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In studying national and state identity, scholars have primarily focused on official or political discourses as evidence of identity construction. More recently, Ted Hopf has underlined the importance of popular culture in examining societal discourses of Soviet and Russian state identity. By looking at portrayals of minorities in Chinese and Indian movies and visual arts we extend Hopf's framework in two ways. First, both China and India have significant heterogeneous, illiterate and poor parts of their population, rendering textual sources less useful as the primary means to study identity. Second, we want to see what types of culture are generated by the state as opposed to internal and external others. By looking at popular culture in a democracy and a non-democracy, we can assess to what extent popular culture is manufactured by the state or is representative of societal discourses. Through an analysis of significant films and art in the post-cold war period, we show how popular culture both reflects and is used as a means to carve out state identity with relation to 'internal' others, such as Muslims and the rural poor. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 9/11 attacks intensified the proliferation of international laws centered on the norm of non-combatant immunity and underscoring the illegitimacy of using violence against civilians, regardless of justifications and root causes. While scholars have critically examined how this legislation was interpreted and implemented by states and international organizations, the response of groups labeled as 'terrorist' remains under-explored. To what extent have these norms impacted violent groups themselves? I assess whether and to what extent violent groups have changed their strategies and discourses after 9/11 to ascertain to what extent violent non-state actors respond to international norms and pressure. Following an analysis of the discourse of selected groups in India and Sri Lanka, I find that while anti-terrorism norms are handicapped by the inability of states to prosecute non-state actors, the active contestation of the label of 'terrorism' suggests that such groups are not immune to normative pressures. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]