals continued under a cloud of suspicion over a period of twenty years at the Foreigners Registration Office. The spectre of spies, the reflux of the Great Game, the Tibet Question and eventually the 1962 Sino-Indian War haunt the distinction between ‘Japanese’, ‘Tibetan’ and ‘Chinese’ nationals and largely remain fuzzy. It is the anxious state's process of separating the ‘Chinese’ from their ‘Japanese’ and then ‘Tibetan’ (also subdivided as Amdowas, Khampas, half-castes, and so on) counterparts that led the charge to register ‘Chinese nationals’ under the British Indian registration of foreigners acts. Marking differences was a way of categorising and classifying in these registration processes such that boundaries could be constructed for the body political and the body social. The nervous nation's and the disciplinary state's rationale for capturing and interning dangerous ‘Chinese’ later is a part of this narrative.

There is a global pattern of states using subtle and insidious legal mechanisms to threaten the citizenship status of vulnerable national minorities. In India, for instance, policies of citizenship enumeration and adjudication have classified around 2 million persons into varying categories of ‘doubtful’ citizens. While the state has not formally revoked citizenship status, it has nevertheless created complex and arduous legal processes that profoundly weaken it. Using the case of India, this chapter theorizes the antecedents, operation, and character of this form of precarious citizenship. It draws from the tradition of critical citizenship studies to argue that the precarity generated by states through these insidious routes is best understood as ‘irregular citizenship’. Irregular citizens are in the condition of suspended animation marked by ambivalence, uncertainty and ambiguity of citizenship status. States may seek to justify the practices of irregularization in the language of the rule of law. But these practices are constituted by the non-application of ordinary legal norms in the contexts of racializing stigmatized minorities and exceptionalist discourses related to national security. The chapter charts these dynamics in India and shows how India’s institutions – most visibly the courts – have adopted juristic techniques that legitimize irregularization despite being at odds with due process.

This chapter imagines Flavia’s experience of visiting Rome’s principal sanctuary of Isis, the Iseum Campense. It weighs the impact of the space’s architecture, artwork, and rituals and the community that Flavia found there.

This chapter explores the impact of conflict on the issue of statelessness in Asia using a case study centred on the Kuomingtang (KMT) soldiers and their descendants in northern Thailand. The case study examines the historical background of the KMT Secret Army and conducts legal and policy analysis on relevant countries including the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of China (RoC) and Thailand. These analyses shed light on how the group became stateless. The chapter scrutinizes the nationality laws of each country linked to the case study and the practical implementation of these laws and offers observations on the statelessness phenomenon. The case study demonstrates that violent conflicts may lead to de jure statelessness or place people at risk of statelessness due to the loss of a sense of national belonging and legal identity documents as by-products of violent conflict; that (re)gaining citizenship of a country might not be easy as relevant laws change and the operation of laws become too difficult for vulnerable groups to manage; and that the long-lasting political consequences of conflict continue to influence state practice in the case of both PRC and RoC, regardless of the group’s rights under their respective nationality laws.