The situation that has unfolded due to the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of Nordic co-operation. In this status report, we look at the situation in border communities following the closing of the border, and what this may tell us about the state of Nordic co-operation – Vision 2030 for which includes integration.

This article peers into the anxieties of the democratic process in post-conflict Nepal. Today, while the recent elections gave Nepal’s politicians a new mandate to finish the constitution-drafting process, the negotiations surrounding the troubled issue continue. Despite the established formal democratic institutions and procedures, authoritarian legacies and pre-democratic political practices, values and attitudes co-exist with the new democratic establishment with negative consequences for governmental stability. The article shows how the existing Nepalese political culture reflects a contradictory mix of deference to senior leaders, but also distrust of their authority, and a culture of confrontation rather than compromise.

The article discusses the perceived life changes of former Haliya bonded labourers in Nepal after their liberation. It concentrates on the subjective perceptions of the labourers, a field that has had little attention in literature to date. Nineteen semi-structured, in-depth interviews of former Haliyas, were conducted in a rural village in Baitadi, Far-Western Nepal in the summer of 2013. These were then analysed, using qualitative content analysis. The paper is constructed on the concept of social status, more precisely subordination, and it suggests that diminishing subordination, such as caste discrimination, dependency and forcing, is more important in former bonded labourers’ lives than the lack of improvement in material benefits. Therefore it can be argued that the literature on bonded labour stresses too much the quantitative data and the meaning of material conditions, and fails to see the importance of the personal experience and improved social status as the most important change in their lives. This suggests that it might be useful to examine the importance of social status when tackling inequality questions as well.

This paper examines how students from indigenous groups from the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Southeast Bangladesh who migrated to Dhaka navigate the city. It does so by investigating how students relate to discourses of modernity and urban lifestyles while not disregarding the importance of belonging to an indigenous group. This way challenging notions of being indigenous as related to a non-industrial mode of production and essentially rooted in rural areas. In addition, by revealing the ways in which these students redefine themselves as Bangladeshi, the dominant notion of a Bangladeshi as ethnic Bengali and Muslim are challenged since indigenous migrant students are neither ethnic Bengalis nor Muslims.

Beneath the protest marches, rallies and sieges dividing Thailand in recent times are more subtle pressures that emerge from everyday encounters involving cultural notions of rank and hierarchy. These are the focus of this highly accessible ethnographic study, which ventures beyond the barricades to explore the connections between inequality, space and social life in modern-day Bangkok.

The author argues that the notion of an urban–rural divide obscures a far more complex reality linking city and countryside in reciprocal relations within both urban and national systems of status and class. Global market forces have increased the emphasis on material wealth in contemporary status relations and exacerbated pre-existing inequalities informed by a premodern system of status ranking called sakdina. This has compounded the challenges facing the growing urban middle classes and further marginalised rural and economically disadvantaged Thais.