Ahmedabad is often called an Indian 'success story' in terms of economic urbanization, but it is also a city highly segregated along religious and caste lines, and a flashpoint in the 2002 Hindu-Muslim riots that left thousands dead. Most of the Muslim communities relocated after the violence work in a vast informal sector around the city's landfills and waste management peripheries that are disregarded by local government and endemic with corruption. While many scholars see this as a recipe for violent conflict, we explore the garbage slum community in Chandola to show that a leveling of social stratification and reduction of segregation amongst Hindu and Muslim communities in this slum results in a more congruous inter-group relationship than current literatures on the relationship between poverty, religion and violence might predict. However, their unity has come at the expense of jointly 'othering' an even more vulnerable group of newcomers-a Bangladeshi migrant community that is persecuted both by the state as well as by fellow residents. We show that while violence markers are constituted in new ways, challenging some assumptions of how inter-group violence is triggered, the fundamental societal weaknesses that facilitate such tensions remain prevalent despite changing conflict actor allegiances.

This article examines how the Islamic prohibition of riba (interest) shapes ideas about homeownership and housing choices among Muslim professional women in Oslo, Norway. While 'homeownership for all' has been an explicit policy goal of the post-war Norwegian welfare state, denoting for immigrants a salient measure of 'successful integration', the lack of interest-free housing finance in Norway makes homeownership unattainable for parts of the Muslim minority, who consider interest prohibited by their religion. While research on Muslim immigrants is plentiful, little attention has been given to the relationship between religion and homeownership in migrants' everyday life, and how the prospect of homeownership relates to questions of integration and belonging. Examining how Muslim professional women negotiate majority and minority norms related to housing and finance, we offer analysis highlighting intergenerational differences as well as gendered and transnational dimensions. We find that the prohibition of riba matters to our research participants and that they actively consider Islamic scripture, their own codes of ethics, and the wider social and economic consequences of their actions when deciding to obtain a loan with interest. Negotiating different, and often diverging, norms, these women straddle expectations of being 'a good citizen' and of being 'a good Muslim'.

How do historical ideas of global, supremacist connection exist alongside ideas of civilisational and racial difference? And what enables certain reactionary, political alliances to traverse colonial hierarchies of power? With an onset in contemporary, transnational connections between a Hindu and a Western Right, this article offers a critical genealogical reading of the concept of Aryanism. Understanding it as articulated historically through interactions between British colonialists and upper-caste Hindus in India, this reading focuses on these elites’ intersecting and contradictory ideas of hierarchy, difference, and cross-civilisational connection. Tracing the empirical, theoretical and political implications of these entanglements, the article contributes to on-going discussions on the imperial roots of conceptual formations and knowledge production in postcolonial International Relations.

This paper identifies a common process of mystification within academic knowledge production today: the treatment of subordinated groups as mere metaphors or rhetorical figures for academic theorizing. We witness it when academics ask what trans might teach us about transnationality, when we are invited to reflect on what might be queer about modern warfare, or when nation-states are described as subaltern. Trans, queer, and subaltern populations are routinely fetishized within scholarship on the “traditional” International Relations concerns of statecraft, migration, security, and so on. This tendency serves a mystifying function by disabling scholars from examining the social relations that shape and organize their lives and histories. This paper proceeds in three parts. First, to understand the origins and logics of this self-mystifying process, this paper returns, via Stuart Hall, to Karl Marx’s methodological writings on abstraction. It contributes to the formalization of his methodology for contemporary IR scholarship by drawing a distinction between the fetishization of abstraction and the concretization of abstraction. Second, the paper explores how abstracted subject positions have been fetishized within three fields of international studies: trans studies, queer theory, and subaltern studies. Third, after elaborating a critique of this mystifying move, the paper outlines alternative approaches that instead seek to concretize the abstractions queer, trans, and subaltern by attending to their specific historical and social determinations. These strategies of demystification, we argue, carry forward a founding commitment of critical theory that is all too often abandoned within scholarly knowledge production today.