It is curious that contemporary specialists concerned conflict zones in Africa tend to refer to The Heart of Darkness, a late 19th century novel written by Joseph Conrad. In this story the narrator, hired by a European company, traveled to inside Congo to see Mr. Kurtz who stationed to collect ivory for trade. In this “dark places of the earth”, Conrad wrote, “The work was going on. The work! And this was the place where some of the helpers had withdrawn to die. They were dying slowly—it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now—nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom”. Massacres in Rwanda or clashes among warlords in Congo remind specialists the nexus of people's suffering at the margin of international politics.
The title of this volume includes the word, margin. You might ask, what does margin have to do with International Politics? This discipline is supposed to comprehend the world as a whole. But is it successful? Let's see some of global issues today: international terrorism, trafficking and drug trade, immigrants and refugees, and poverty in global economy. You will notice that we do not know those phenomena very well. Such lack of knowledge tells us that a huge arena of global society stays invisible, waits to be noticed.
Nine authors in this volume challenge each Heart of Darkness as area researchers or specialists of international politics. Fujiwara and Sakai analyze the relationship of state and society in the United States and Iraq from the angle of poverty or gender. Both deconstruct politics of anti-terrorist wars. Tsukimura and Toda focus on ethnic conflicts in former Yugoslavia and Nigeria; power games between majority and minority triggered violence, when the state lost its governability. Namioka, Kimura and Iizasa study immigrants, refugees and Muslims. Their cases vary from France, India to Australia, but there is a similar tendency to marginalize newcomers, if necessary violently. Honna, Yamane and Katsuma analyze mafia activities and government policies in South-East Asia, politics of disarmament in post-conflict zones and violence against children in disturbed areas. Violence, organized or sporadic, appears in anarchical society.
The role of scientists will be to overcome such intellectual barriers to divide global society. This is our joint efforts to hear the voices from the margin and to get a picture of the world as fair as possible.

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The war on terror and post-Katrina New Orleans belong to two different worlds, but share a common property; the fate of the marginalized, the forgotten ones, in the global society. This study aims to show how they were forgotten; how the poor, at home and overseas, have been perceived, and how that perception differs from who they actually are.
The paper is divided into three parts. The first establishes the cognitive framework that captures and stigmatizes the poor; the second argue that there has been a perceptual flight away from the poor, at home and abroad, enhancing social neglect over ‘the other America’ at home and frustrated communities abroad. For the final part, I make several observations based on a field work in post-Katrina New Orleans, digging into their own cognitive framework that departs so far away from the assumption and prejudice that have been cast upon them.
The perceived role of the poor people in political life has swung wildly over the past 200 years. The first is that of helpless people at the mercy of destiny, soaked in miserable lives and longing for help. The other is an image of the militant poor, who direct their frustrations into actions that challenge political authority or distribution of goods.
The two images have led to three distinct reactions toward the poor. The first is charity; since the last days of the Roman empire, the Christian manner of helping the poor have extended to NGO activities at home and abroad, some more secular than others. Social policy is different from charity in the sense that the agent is the state, and the purpose can be crisis management. The second is surveillance and control. If the angry poor pose a challenge to law and order, an obvious response will be the employment of police power. The opposite side of the coin will be solidarity and revolution; an angry mob may be an asset for social change.
In the golden days of Great Society and Cold War development aids, the charity-social policy nexus dominated the scene; in the following years, such attention to charity, social engineering and development gave way to a combination of free market and coercive surveillance. The last section shows the urban myth that many of the African American community share, which may be sustained in the future due to their prolonged marginalization.

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Women in Iraq have been always at the “periphery” of the multi-layered centre/periphery structures. They were located at the periphery of the traditional Muslim/Arab society in a Western/modernist sense. Iraq itself, on the other hand, is located at the periphery of the colonial and global economic system. Consequently, Iraqi women have found themselves in a double peripheral position, both at the international as well as the domestic level.
The leftist political elites who became dominant in Iraq after 1958 understood the liberation of women as evidence of the progressiveness of modern society, as they opposed both feudalism and Western colonialism. The state under the Ba'thist regime in the 1970s controlled women's organizations and included them in the system of revolutionary mobilization. State control was strengthened during the war period in the 1980s as a means to mobilise women into the labour force.
The leftist regimes in Iraq pursued this secular and de-Islamisation policy until after the Gulf war, but in the 1990s Saddam Hussein introduced a re-tribalisation and re-Islamisation policy as a means to compensate for the state's lack of ability to govern local society. This revival of traditional Muslim and tribal social systems drove women again to the periphery.
The US invasion of Iraq and the removal of Saddam's regime has led to a change in the previous central/peripheral relationship. Iraq was placed at the periphery of the world political system under US/UK control. At the same time, the new Iraq regime, established following the general election in 2005, is led by Islamist political parties, which were in a peripheral/outlaw position in Iraq before 2003. Under this new situation, women have been divided into three categories. First, there is a group who utilise the US/Western support to “liberate/democratise” Iraq and demand the introduction of a Western legal and social system to protect women's rights. A second group accepts the newly introduced Western electoral system but not the Western-type equal political rights for women. The third are women members of Islamist political parties, who act as a part of the revolutionary forces pursuing the establishment of an Islamic state.
Under both the leftist and Islamist regimes, revolutionaries have consistently pursued their own goal of “liberating” their nation from the rule of the “centre” of world politics, which is led by the Western system; sometimes they play up the nominal status of women to the state elites, but in other cases pursue their own aims at the expense of women's rights.

