In South Asia, the movement of people and goods across borders is strictly controlled by states. However, there are some exceptions to these factors. India–Nepal border, for instance, is peaceful and porous with minimal restrictions on the movement of goods and people. Albeit there are times when border issues between these two friendly neighbours have taken a critical turn. One such recent border-related problem between India and Nepal was witnessed during the Madheshi movement. In 2015, an agitating section of the Madheshi community blocked the India–Nepal border. Due to the sociocultural proximity of Madheshi community with India, the blockade of the Indo-Nepal border has had repercussions on the bilateral ties. Conceptually, this article argues how border shapes relations between neighbours in South Asia. Empirically the recent blockade of the India–Nepal border is presented as an example to substantiate the primary argument of this article. There is also an attempt in this article to study the recent changes in the India–Nepal relations from the perspective of border studies.

The paper is an attempt to understand the impact of regions on border studies. It has been argued that even in this era of globalization borders exist but the conceptual understandings of borders are region specific. In an integrated region, the meaning of the border is different and border studies are more interdisciplinary in their approach. Whereas in regions where regional integration is still in its nascent stage, borders are regarded as dividing lines between two states and studies related to borders commonly linked with security studies; barring the development of a multidisciplinary approach towards the subject. In this paper, examples from Europe and South Asia are taken to substantiate the main arguments.

Purpose Generating meaningful employment has become a major concern for countries across the globe to break the vicious circle of poverty. Employment creation becomes more intricate in a developing economy like India where the population is at an incessant rise, without a simultaneous increase in the employment generation. In the event of situations of mounting unemployment, micro small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) being largely labour-intensive have been claimed as a significant contributor in an economy’s development to induce employment generation. The study at hand is an attempt to gauge the overall contributions of MSMEs in employment creation in Assam, a developing region of the Indian sub-continent. However, most importantly, the purpose of this paper is to determine if men and women are differently employed in the sample MSMEs and if the pattern of employment creation is different across male and female-owned sample MSMEs. Design/methodology/approach The study is based on a uniquely large sample of 320 MSME entrepreneurs with an equal representation of 160 each from male and female entrepreneurs. Secondary data sources were also consulted. Study areas comprising Kamrup-Metropolitan and Kamrup-Rural, depicting both urban and rural Assam, respectively. The choice of activities undertaken by the entrepreneurs includes a wide variety of 12 activities pertaining to all the MSME entrepreneurs in general and certain gender-specific in particular. The two hypotheses (H01 and H02) formulated were tested using the Chi-square test and the Mann-Whitney U test. Furthermore, the growth rate of employment generation in Assam along with the growth rate of the number of MSMEs established and investment made by the MSMEs were computed. Findings The calculated growth rate of employment creation, capital investment and MSMEs established were found to be positive. Based on the results of the Chi-Square test and Cramer’s V test, this paper establishes a strong association between the MSMEs and the total employment generation by the sample entrepreneurs (H01). The primary data suggested that 320 MSMEs are Employing 2,766 people in the study area with an average of 8 people per unit. Employment in the service sector is higher than the manufacturing units with an average of 4 people per unit. Another vital finding of the study professed that the women-owned MSMEs have a relatively lesser number of people (32.2%) employed than their male counterparts (67.8%). The mean rank of male entrepreneurs is considerably higher (211.49) testifying a higher employment creation by the male-owned MSMEs than the women-owned (H02). Moreover, women (33.4%) are thinly employed than men (66.5%). Women entrepreneurs were seen to have mostly limited themselves in micro-units followed by small-units. In terms of the nature of employment, full-time employees (81.8%) supersede part-time employees (6.6%). The pattern of self-employment is equal (5.8%) across both male and women entrepreneurs. MSMEs have been well identified as an impeccable answer to mitigate the problem of mounting unemployment. Originality/value The novelty of the study lies in its meticulous and explicit understanding of the employment scenario in Assam by the MSMEs. Empirical works on employment creation by the MSMEs in Assam were fundamentally based on secondary data sources. The study fills in the gap by providing a holistic picture of employment creation based on both primary and secondary data, but prominently on the primary. The study accounts details about the nature of MSME employment, the gender of the MSME employees, employment creation by male and female MSME entrepreneurs, the growth rate of MSME employment and self-employment to name a few

It wasnot true, for example,aswas claimed in the Party history books, that the Partyhad invented aeroplanes. 1The whole literatureoft he past will havebeendestroyed -Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron -they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changedinto something different, but actually changed into something contradictory of what they used to be. 2Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY

Post-Colonial and Post-Partition South Asia South Asia as a post-colonial as well as a post-partition region has a lot to offer to those interested in the geopolitical triad of bordering, ordering and othering (van Houtum and van Naerssen 2002). Several of these practicesthat feed into and are in turn fed by boundary producing formal and popular narrativescontinue to unfold on a subcontinent that eminently qualifies as ecologically-geographically connected but remains geopolitically partitioned, and are yet to be theorized. The Janus-faced nature of South Asian borderlandsthe inward nationalizing inclinations entangled with the outward regional frontier-orientationsare a stark reminder of the reality that is often overlooked: the history of mobility in this part of the world is much older than the history of territoriality. The geopolitical triad or triangle mentioned above (i.e. bordering, ordering and othering) comes with a heavy price tag for the inhabitants of the sub-continent, especially for those communities whose homeland landed in a suddenly erupted borderland in the wake of the 1947 partition of British India, which caused the death of nearly one million people and more than ten million were displaced. Whose territory was being partitioned in 1947 (Chaturvedi 2005) is a question that remains unanswered even today. It is useful to acknowledge at the outset that contemporary South Asia is, paradoxically, both a rich and poor region due to the mismatch between opportunities and capacities. It is a region where people across borders are culturally and socially interrelated but this commonality is not reflected in state-to-state relations of two nuclear powers-India and Pakistan. South Asia is both one of the fastest-growing and one of the least integrated regions of the world. It is also a region of contrasts, marked by both optimism and pessimism and features many intricacies. This dichotomy of strength and weakness, security and insecurity, hope and fear with connections and disconnects is a remarkable, if not unusual, feature of South Asia and gives birth to borders and boundaries with different kinds of territoriality. Some of the enduring legacies of this partition include truncated territories, economies, cultures and unforgettable memories. As pointed out by Ranabir Samaddar (2005, 95), there was "[N]ot one partition, not even two, not even three … but several partitions … partitions of several territories, several units, several identities and several visions". How does one capture the idea of South Asia? On its radical side, social theorist Ashis Nandy would even question the idea of South Asia. For Nandy,