Calcutta Research Group, (25-30 November 2018)
Module A
Module A. Promises and Paradoxes of the Global Compacts on Refugees and Migrants : The Need for New Global, Regional and National Responses
Coordinators: Dr. Nasreen Chowdhory & Professor Ranabir Samaddar
Abstract
The Global Compact on Refugees and the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration, mandated by the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, 2016, and currently being considered by the United Nations have been widely considered as opportunities for the world to reconsider old approaches to refugee and migrant protection. Annex 1 of the Declaration speaks of a comprehensive refugee response framework (CRRF) and the resolution invites the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to engage with States and consult with all relevant stakeholders, with a view to evaluating the detailed practical application of the comprehensive refugee response framework and assessing the scope for refinement and further development. It also specifies that the objective is to ease pressures on the host countries involved, enhance refugee self-reliance, expand access to third-country solutions and support conditions in countries of origin for return in safety and dignity. Annex II, likewise, proposes a process of intergovernmental negotiations leading to the adoption of a global compact for safe, orderly and regular migration. The proposed global compact would be an important contribution to global governance and would deal with humanitarian, developmental, human rights-related, and other aspects of migration.
The Declaration is global not only because it emanates from a global institution, but also because of the following aspects, to be detailed out in course of this article: (a) First, a single declaration covering subjects of migration and forced migration is an acknowledgement of the reality that the two have deep relations, and that population flows are increasingly mixed and massive in nature defying neat categorization. (b) Second, the Declaration also highlights the limits and or unwillingness of States to carry primary responsibility of the refugees and migrants, and hence opens up the possibility to include the “whole of society”, which is to say the “whole of globe” covering various stakeholders including business and commercial segments. (c) Third, the Declaration suggests uneven geographies of protection and labor market, and conceives of the globe in terms of sanctuaries, third countries, hotspots, border zones, safe corridors, legally run labor regimes, remittance-centric segments of global economy, as well places characterized by multi-stakeholder operations. These geographies are in part created by spatial planning for refugees and migrants, in part by financial and security operations. (d) Fourth, the new approach is global because refugees and migrants are conceptualized as subjects of global development. (e) Fifth, migration and refugee “crises” are going to be inevitable unless the world works towards durable solutions – hence the need for globally relevant comprehensive response framework, such as the “comprehensive refugee response framework”, and what the International Organization for Migration (IOM) has popularized as a “framework for effective practices with regard to management capacity building.” (f) And, finally, solutions can become durable only becoming global, through as indicated above practicing a new geography of care and labor market, and through pursuing a technological mode of management that would circumvent borders and boundaries to cope with the complex reality of global migration.
In this background, this article focuses on the proposed global compact on refugees. In course of the analysis it also refers to the global initiative on “safe and orderly migration” as the counterfoil, the other scene of refugee management. The article aims to show how a global gaze as an apparatus of power is born, how it becomes a material reality, how a particular ideology, in this case humanitarianism, works as the gradient of such a global machine, how the global must erase out local histories of care and protection as the global become technological in its strategy, and finally what happens to the agenda of rights which had been the backbone of much of the welfare and protection ethos in the preceding century.
It is a lengthy paper that will present a postcolonial critique of an emerging global apparatus of power.
Draft of Full Paper: CLICK HERE
Participants
Sl.No. | Name & Details of the Participants | Country | Photo | Research Articles | Comments by Coordinator |
1. |
Buddha Singh Khepchhaki,
Pravasi Nepali Coordination Committee |
Nepal |
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2. |
G. M. Arifuzzaman, Centre for Genocide
Studies, University of Dhaka |
Bangladesh |
“Regional and global responses to the Rohingya Repatriation Process: Opportunities and challenges” |
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3. |
Laura Amadori, International Organization
of Migration |
Africa
(Guinea-Bissau) |
The Global Compact for Migration: keeping promises in the context of fragile states - The case of Guinea Bissau |
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4. |
Rajkumar Nagarajah, Ministry of Policy
Planning , Sri Lanka
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5. |
Sucharita Sengupta, Graduate Institute Of
International and Developmental Studies, Geneva |
India | Revisiting Statelessness and global protection regime: the Rohingyas |
Readings