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The Course was
structured around 8 modules. There are five compulsory modules (A-E)
and three optional modules (F-H).
Course Modules
(Compulsory)
A. States, partitions, forced migration and issues of citizenship
B. Gender dimensions of forced migration, vulnerabilities, and
justice
C. International, regional, and the national legal regimes of
protection, sovereignty and the principle of responsibility
D. Internal displacement with special reference to causes, linkages,
and responses
E. Resource politics, climate change, environmental degradation, and
displacement
(Optional)
F. Research methodology in Forced Migration Studies
G. Ethics of care and protection
H. Media and forced migration
The readings are
divided into two sections: essential and supplementary. The
essential reading materials with an introductory note on each module
were sent to the participants before the commencement of the
distance education segment on 1 September 2008. The additional
reading material was uploaded on the secured segment of the website
meant for the course participants and the faculty. On their arrival
in Kolkata, participants received supplementary reading material in
the form of books, CDs, essays and reports.
The participants had
to complete two assignments during the course of the distance
education segment. The first assignment was a short (700-1000 words)
review essay/note on any of the reading materials sent the
participants received relating to one of the two supplementary
modules (F and G). The two optional modules are: Module F. Research
methodology in Forced Migration Studies and Module G. Ethics of care
and protection. The second assignment is a term paper (2500 words)
or a term assignment in any other form as suggested by the module
tutor. Participants had to submit their first draft of the term
paper during the distance education segment. On the basis of the
comments they received during the interactive sessions with their
respective module tutor they had to present a revised term paper
during the Fifteen-day workshop. Some of the best term papers will
be eventually published in Refugee Watch. The abstracts of the
introductory notes and modules assignments are presented below.
Module A (States,
partitions, forced migration and issues of citizenship)
Core Faculty: Samir Kumar Das
Module Note
Cracking and
splitting of empires and kingdoms in the pre-Partition era were not
rare and were hardly associated with population movements. It is
only with partition that population movement becomes an essential
part of the process.
While partition
evidently upsets and shatters the preexisting ‘way of life’, it also
gradually becomes ‘a way of life’ itself as people are forced to
‘select’ their nations and states ‘naturally’. One partition creates
and hides many other partitions. At one level, instead of mitigating
the Hindu-Muslim divide, it has sharpened and exacerbated it. At
another, it turns us away from what is called the ‘denationalized
peoples’ perspective’ – including the gender perspective on that
epochal event. Now that the ethnicities and nationalities within
each nation-state have become relatively free from the control of
nation-states – thanks to the forces and processes of globalization
- their assertions too are couched in the demand for partition. The
demand for partition reenacts the territoriality of the nation-state
as much as the demand also subverts it.
Term paper
Assignment (Answer any one of the four questions)
1. Discuss the complex interconnection between population flux and
the rise of xenophobia and racism in the wake of globalization.
2. Have the partition refugees enjoyed the right to return? Give
reasons for your answer.
3. Do you think that partition refugees are a case by itself? Argue
your case.
4.
Demonstrate through
an analysis of state formation how forced migrations due to
partitions pave the way for fictive core of nationalism.
Module B (Gender
dimensions of forced migration, vulnerabilities, and justice)
Core Faculty:
Paula Banerjee
Module Note
South Asia
is the fourth largest refugee-producing region in the world. Again,
a majority of these refugees are made up of women. This module is
meant to portray that undoubtedly both displacement and asylum is a
gendered experience. At least in the context of South Asia it
results from and is related to the marginalisation of women by the
South Asian states. These states at best patronise women and at
worse infantilise, disenfranchise and de-politicise them. It is in
the person of a refugee that women’s marginality reaches its
climactic height. One way of marginalising women from body politic
is done by targeting them and displacing them in times of state
verses community conflict. As a refugee a woman loses her
individuality, subjectivity, citizenship and her ability to make
political choices. As political non-subjects refugee women emerge
as the symbol of difference between us/citizens and its
other/refugees/non-citizens.
Term paper
Assignment (Any one of the four questions)
1. Is there a
gendered structure in people's ability to acces resources? If so
substantiate on how it impacts on forced migration?
2. Is there a
relation between trafficking and statelessness? Discuss this with
examples taken from the Indo- Bangladesh or Indo Nepal Border?
3. Write on camps
as sites of insecurity for women. Give examples taken from any
refugee or IDP Camps.
4. Can the right to
return be the only durable solution for women? Give your response
with examples taken from Afghan refugees in Pakistan or Bhutanese
Refugees.
