Narrating boundaries: Framing and contesting suffering, community, and belonging in enclaves along the IndiaeBangladesh border Jason Cons * Bucknell University, Department of International Relations, USA Keywords: India Bangladesh Border Belonging Community Enclave abstract This paper explores the politics of community making at the IndiaeBangladesh border by examining the public and private narratives of history and belonging in a Bangladeshi enclaveda sovereign piece of Bangladesh completely territorially surrounded by India. Drawing on framings of political society, this paper argues that understanding populations at the margins of South Asia and beyond requires attention to two processes: first, to the ways that para-legal activities are part and parcel of daily life; and second, to the strategies through which these groups construct themselves as moral communities deserving of inclusion within the state. Border communities often articulate narratives of dispossession, exception- ality, and marginalization to researchers and other visitorsdnarratives that are often unproblematically reproduced in academic treatments of the border. However, such articulations mask both the compli- cated histories and quotidian realities of border life. This paper views these articulations as political projects in and of themselves. By reading the more hidden histories of life in this border enclave, this article reconstructs the notion of borders as experienced by enclave residents themselves. It shows the ways that the politics of the IndiaeBangladesh border are constitutive of (and constituted by) a range of fractures and internal boundaries within the enclave. These boundaries are as central to forging communitydto articulating who belongs and whydas are more public narratives that frame enclave residents as victims of confused territorial configurations. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. How might we understand the politics of community-making in borderlands? As border studies have moved from focusing on questions and histories of producing space and mapping the border (Prescott, 1987) to qualitative explorations of those who live in proximity to it (essays in Wilson & Donnan, 1998), there has been an outpouring of writings focusing on questions of political marginalization and spatial exclusion in border zones. Such studies have greatly contributed not just to understandings of sovereignty and border politics (Chalfin, 2010; essays in Diener & Hagen, 2010), but to questions of identity (Aggarwal, 2004; Eilenberg, 2010; essays in Kumar Rajaram & Grundy-Warr, 2007; Middleton, 2011); to the tenuousness of concepts such as security, state, and nation (Coleman, 2009; Jones, 2009b; Samaddar, 1999; Van Schendel, 2005); and to the politics of transporting both licit and illicit goods across state frontiers (Mountz, 2010; Sturgeon, 2004; Tagliacozzo, 2005; essays in Van Schendel & Abraham, 2005). Such studies have adopted widely heterogeneous theoretical approaches to the border. However, in the past decade there has been a general convergence or clustering around a set of theoretical possibilities opened by the writings of Hannah Arendt (1968) on “statelessness,” Giorgio Agamben’s (1998, 2005) revitalization of Arendt and Schmitt (2005 (1922)) through the concept of the exception, and James Scott’s (1998, 2009) explorations of state and non-state space. 1 All of these frameworks offer compelling ways to under- stand the dynamics and dilemmas of exclusion for those living at the political margins of state and nation. Yet, in their primary attention to the forms of political and legal subjection (the presence or absence of particular forms of state power), they also risk reproducing narratives of expropriation that are as central to the political aspirations and claims for inclusion of those living on the margins as they are to marginality itself. As such, the problem of understanding how narratives of exclusion play into the formation of borderland communities is critical, not just for interpreting and evaluating claims of communities in borderlands, but also for understanding the ways that bordering practices produce not one political boundary, but many. In this essay, I intend to read a set of more silent, or silenced, narratives of inclusions and exclusions against the grain of “public” histories of destitution and suffering in a particularly confused border region. My goal is not just to point out that there are hidden * 013 Coleman Hall, Lewisburg, PA 17837, USA. Tel.: þ1 312 961 1853. E-mail address: jason.cons@bucknell.edu. Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect Political Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo 0962-6298/$ e see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2012.06.004 Political Geography 35 (2013) 37e46