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Yugoslavia disintegrated due to internal war in Croatia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. Six republics (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, and Macedonia) were newly born, and one more republic (Kosovo) is appearing. The warring party which participated in all three of the internal wars was the Serbs. In this paper, I reconstruct the process of these internal wars from the perspective of the Serbs. The international community considered Serbs, especially their leader, Slobodan Miloševic as an “evil, ” through a simple dichotomy, but Serbs always felt fear as a minority during the internal wars.
Generally speaking, when relations among ethnic groups are worsened, there will be a tendency for the minority to feel fear. Which factors will worsen interethnic relations? First of all, it is pointed to that a decline in the economy can deepen the cleavage among ethnic groups. Then, the security dilemma will function, especially when there is a certain pattern of demography, and/or interethnic history. Nevertheless, leadership will be needed when an ethnic minority makes a hostile action against the majority, even if the minority feels dissatisfaction, uneasiness, and fear.
Serbs were the largest ethnic group in Yugoslavia. According to the census in 1981, 36.3% of the total population was Serbs. Serbs were also the most powerful ethnic group in politics. Nevertheless, the Serbs had two problems in maintaining their power. Firstly, Serbs were an ethnic minority in some republics and autonomous regions which belonged to Serbia. In 1981, the proportion of Serbs was really 85.4% in Serbia (excluding two autonomous regions, Vojdodina, and Kosovo), and 54.4% in Vojvodina. However the proportion was 32.0% in Bosnia, 13.2% in Kosovo, 11.6% in Croatia, 3.3% in Montenegro, and 2.3% in Macedonia. Serbs in Bosnia, Croatia, and Kosovo would therefore drop from relative ethnic majority to minority when those areas became independent. Secondly, the ratio of Serbs in the population was decreasing year by year. The proportion of Serbs decreased from 14.2% to 12.2% in Croatia from 1971 to 1991, from 37.2% to 31.3% in Bosnia, and from 18.4% to 10.0% in Kosovo. In contrast to the Serbs, the proportion of Muslims in Bosnia increased from 39.6% to 43.7%, and the proportion of Albanians in Kosovo from 73.7% to 84.0%.
Serbs hoped to hinder the independence of the republics from Yugoslavia, but there were no mechanisms for mediation in the conflict between ethnic groups, and no leadership for resolving the ethnic conflict as had been provided by Josip Broz Tito. Particularly, the federal leaders could not use their power to support new leaders in the republics, because the latter obtained more democratic legitimacy through democratic elections in 1990. Serbs who wanted to maintain their status as an ethnic majority could only build their quasi-states, and attack the newly-born states.

