We have little basis to doubt (a) that we have good reasons to worship God, (b) that God is worthy of worship, (c) that worship of God is reasonable, (d) that it is unreasonable not to worship God, and (e) that worshipping God is obligatory. But none of these normative states of affairs amounts to or entails our owing God worship. The central aim of this chapter is to show that we do not by nature owe God worship; our owing God worship could be no more than a contingent matter. That our owing God worship is contingent does not entail or even suggest that there is any imperfection or limitation in God, and there are good reasons to hold that it is an attractive view of the relationship between God and humans that our owing God worship is a matter of a special contingent relationship between God and us rather than something that holds by nature.

The ‘marketplace of ideas’ metaphor tends to dominate US discourse about the First Amendment and free speech more generally. The metaphor is often deployed to argue that the remedy for harmful speech ought to be counterspeech, not censorship; listeners are to be trusted to sort the wheat from the chaff. This deep skepticism about the regulation of even harmful speech in the USA raises several follow-on questions, including: How will trustworthy sources of information fare in the marketplace of ideas? And how will participants know whom to trust? Both questions implicate non-regulatory, civil-society responses to mis- and disinformation. This chapter takes on these questions, considering groups and institutions that deal with information and misinformation. Civil society groups cannot stop the creation of misinformation – but they can decrease its potential to proliferate and to do harm. For example, advocacy groups might be directly involved with fact-checking and debunking misinformation, or with advancing truthful or properly contextualized counter-narratives. And civil society groups can also help strengthen social solidarity and reduce the social divisions that often serve as fodder for and drivers of misinformation.

The Introduction begins by unpacking a 1929 Taiwanese civil case where multiple parties were concerned with the formation of a marriage, showing how the case – and public debates as well as other civil and criminal cases presented in this book – evolved around sociolegal problems across the empire, social customs and new forms of family, masculinity tied to household relationships, and Taiwanese women’s agency. The argument of the circulation of gender ideals is followed using ethnographic and historical backgrounds on marriage gifts, daughter adoption, and premarital sexual relationships in Japan and Taiwan from the late nineteenth century through the 1910s. Grounded in these historical contexts, the Introduction suggests gender was at the center of Japan’s international and colonial relations, the competition surrounding Taiwanese masculinity in society and law, and the contested formation of Taiwanese women’s agency in the colonial courts. The final section outlines the organization of Geographies of Gender by highlighting the shift in narrative from the larger historical circumstances surrounding the Japanese empire to the specific interactions between discourse and colonial law in gendered terms.

Childhood statelessness is an urgent global human rights issue. Yet, there is limited ethnographic data on the everyday and varied experiences of stateless children and youth, whose representations in mainstream media and campaign materials tend to transmute them into generalized subjects with an ostensibly universal experience of total abjection. Drawing on thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in northern Thailand, this chapter examines the process of ‘learning to be stateless’ among Shan youth participants and the impact of statelessness during their various life stages. The chapter argues that statelessness is not necessarily a fully and actively internalized status since birth but a dynamic condition that constantly undergoes re-interpretation by the affected youth at punctuated moments and at various life stages. By examining the contemporary regime of statelessness in a country such as Thailand, where stateless persons have access to certain rights as children but not as adults, this chapter calls attention to the intersection of life stages and statelessness and the complex ways in which such regimes of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion place the emotional and practical burdens on stateless persons as they transition from childhood into adolescence and adulthood.

Introduction

Having studied a prototype model Hamiltonian in one-dimensional (1D), we turn our focus towards two-dimensional (2D), now with the lens on graphene. Particularly, we shall explore whether graphene possesses the credibility of becoming a topological insulator. That may happen, provided by some means, we are able to open a spectral gap at the Dirac cones. Since a non-zero Berry phase can be a smoking gun for non-trivial properties, let us first look at the Berry phase of graphene.