Module C
(International, Regional, and the National Legal Regimes of
Protection, Sovereignty and the Principle of Responsibility)
Core Faculty: Oishik Sircar
Module Note
Module C deals with
the national, regional and global legalities of refugee rights,
focusing on developing a critical understanding of the history and
politics of the international protection regime, which includes
questions of citizenship, state accountability, the transnational
forced migrant subjectivity and representation, and asylum
jurisprudence. The need for Southern countries, especially those in
South Asia, to develop a refugee protection regime, over and above a
human rights protection system, should ideally be premised on
countering such ‘primitive’ constructions by the Northern countries
that can extend asylum only when ‘barbarity’ marks the state in the
asylum seekers country of origin. The module will also draw out the
distinctions between the categories of refugee, internally displaced
persons, and stateless people in the light of the contested debates
around persecution, well-founded fear and asylum adjudication
systems.
Term paper
Assignment (Any one of the four questions)
1. Are the five
Convention grounds for persecution limiting or enabling in the
present era of securitized States?
2. With special
reference to the essay by Hathaway and Hicks, discuss the contested
and changing nature of the concept of 'well founded fear' in
International Refugee Law.
3. Do
national asylum adjudication mechanisms like the US' Immigration and
Naturalization Services undermine the key principles of refugee
protection enshrined in the 1951 Convention because of the operation
of the 'worse the better' standard? Discuss with reference to the
essay by Bhaba.
4. How do cultural
invectives operate as the qualifier for refugee/immigrant protection
of people from Southern countries seeking asylum in Northern
countries? Discuss with reference to the essays by Visweswaran and
Akram.
Module D (Internal Displacement with Special Reference to Causes,
Linkages, and Responses)
Core Faculty : Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury
Module Note
The eviction of indigenous people from their land is a recurrent
theme in South Asia. Be it Ranigaon, Golai, Motakeda, Somthana,
Ahmedabad, Bandarban, or Trincomalee, thousands of families are
being evicted from their homes either in the name of conflict or in
the name of modernization.
The last two decades have witnessed an enormous increase in the
number of internally displaced people in South Asia. Since the
early 1990s the need for a separate legal mechanism for IDPs in
South Asia has increasingly been felt. Only recently the
international community has developed such a mechanism that is
popularly known as the UN Guiding Principles on internal
displacement. This has given us a framework within which
rehabilitation and care of internally displaced people in South Asia
can be organised. This module discusses in detail the ways in which
the South Asian nation states has addressed the issue of Internally
displaced persons, the policies regarding the rehabilitation and
care of these groups within South Asia.
Term paper Assignment
(Any one of the four questions)
1. In what way internal displacement may be considered a more
serious humanitarian crisis than the refugee problem in the
contemporary period?
2. To what extent the UN Guiding Principles can deal with the
problems faced by the persons suffering from development-induced
displacement?
3. Do you think that the internalization of the UN Guiding
Principles in national laws would be able to protect the rights of
the IDPs?
4. Write an essay on the best legislative and administrative
practices on the protection of the rights of IDPs in the context of
the role of the national human rights institutions of any country of
your choice.
Module E (Resource Politics, Climate Change, Environmental
Degradation, and Displacement)
Core Faculty : Masud Hossain
Module Note
Objective of this module is to contemplate the impacts of resource
crisis, climate change and subsequent forced migration on
development of the society. Resource crisis, climate change and
forced migration are one of the major concerns of the contemporary
development discourse. Forced migration due to resource crisis
caused by climate change and environmental degradation is a serious
impediment to attaining the basic normative goal of development i.e.
a relatively equal society along with capable social actors by the
virtue of favourable structural facilities and opportunities. In
this module it is particularly intended to examine to what extent
the issues of resource crisis, climate change and resultant forced
migration are impairing the social equality on the one hand, and to
what extent the existing social inequality, particularly in the
relationship between the countries of the North and the South,
causing the problems of climate change, resource crisis, and forced
migration on the other.
Term paper Assignment (Answer any one)
1. Should environmental refugees be recognized as an official
category of refugees by the United Nations?
2. Forced displacement by climate change and role of the
international community.
Module F (Research Methodology in Forced Migration Studies)
Core Faculty : Pradip Kumar Bose
Module Note
Much of research depends on wit, particularly if the enquiry is
sensitive in the eyes of the people enquired into. And there is no
training in wit. In the social sciences methodology is taken to be a
discipline, bordering on philosophy, whose function is to recommend
and examine the methods, which should be used to produce valid
knowledge. Methodology lays down procedures to be used in generation
of valid knowledge and these procedures are justified or criticized
by means of philosophical arguments. It is clear that methodology’s
claim to prescribe correct procedures to social sciences presupposes
a form of knowledge that is thought to be provided by philosophy.