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During the Cold War, democratic movements in Sub-Saharan Africa were suppressed by the authoritarian governments. These governments were supported by the forces of East or West. After the Cold War, as a condition of economic aid, the Western donors demanded “democratization.” Without aid, most of the authoritarian leaders could not cling to office anymore, so some leaders accepted the democratization, and others were ousted by the antigovernment forces.
The transition to democracy did not foster the consolidation of democracy. Some countries plunged into the internal wars. Other countries could establish new governments by the multi-party poll, but these new governments imitated their predecessors, became authoritarian regimes and suppressed the opposition in order to cling to office.
Why is the consolidation of democracy so difficult in Africa? Many researchers have explained the reasons as “ethnic politics.” They say that the introduction of a multi-party system to ethnically divided societies in Africa results in the creation of “ethnic” parties, and these parties are opposed to each other ethnically. Confrontation between ethnic parties causes ethnic conflict. This explanation seems to criticize the ethnic “identity” of African people.
Ethnic identity does not cause the ethnic conflict immediately. Many ethnic conflicts have been caused not by ethnic politics but by resource competition and power politics. The “haves, ” regardless of ethnicity and religion, fight each other over the resources. They use “ethnic” identity to mobilize their people, and ethnic identity changes into ethnic nationalism. It is “haves not” who fight and kill each other under the name of ethnic nationalism. “Haves” are not in the battlefield.
The introduction of democracy, which means “participation and opposition” (R. Dahl's “polyarcy”), gives the disenfranchised groups excuse to protest to the government. Without establishing new rules to avoid the predictable “ethnic” and “religious” conflicts, democratization of the authoritarian state, which maintains the legacies of colonial rule, has faced objections raised both by the group which wants to preserve the vested interests and by the group which demands the redistribution of the power. “Impoverishment” of people by economic deterioration makes it easier to mobilize poor people to fight for the elites' interests. The state system will collapse, and internal conflict will start under the name of ethnicity or religion.
Nigeria had been an authoritarian state and maintains colonial legacy. Because it did not make rules to prevent conflicts before the transition to the Fourth Republic in 1999, Nigeria met the 2000 Sharia conflict and the Niger Delta armed uprising. These uprisings could have been foreseen before the establishment of democratic government.
From the study of Nigeria, we learn that, in order to successfully democratize in Africa, the colonial legacy must be thrown away and the rules which will avoid the future conflicts should be established before any multi-party poll.
For the Nigerian government, we recommend two points. One is to protect human rights. The other is to improve the circumstances of people. Redistribution of resources is needed with global cooperation.

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The purpose of this paper is to critically analyse the politics of border control in a specific nation-state, in this case Australia.
As the pace of transnational human movement continues to accelerate, border controls are being selectively tightened by many states. This tendency became particularly conspicuous following the 9.11 terrorist attacks. As a result, two sharply contrasting groups of people have emerged: a privileged group made up of people who enjoy the right to move freely across borders, and another made up of people who are forced to leave their countries without any clear destination, neither accepted in the safe country that they wish to enter, nor able to return to their homeland. The latter group includes the recent “boat people” who have escaped from political disturbances in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq in order to try to seek asylum in Australia.
At the end of August, 2001, a Norwegian cargo ship, the Tampa, saved more than 400 asylum seekers, mainly from Afghanistan, from a boat sinking in international waters. The Tampa attempted to make land at Christmas Island, an Australian territory, but was denied this option by the Australian government, which sent a military detachment to board the ship. The “Tampa incident”, which attracted considerable international attention, not only conclusively demonstrated the Australian government's hard-line stance towards asylum seekers, but also paved the way for a more rigid border control policy.
The implementation of a series of acts of exclusion against asylum seekers calls to mind Susan Buck-Morss's concept of the “wild zone”, ‘a zone in which power is above the law and thus, at least potentially, a terrain of terror’, a zone which paradoxically continues to exist within modern democracies. What is really happening in the terrain of border control as a “wild zone”? What kinds of policy system and policy practice, and what political logics and discourses, constitute this terrain? This paper considers these questions with a focus on the recent issue of asylum seekers in Australia. Remaining attentive to the prevailing discourse of “sovereignty”, the paper uses this issue to explore the meaning of border control today and its implications for current international politics.
In an era of globalization, when various aspects of national sovereignty seem to be being gradually eroded, border control may be indicated as one of the most effective remaining means of demonstrating the existence of national sovereignty. To democratise this “wild zone”, it will be necessary to question the political intentions of the discourse of “sovereignty” and to attempt to maintain a balance between “sovereignty” and “humanitarianism” in the terrain of border control.

