Mahanirban Calcutta Research group

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Policies and Practices 105
 
Reflections on the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis
The two pieces in “Reflections on the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis” look at the ‘European refugee crisis’. By addressing the current scenario of “crisis” (of refugees, asylum, migrations) affecting the European space, Rahola focuses on the multiplication of borders and border apparatuses the government of the crisis directly elicited. Singh strives to understand the wave of forced migrations to Europe since 2015 in terms of the politics, practices and policies of the European Union, particularly with reference to the Syrian refugees.

Essays by Federico Rahola and Priya Singh
 

Policies and Practices 104
 
Global Capitalism, Informal Economy and the Question of Labour
“Global Capitalism, Informal Economy and the Question of Labour” has two reflective essays engaging with different aspects of the informal economy and migrant labour. “Refugee Economy – An Inside of Global Capitalism” by ByasdebDasgupta attempts to look at the refugee problem in the wake of the era of neoliberalism. “Challenges Faced by Asian Women Domestic Workers in the Gulf: A Comparison of Experiences from South India (Kerala), Sri Lanka, and the Philippines” by Ilina Senfocuses on the challenges faced by women domestic workers from three sending countries – India, Sri Lanka and Philippines, and discusses the commonality and differences in their experience.

Essays by Byasdeb Dasgupta and Ilina Sen
 

Policies and Practices 103
 
Migrants and Movements across Asia: Mobility, Global Migration Governance, and the European Response
Sengupta’s paper centres around the refugee situation in Asia, relating it to the “European migration crisis” which actually concerns Asian migrants. In focussing on trans-Asian movements that include at least two states as migrants transit through countries to reach their destinations, it discusses legal and institutional frameworks in these regions and highlighs the need for these frameworks to better express the consequences of human movements.

Essay by Anita Sengupta
 

Policies and Practices 102
 
Statelessness, International Conventions and the Need for New Initiatives? Addressing the New Frontiers of Statelessness
Tracing the history of the UN Refugee conventions, their provisions, definitions and classifications of statelessness (like de jure and de facto), this reflective piece argues that current definitions of statelessness are insufficient, ineffective and sometimes partially redundant in ensuring security and rights, especially in the context of capitalist globalisation confronting the Westphalian state system and sovereignty, and need to be revisited. 

Essay by Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury
  

Policies and Practices 101
 
Global Capitalism and Refugee and Migrant Labour
This paper explores the historical background of labour migration in connection with the rise and development of capitalism and leads on to a discussion of labour migration under present conditions of neo-liberalisation and global market economy. It also highlights how gender was of central concern in recruitment operations as well as labour deployment in the indentured system and other forms of labour migration more generally and how long-distance migration in turn unsettled gender hierarchies. 

Essays by Ranabir Samaddar & Samita Sen
  

Policies and Practices 100
 
Population Flows, Refugees, and the Responsibility to Protect in the Global Protection System
“Population Flows, Refugees, and the Responsibility to Protect in the Global Protection System” by Shibashis Chatterjee explores three issues related to population flows and their regulations namely, our understanding of the refugee and migrant, the idea of the responsibility to protect, and population flows in Asia, Latin America, and Africa in view of the mechanisms available to meet this challenge.
 
Essay by Shibashis Chatterjee
  

Policies and Practices 99
 
Responsibility to Protect: Questions of Race, Religion, Resource and the Unspoken Fourth
In her paper, Banerjee delves into the links and connections that issues of citizenship and migration share with the notions of race, religion, resource and gender. She argues how any understanding and analyses of forced migration remains incomplete without taking into consideration, the ramifications of these four components. 

Essay by Paula Banerjee
  

Policies and Practices 98
 
Promises and Paradoxes of a Global Gaze
Samaddar’s paper analyses the promises and paradoxes of the global developmental gaze, birthed in the wake of the 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 which would link protection, safety, and security with sustainable development.
 
