will be under any moral obligation if and only if by taking care and protecting them we ‘do not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance’, that is to say, our own right to life and livelihood (Singer in Markie ed. 1998:800).
The variations in the tenor and accent of our ‘moral reasoning’ can hardly escape our attention. But they should not be blown out of proportions either. The rights-based argument may well be subsumed under the humanitarian argument or for that matter, the community-based argument, though of course it will be difficult to accommodate the community-based and the humanitarian arguments within the same ethical philosophy. In many ways, the arguments cut across each other and can hardly be considered as mutually exclusive. While in our ‘moral reasoning’, we face the challenge of extricating ethics from power, most of the studies in this respect point out how the practices of care and protection continue to be governed by power and security considerations. The camps and shelters built for the displaced persons represent sites where war is continued ‘by other means’. The budgetary allocation is paltry and irregular. The camp-dwellers are deprived of the non-derogable freedoms, the Guiding Principles propose to secure. Life is poor and insecure. Search for any durable solution ironically makes us confront power and negotiate its terms. Our attempts at disentangling ethics from power too are a power game.  

Review Assignment 

Module H (Media and displacement and forced migration) Core faculty: Dipankar Sinha

The 21st century is widely being described as a “media-saturated era”. Innumerable issues and events in public life are relentlessly being given exposure and ‘meaning’ through the act of mediation by media of various kinds--- print, broadcast, electronic and digital. As a consequence, there has been a significant increase in media’s role expectation in the mind of the audience around the world. But what is the state of affairs, especially in the context of a sensitive issue like forced migration, insofar as media’s role performance is concerned? Any search for explanation of the divergence and convergence of role expectation and role performance brings up a core media practice, namely, agenda setting, by which the mainstream media determine which issues are to be promoted and publicized as salient in public perception. Insofar as the media representations of forced migration/ forced displacement are concerned they are to be situated within this theoretical framework to go beyond a sectoral approach marked by scattered instances.
The issue of forced migration/ forced displacement in the realm of mainstream media generally falls in the technical category of “catastrophe communication”. In the specific context of South Asia, while there are instances, some quite impressive, of the mainstream media giving due attention to the issue the point should not be over emphasized. Forced migration, especially those following instances of intense violence like war, partition and ethnic conflict, have drawn mainstream media’s attention to unleash various media representations, but all within a specific and mostly brief time-span--- as long as the media believes that the ‘drama content’ retains the interest of the audience [specific instances will be given during the lecture]. In general the mainstream media’s act in putting forced migration in its ‘primary’ agenda has been short, scattered, capricious