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This article examines the relationship between citizenship and the public recognition of Islam in France. Secularization is a cultural norm in Western Europe. In this circumstance, the settlement of the Muslim population with the claim for the public recognition of Islam has often been regarded as a threat against the idea of citizenship. In particular, ‘French citizenship’ appears antagonistic towards the public recognition of religious belonging. This is due to the fact that religion as a matter in the private space should be separated from the public space according to the model of republicanism deeply embedded in the French political culture based on the principle of separation of the public space from the private, or more specifically, the principle of laïcité (separation of religion from politics). This citizenship appreciates the public space as the space of universal values, in which the citizens discuss issues they have in common. In this framework, all individuals are entitled to have citizenship regardless of their origins or social backgrounds.
But in reality the majority of French Muslims, who are mainly of Maghrebin origin, are discriminated against and excluded socially and economically. The social right, which is part of citizenship, in particular, is not effectively assured for them. Given this, the social and economic conditions on which Muslims could participate in the public space are not fully developed, and hence citizenship for those people lacks substance. Since the 1990's, the number of the new generation of Maghrebin immigrants who have started to claim for the public recognition of Islam has increased. These Muslims organize and run associations whose purposes are to encourage and educate young French Muslims in order to restore their dignity, the dignity eroded by the experience of being the target of racism. These associations are normally open to anybody, and are based on universal values such as social justice rather than ethnic origins.
In 1996, some of these associations organized a network called “Collectif des associations Musulmanes du Grand Lyon”, in the east suburb of Lyon. CAMGL is considered as representative of the trend of these associations. CAMGL regards Tariq RAMADAN whose grandfather is Hassan Al Banna, a founding member of the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt, as the ideologue of the network. Since it teaches Islamic faith as a basis of ‘citizenship’, CAMGL is perceived as a threat against the republican model of citizenship.
In this article, the author argue that the recent trend observed in CAMGL offers some potential to propose the new form of republican model of citizenship based on universal values, but constructed through a different sense of belongings.

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In this paper, the narratives of riot participants in the Nellie incident, which took place in Assam in 1983 will be analyzed. It is often the case that in the study of the riot, it is difficult to locate the participants and conduct interviews with them, and thus there is little chance to know the perspectives of the attackers. Also, recent studies on collective violence in South Asia focused more on the routinized riots which were manipulated by the political parties or large-scale organizations. In such approach, the voices of the attackers in collective violence were often neglected and their agency was marginalized. However, in case of the Nellie incident, due to its rural character it was possible to approach the participants and collect valuable insights from them.
The Nellie incident was one of the largest collective violence in independent India which saw more than 1600 people. Such large-scale collective violence was triggered by state-level disturbance during the state legislative assembly election. During the election period, whole the state of Assam was in serious disturbance due to the boycott by the student organization leaders, who led a large-scale movement on foreign nationals issue from 1979.
In this incident, both the attackers and the victims were rural peasants. The victims were Muslim peasants who has their origin in East Bengal, and the attackers were the local inhabitants, mostly comprised of the Tiwas, the autochthonous people in the area, but also included other residents in the area such as Assamese-speaking Hindu people. Although it is clear that the incident was triggered by the movement and the election disturbance, it has been disregarded what caused the people in the area to attack against the Muslim residents in the area. In earlier writing, it has been discussed that the Tiwas, a backward plains tribal group, were merely utilized by the movement leaders.
In this paper, based on the fieldwork in the Nellie area in 2001-2002, I focus on the decision-making process of the riot participants in the incident, and analyze the way they viewed the movement and election disturbance. It can be said that although the riot participants are influenced by the movement leaders and their ideologies, they also had their own reasons to attack the Muslims in the area. From the field data, the paper attempts to analyze the violence by focusing on the difference between the views of the rioters and the top student leaders and/or journalists and academics who tried to analyze the incident. By doing so, it tried to locate the anti-foreigners movement in Assam from the people's perspective.

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The rapid improvement of information and communication technologies has contributed to the globalization of threat posed by transnational organized crime. Such a development has influenced the paradigm of international relations, as the “war on Mafia” now constitutes a significant agenda for both national security and international cooperation in many countries. The empowerment of transnational crime is widely recognized as a threat to national sovereignty and human security. As their tentacles reach beyond national borders, the cross-border activities of criminal network are increasingly difficult to counter at individual state level. Against this backdrop, many regional groupings have determined to promote regional cooperation against transnational crime. This article attempts to clarify the case of Southeast Asia where ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) has endeavored to establish its regional governance against transnational crime.
We first discuss the post-Cold War reshaping of national security discourse in which the war on Mafia has emerged as a “new” security agenda, replacing the old war on communism. This article suggests that securitizing the war on Mafia requires a perspective to identify the non-state actor as the legitimate subject of national security operations, and the difficulty to do so may create a discursive space to interpret “national threat” in arbitrary and manipulative ways by political elites.
We then analyze the situation in Southeast Asia where the spread of poverty in many societies and enduring corruption at different levels of government have contributed to the expansion and regionalization of transnational crime, particularly since the Asian economic crisis in 1997. By examining six types of cross-border criminal activities, we elucidate the impact of transnational criminal activities in Southeast Asia. ASEAN leaders have shown their commitment to promote regional cooperation against transnational crime as a “common security threat.” We argue, however, that these commitments have not always been transformed into effective policies, thanks largely to the gap in institutional capacity among member countries in dealing with transnational crime. Consequently, the gap has effectively prevented ASEAN from consolidating the interpretation of “new security threat” and it has significantly provided a political space to manipulate the security discourse.
To explore this dynamism, we examine two cases of Indonesia and Thailand. In these countries, political elites have reinvented such a space to promote an authoritarian agenda in a democratic polity, and the elite capture of “global security norm” has resulted in an apparent setback of democratic reform. We argue that these examples are embedded in the dilemma of securitizing transnational crime in Southeast Asia, thus it is important to bring the analysis of domestic politics into the study of regional security cooperation which has a tendency of paying less attention to the aspect of power politics.

