SEZs in India have produced differentiated meaning of citizenship in three significant ways; firstly through the legislative clauses and amendments. This essay will highlight some of the amendments that states like West Bengal, Maharashtra, Gujarat etc carried out in its state SEZ act to “attract investors” at the cost of rights of the people which shows how practices of citizenship is resplendent with policies of inclusion and exclusion in the state – citizen relationship. Thus the question that emerges is “citizenship” a status or is it a role? Secondly, the unique governance structure of special economic zones carries the potential of SEZs turning into sovereign mini-centres of power as the power of entry and exit is restricted and the permission to enter this well guarded city has to be obtained from the Development Commissioner, an officer appointed by the Central Government. Thirdly, the need for creating “economic zones” and to declare them “public utility services” with no index of security schemes for the workers shows that the main aim of the neo-liberal state “is to create a “good business climate” and therefore to optimize conditions of capital accumulation no matter what the consequences for employment or social well- being”(Harvey 2008: 25)[1] Thus when we talk about citizenship rights in SEZ, Harvey (2008)[2] reminds us that we need to remember “rights cluster around two dominant logics of power : that of the territorial state and that of capital”. He argues that even though we want our rights to be universal, the enforcement of rights requires the support of the state apparatus and it is in this sense “rights are fundamentally derivate of and conditional upon citizenship”[3].

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Joined as Research Associate in CRG May 2007. Her M Phil dissertation was on "Migration and Entrepreneurship: Chinese Community in Kolkata Primary areas of academic research interests are development and its impact on migration, social movements Food practices and consumption culture in 21st C Bengal.”  

The modern institutional figure of ‘the refugee’ emerged in dialectical relation to the territorialisation of sovereign power. After the consolidation of the nation/state as organising form of governance across the world, the marginal space occupied by the refugee in the national order of things has functioned as an exception justifying and confirming practices of statecraft, particularly at intergovernmental level. ‘The refugee’, as the concrete embodiment of the boundaries of citizenship and statehood, reifies them, rendering concrete their (changing) meaning; as an institutional field of intervention, it allows the projection of regimenting institutional orders, across different scales of discourse and action. Not surprisingly, ‘the refugee’ is a key institution in the projection and dissolution of such regimenting orders.
This paper assesses the relation between the institution of 'the refugee' and forms of inter- and trans-governmental regimentation, focusing on the three-decades long displacement of Afghan refugees in Pakistan. It exposes the necessary incompleteness of such regimentation attempts by looking at its contents (protection and assistance practices).  Drawing on such analysis, it provides a relational and multiperspectival framework for the conceptualisation of the refugee as a multiply interpellated and multiply positioned subject.

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