‘Forced migration’ as a problematic demands a critical epistemology.
It believes in value-determined nature of enquiry, unlike positivism
and post-positivism interested in explanation only. Further, it
wants enquiry to critique with an intention to transform social,
political, economic, and ethnic and gender structures, which
constrain and exploit woman and man. This module addresses the
concerns of this problematic.
Review Assignment
1.What is qualitative methodology? Illustrate your account with some
examples from the texts.
2.Can biographies be helpful in displacement studies? What do you
think the advantages and disadvantages in using the biographical
materials in such studies?
3. Describe the commonly available sources of migration statistics.
How can they be meaningfully used in displacement studies? What are
the limitations of migration statistics that are generally
available?
4. What is survey research? If you have to prepare a report on a
refugee camp how would you conduct the survey? Give full details.
Module G (Ethics of
Care and Protection)
Core Faculty: Ranabir Samaddar
Module Note
The entire history
of refugee care and protection has been also one of “refugee
manipulation”. Refugees have been used and abused in the interests
of the states, and institutions have been either willing accomplices
or have been ignored in these policies and acts of manipulation.
Indeed, in recent years there is increasing interest in the ethical
dimension of the principles and practices of care and protection of
the uprooted and the displaced. In this module we address the basic
issue as to “Why should we care for and protect the victims of
forced displacement”? The “we” here refers to those who have not had
experienced displacement themselves, yet harbour some form of an
ethical commitment to the victims of forced displacement. The
ethical language therefore is expected to establish some form of a
connection between them and us – between those who are not forcibly
displaced and those who are. CRG’s studies in the partition
‘refugees’ in the east, for example, underline a plethora of
self-help initiatives undertaken by them. Ethical language therefore
is a language of universality that cuts across the given boundaries
of the victims’ groups and communities.
Review Assignment
1. On the basis of
the literature (particularly the Reader on International Refugee
Law) you have received, please write a review note of about 700-1000
words on the place of the human rights treaties and their
limitations in ensuring the implementation of ethical standards in
protecting the rights of the persons/people forced to migrate.
2. Write a short
essay of about 700-1000 words on the basis of the literature
referred to in the module note on the implication of the comment
made in the module note, “It is these interrelations and the
inter-conflicts that make ethical judgements so complicated and
predicated on many a factor beside the moral.”
3. Explain (in about
1000 words) on the basis of the note and the reference material (for
instance Catherine de Wenden’s article) how ethical issues become
identity issues, which also involve judgements on the self, and
therefore the humanitarian argument is also one of qualified and
critical judgement.
4. How does the
argument of the ethical duty to protect become an argument of power?
Write your comments (in about 700 words) on the basis of the
reference material (for instance Samaddar’s article, “In Life, in
Death: Power and Rights”).
Module H (Media and
Forced Migration)
Core faculty: Sanjoy Barbora
Module Note
This module reflects
on the Public Sphere and whether the growth of Media in South Asia
has ensured victims right to communicate. In this module we try and
examine the linkages between the right to information and the right
to communicate. Recent developments in the South Asian media
landscape is worth delving into if one is to understand the kind of
transformation that society, state and media have undergone in the
region. The number of satellite television channels in the national
and regional levels has increased in the last decade. In countries
like Nepal, community radio stations have revolutionised local
politics. In Kathmandu alone, there are 17 privately owned radio
stations (as of December 2007). Pakistan has recently allowed
broadcasts from private radio stations. Moreover the growth of
newspapers in countries like Bangladesh and Pakistan are also
phenomenal. All these changes would lead one to assume that the
average citizen has greater access to information now, than in the
past. However, this has not automatically lead to a plurality of
voices in the public domain. Therefore, stories of forced
displacement, refugees, civil rights violations and so on, are
placed along a same continuum of concerns that compete with
advertising space, pageants and hostile business takeovers.
Media Assignment
-
Prepare a brief
note on a possible case study of forced displacement and produce
a script for a radio magazine
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Interview at
least 4 people on some aspect of forced migration (Sound inputs)
-
Structure news
story for a radio magazine (of about 8 minutes)
-
Prepare a draft
script of the radio magazine
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The script
should include the following:
(a)
A brief description
of the event
(b)
List of key persons
to be interviewed
(c)
Creating “voice
over” bytes from the interview
(d)
Linking “voice over” bytes with other important sounds. |