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Reintegrating ex-combatants into societies is a vital component of peace support operations, which is commonly referred as the disarmament, demobilization and reintegration of ex-combatants program (DDR). The aim of this paper is to analyze how integrated societies with ex-combatants are influenced by transformation of “state governance” instigated by DDR.
Most of articles about DDR attempt to grasp how DDR is conducted in post-conflict areas, but have not focused so much on investigating how DDR influences integrated societies with ex-combatants from a perspective of state governance. In a process of transformation of state governance in weak states, armed groups may pursue “their” own profits in peace negotiations and its implementation. This is because the aim and scope of DDR is stipulated in peace negotiations. It is important to understand here that this scope and aim of DDR is inherently a political issue influencing the overall picture of the post-conflict order, such as composition of integrated society. With this understanding that DDR is inherently a political issue, this paper illustrates the gap between those “inside” and “outside” of state governance as a result of DDR, and also attempts to recapture marginalized ex-combatants as stakeholders.
The first section of this article defines the term “governance” as “ordering agents for profits of stakeholders, ” and then introduces the perspective of “state governance” in the discussion of nation-building in the areas after internal conflicts. Second section clarifies characteristics of “armed groups, ” and places these armed groups as stakeholders in the state governance. Armed groups are characterized as non-state actors that are not under the control of state (s) and attempt to accumulate social resources for their own profits by the use of force, which will weaken the capacity of agents for state governance to retain order.
The article then illustrates three ways in which DDR influences the state governance: (1) peace agreements as designers of aims and scope of DDR (reconstitution of agents); (2) reconstruction of the national army and police, also referred as the security sector reforms (SSR), through screening of excombatants (ordering of state governance); and (3) reconciliation and justice inside integrated societies as ex-combatants are re-integrated into societies (reconstitution of stakeholders).
Finally, this article examines how this particular transformation of state governance generates marginalized communities within a society: (1) some armed groups are expelled from peace agreements; (2) some commanders and political leaders of armed groups are excluded as a result of SSR; and (3) newly integrated societies hold discords within itself (i. e. gap among excombatants, gap between ex-combatants and conventional civilian and gap among ex-combatants with special needs).

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The focus of this paper is those who faced violence and exploitation during their childhood in developing countries. They are the most marginalized in international relations. First, in the international system, the states, particularly the powerful ones, are the major actors. Most of them are industrialized countries where human rights are relatively well respected. Therefore, with the principle of non-intervention in internal affairs, human rights violations in developing countries are less likely to be on the international agenda. On the other hand, since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the international framework of human rights has been strengthened. In this context, the UN Human Rights Council was established in 2006 to periodically review the human rights status in all countries.
Second, the vulnerable within the family, such as children and women, tend to be marginalized, as the household is usually perceived as private space, not to be intervened by the public. However, as the problems of child abuse and domestic violence become prominent even in industrialized countries, the international rights of the vulnerable groups have been established, including the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). It is a shift from protection to liberation, treating children as rights-holders.
When the state, as duty-bearer, is not willing to implement the CRC domestically, there is now a possibility for the aggrieved party, the child or NGOs representing the best interest of the child, to claim the rights as an international actor.
First, the aggrieved party can help develop international norms at world conferences. Ms. Somaly Mam who faced sexual exploitation in her childhood established an NGO “AFESIP” in Cambodia, forming an alliance with an international NGO “ECPAT” that was instrumental in organizing a series of the World Congress against Commercial Sexual Exploitation of Children (CSEC), bringing the 2000 Optional Protocol to the CRC on CSEC into effect.
Second, the aggrieved party is capable of mobilizing international support to influence the behavior of a specific country. For the Government of Cambodia to become more proactive in implementing the CRC in the country, “AFESIP” mobilized support from the European Parliament and the U. S. Department of State. It shows that the aggrieved party can play a significant role as an actor in search for a new international order, both strengthening human rights norms and influencing a specific country to implement them.

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