Small-scale trade and smuggling are part of everyday life at many borders. These trading activities often compensate for economic shortage that many households are suffering from in consequence of e.g. political transformation processes. Despite of the diversity of transborder small-scale trade and smuggling and their wide dispersion, not only in Europe, their reception within social sciences is relatively low. The contributions shed therefore light on research in geography and neighboured disciplines. On the basis of empirical research findings from borders all over the world, the authors thrive to analyse mechanisms and conditions of the informal activities and to detect parallels and differences of informal economic structures from different perspectives. This book is valuable reading for researchers in geography, sociology, ethnography, and in political science.

Concerned with people called variously: eta, burakumin, buraku jumin, buraku people, outcastes, or "the lowest of the low", this book examines how their experience of caste/status-based discrimination in 19th century Japan affected their experience of race-based discrimination in the West of the US and Canada in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

This book examines changing and emerging state and state-like borders in the post-Soviet space in the decades following state collapse. This book argues border-making is not only about states’ physical marking of territory and claims to sovereignty but also about people’s spatial practices over time. In order to illustrate how borders come about and are maintained, this book looks at border communities at internal, open administrative borders and borders in the making, as well as physically demarcated international state borders. This book also pays attention to both the spatial and temporal aspects of borders and the interplay between boundaries and borders over time and thus identifies some of the processes at play as space is territorialized in Eurasia in the aftermath of state collapse.

Offers insights into how the new international boundary between India and Pakistan was made, subverted, and transformed.

Mobilities in Remote Places explores the meanings, challenges, and opportunities of remoteness as practiced and experienced by those who live and work in some of the world’s most remote communities. As mobilities around the world proliferate in countless forms, the meanings of remoteness undergo significant change. Places once considered impossibly distant have appeared to become closer, more accessible, and less distinct from global centres of geopolitical power. But instead of disappearing altogether, configurations of remoteness evolve, manifesting themselves through new possibilities, new challenges, and new insecurities. Drawing from a variety of case studies from around the globe, the book’s contributors examine remoteness as an outcome of evolving mobility constellations. Rather that defining remoteness as an absolute or objective time-distance condition, the book shows how remoteness is a practice, experience, and representation that is situated, relational, and emergent. This collection of original and thought-provoking chapters will be of interest to students and researchers in the humanities and social sciences with an interest in mobilities, place, and human geography.

This volume investigates the "global education effect"—the impact of global education initiatives on institutional and individual practices and perceptions—with a special focus on the dynamics of border construction, recognition, subversion, and erasure regarding "Japan". The Japanese government’s push for global education has taken shape mainly in the form of English-medium instruction programs and bringing in international students who sometimes serve as a foreign workforce to fill the declining labour force. Chapters in this volume draw from education, anthropology, sociology, linguistics, and psychology to examine the ways in which demographic changes, economic concerns, race politics, and nationhood intersect with the efforts to "globalize" education and create specific "global education effects" in the Japanese archipelago. This book will provide a valuable resource for anyone who is interested in Japanese studies and global education.

Papua New Guinean, Chinese and Australian people have long been entangled in the creation of complex histories and political debates concerning the similarities and differences of each group. These debates are fundamental to understanding how a sense of national unity in Papua New Guinea is formed, as well as within analyses of the wider world of strategic power dynamics and influence. The Chinese in Papua New Guinea offers a comprehensive and nuanced examination of the Chinese in Papua New Guinea. Chinese, Papua New Guinean and Australian interactions are analysed in the context of ongoing shifts in colonial power, increased regional engagement with China, and current political instabilities across the Indo-Pacific region. The many ways the Chinese have been defined as actors in PNG’s history and politics are analysed against the backdrop of a rapidly changing global order. The complexity of Chinese experiences within Papua New Guinea is given expression, here, with chapters that stress political and historical heterogeneity, the importance of language for understanding Chinese social relations, and that articulate rich personal experiences of race relations.