This chapter examines the production of the Muslim “evacuee,” whose representation at the time of Partition prompted Pakistan's earliest use of official emergency powers to resolve what came to be known among the region's political and technocratic elite as the “refugee problem.” Official representations framed evacuation as a crisis phenomenon in need of resolution while simultaneously casting the Muslim evacuee as a certain kind of national subject, one whose unexpected arrival and need for care acquired the status of an existential imperative for the state in ways that shaped its authority (Naqvi 2007). They provide an illustration of how mass migration and mass migrants came to be conceived through a largely responsive process of political signification, one that refashioned colonial technologies and Muslim nationalist ideals to meet unprecedented situations. I discuss how this gave shape to a finite political language of exceptions, means, and ends that engendered the Pakistani state as a body positioned above the Muslim-majority provinces. Such maneuvers, I maintain, were part of a transnational and translational political process of official commensuration with mass violence, in which the end of the official transfer of population came to be equated with the end of violence. In the narratives that follow, I describe how the “refugee problem” gave rise to logics of official problematization that engendered the federal state as an entity capable of regulating life and deciding on exceptions. Part of this narrative of problematization included the creation of new, regionally defined distinctions between Muslim migrants originating from “agreed” or ‘non-agreed” areas within the newly independent India to Pakistan, whose future was closely debated in the catastrophic wake of decolonization.

Further aspects of the topography, scale, and effects of Partition's chain of violence and displacement should be outlined at this point. The earliest migrations were prompted by outbreaks of communal violence in the Punjab and sections of Delhi in the weeks before independence and persisted until the early spring of 1948. During this period, approximately 7 million refugees crossed the eastern and western borders between India and Pakistan (Ashraf 1949: 24).

A sense of politics does not generally unfold easily as an unequivocally observable analytic category with significances and meanings that are, of necessity, revealed and concealed. The aim of this chapter is nevertheless to analyse, as clearly as possible, the People's Daily's representations of the border town of Kalimpong in the 1950s and 1960s. Kalimpong, as a meeting point or a metonymic space, came to play a pivotal role in the border politics of the PRC and the ROI for three reasons: (a) Historically a British trade post since the mid-nineteenth century, Kalimpong was favourably located on the Lhasa–Kolkata trade route—the same route used by the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in the early 1950s to transport supplies from China to Tibet after the Battle of Chamdo. (b) A sizeable Tibetan population lived in Kalimpong, especially after the PLA invaded the Kham region, when refugees started to stream into Kalimpong.6 This Tibetan population included residents, traders, refugees and, most importantly for this chapter, influential members of the Kashag (or the Tibetan governing council). (c) A diasporic Chinese population lived in Kalimpong, many of whom were later interned in Deoli after the 1962 Sino-Indian War. Drawing on archival material from the People's Daily, fieldwork notes, along with interviews conducted over a period of six months, and many published primary and secondary sources, we shall attempt to show how Kalimpong functioned as a metonymic ambit in which ROI–PRC relations were to play out in the 1950s and 1960s.

Akin to Pravda's status in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) at its height, the People's Daily, as an official organ of the CCP directly controlled by the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, provided direct (and sometimes oblique) information on the policies and viewpoints of the government.

In April 2023, the Government of India amended a set of regulations called the Information Technology Rules, which primarily dealt with issues around online intermediary liability and safe harbour. Until 2023, these rules required online intermediaries to take all reasonable efforts to ensure that ‘fake, false or misleading’ information was not published on their platforms. Previous iterations of these rules had already been challenged before the Indian courts for imposing a disproportionate burden on intermediaries, and having the effect of chilling online speech. Now, the 2023 Amendment went even further: it introduced an entity called a ‘Fact Check Unit’, to be created by the government. This government-created unit would flag information that – in its view – was ‘fake, false or misleading’ with respect to ‘the business of the central government’. Online intermediaries were then obligated to make reasonable efforts to ensure that any such flagged information would not be on their platforms. In practical terms, what this meant was that if intermediaries did not take down flagged speech, they risked losing their safe harbour (guaranteed under the Information Technology Act).