Essay by Ranabir Samaddar
  

Policies and Practices 97
 
Peasants, Students, Insurgents and Popular Movements in Contemporary Assam
This essay is an effort to understand the compulsions and contexts in which popular movements have taken place in Assam since the mid-20th century. Since the turn of the 20th century, political mobilisation for change and renegotiation of power in Assam has centred onthe peasant. Initially emerging as an important focus of analysis for modern historians of Assam, the figure of the peasant has become important for other social scientists and politicians alike. The early intellectual scaffold of this process that emerged in the middle of the 20th century, had been the valley-based, male, Assamese-speaking, rent-paying, rural farmer, who had limited access to modern markets and whose way of life was constantly being threatened by other cultivators and the (tea) plantation industry. The peasant, as Lenin pointed out in the early 20th century, was seen to have two souls: one that craved private property and the other that dreamed of visions of equality in a rural community (Lenin 1965: 40-43). Seen thus, the peasant became an important actor in political mobilisation in most parts of the decolonising world. Although the conditions in Assam were similar to many colonised countries in the middle of the 20th century,there were several occasions where peasants in the two valleys and hills in Assam were mobilised politically only to be abandoned, because those who spoke for the peasant, were also responsible for the erosion of the rural community. 

Essay by Sanjay Barbora
 

Policies and Practices 96
 
The Urban Turn
 
Separation, Mobility and the Ordinary City: On Migrants’ Subjection and Subjectivity: The paper centers on what was categorised as a paradigmatic city, an archetype; colonial and postcolonial notions of cityness; and the postcolonial city that was an exemplary to cities that were removed from the administrative centers of the state and capitalist power, in other words, the ordinary city.
The Generic City: meta-political remarks on the Future of the City at the Time of Absolute Capitalism: The paper attempts to transpose the tripartition of the meaning of plasticity as proposed by the philosopher Catherine Malabou to the heuristic understanding of the evolution of the city.
The Urban Turn: The paper explicates the concept of urban turn in its myriad forms in contemporary times, wherein the city becomes the site of modern power albeit in disguise.

Essays by Subir Sinha, Livio Boni & Ranabir Samaddar
 

Policies and Practices 95
 
Capital: Value & Translation
 
The two pieces in “Capital Value & Translation” build on the notion of ‘commodity’ as discussed by Marx in Das Capital, and address the politics of translation with reference to translations of Das Capital. Pranab Kanti Basu, in “Commodity Fetishism”, elaborates on the departure of Marxian OD logic through the problem of Commodity Fetishism (CF), while simultaneously showing the role of interpellation and of the need of intertwining cultural counter-hegemonic strategies with the political counter-hegemonic practices of those organising to affect social change. Jon Solomon, in “From ‘Linguistic Context’ to ‘Sinification’: Marx, China, and Translation in the Postcolonial Condition”, attempts to construct a genealogy of Sinification in relation to the concept of postcolonial condition elaborated by Ranabir Samaddar (2017). He attempts to understand the postcolonial condition in the light of the modern regime of translation, and to understand the how the regimes of accumulation are related to the apparatus of area and anthropological difference that characterizes the postcolonial world.

Essays by Atig Pranab Kanti Basu & Jon Solomon
 

Policies and Practices 94
 
Population and Rent in Capital
 
“Population and rent in Capital” has two reflective pieces that look at Marx’s Das Capital from the perspectives of population and rent. In “Is There a Theory of Population in Capital?” Ranabir Samaddar contextualises the need to re-engage with and re-frame the question of relation between capitalism and population with reference to Marxian, Malthussian and Foucauldian perspectives on labour and life. Iman Kumar Mitra, in Marx’s Theory of Rent: A Speculative Reading”, retraces the trajectory of the theory of rent in Marx’s exposition of capitalism against the backdrop of the implications of such a theory in a capitalist society as espoused by Marxian scholars like Harvey and Dussel.

Essays by Ranabir Samaddar and Iman Kumar Mitra