Refugees and humanitarian ethics: Beyond the politics of the emergency (original) (raw)
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Amidst the myriad viewpoints and perspectives that animate discussions on forced migration, the greatest challenge for academics and policymakers, continues to be the relevance and applicability of pre-existing international frameworks that were established to afford protection to people of concern, and the broader implications such challenges have on the global refugee regime. My doctoral dissertation is a study of some of the gaps associated with the global refugee regime and the historical development of refugee protection India, which remains minimally researched. The project identifies India as an alternate location of practice with respect to refugee protection. The dissertation also studies the notion of 'resistance' with respect to India's relationship to international refugee law mechanisms by pitting it against the existing global narrative of 'deviance' that has often been attached to states that are non-signatories of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. With the help of this study, my project will present the first steps towards a new place for discourse on forced migration research. With the help of detailed archival analysis, the thesis examines the subcontinent's practice of refugee protection that deviates from Eurocentric norms. The archival analysis demonstrates that several groups of people have sought refuge in India and the practice of extending sanctuary to such groups has essentially reconstructed refugeehood in India. The thesis provides first steps towards a cross-sectional model of refugee and forced migration research, which makes it crucial to not only move from the rudimentary definitions of a refugee, but also to identify alternate locations of practice. In summary, the thesis is a combination of exploring the 'cacophony of definitions' of refugeehood in India and an examination of look at how the refugee label has evolved over a period of time. Given India's disillusionment with the international refugee framework, the thesis explores the 'general perceptions and views' on refugeehood that
Canadian Journal of Law and Society / Revue Canadienne Droit et Société
In Mohsin Hamid's celebrated novel, Exit West, 1 a young couple flees violent conflict in South Central Asia, trekking through magical doors to Europe and North America. The interiority of refugee experience is excavated, seared by familial, emotional, and spiritual wounds. "Encampment" as the reality of refugees adrift-finding only transient shelter across continents-shreds any claims to meaningful legal status. The scale of this reality raises grave ethical questions about the gap between what is owed to forced migrants and what part of this obligation societies will honour. Serena Parekh, a political philosopher at Boston University, is certainly concerned, in No Refuge, about doors turning into walls. But this is located within a crisis engendered by the "structural injustice" of a post-World War II system of dealing with displacement enacted by liberal western states. Her essential premise is that "refugees around the world are largely unable to get refuge, that is, they are unable to access the minimum conditions of human dignity while they wait for a more permanent solution" (p. 3). Most of the estimated thirty-three million people seeking protection across borders (as part of the over 103 million forcibly displaced worldwide) 2 will subsist in badly resourced camps or unaided internationally, in urban centres, in the global south. The overwhelming majority stay in limbo, indefinitely. From Myanmar's Rohingya exodus to Bangladesh and Somalis crossing the border to Kenya's Dadaab refugee complex, to millions of Syrians who have spent a decade in Lebanon and Turkey, and many more millions of Palestinians generationally living in sites across the Middle East, an "age of encampment" prevails. 3 The numbers would be worse still if internally displaced people (IDPs) and those wanting to flee severe repression, such as in Xinjiang (China), crossed borders. Asylum being a fundamental human right, what are forced migrants to do if the barriers are insuperable? Parekh's answer is human smuggling. It's the "price we
Éthique et Économique / Ethics and Economics, 2011
This paper examines the ethics of refugee aid, attempting to answer "Why do States engage in refugee aid?" Moving beyond the simplistic answer based on the notion of charity, which demonstrably fits ill with the essentially positivist methodology of conducting refugee aid, an ethical model is construed based on the Weberian concept of action as an instrument of rationality. This is supported with critical readings from Hannah Arendt, amongst others, and also my own experiences as a former UNHCR aid worker. However, although this model better captures ground realities, it negates the individuality and humanity of refugees. Thus refugee aid as a form of global, transnational justice will be presented, based on readings from Amartya Sen.
UNHCR REFUGEE POLICY, OPERATION OF NGOs AND WOMEN REFUGEES' EMPOWERMENT IN INDIA
I n this research work, the researcher will consider the various development programs regarding women refugee which are organized through UNHCR, NGOs and other related agencies in the international context and within India. It is noteworthy to say that, between 75 to 80 percent of the world's refugees are women and children and many of them have been living in camps and emergency situations for generations, in between India also is not the exception. Most of the time the inability, disability, and loss of a male head person in the family lead economically self-sufficient poses and threat to men themselves and to their families too. Hence, refugee women need to be prepared for productive activities through education and training, income generation activities and other types of empowerment. But unfortunately, the policies and strategies to incorporate women have not yet been implemented sufficiently in India to bring about the real improvement in the lives of refugee women. The present research work will prove that accessing women refugee to skill development training programs help them to increase their positions in accessing to knowledge, resources and gaining decision-making power and to find safer job, and in fact, self-sustaining plays a key role in protecting them from dependence on unsafe and unsustainable income generations option and lead to protect them from gender-based violence within the family as well as in workplace. In fact, more state and international development level programs through international non-governmental and governmental agencies and reviewing UNHCR's livelihoods programs in India for the empowerment of all types of refugee women can make them more independent and protected to be needed. ABSTRACT
The Special Plight of Women Refugees
The special plight of women refugees across the globe presents various chal- lenges to any universal concept of human rights or access to rights, along with challenges to any concept of universal feminism or essentialist notion of gender identity. Even the United Nations has been forced to finesse the issue of innate, immutable characteristics as the basis for refugee status. There are vast cultural differences between women refugees from different cultures and contexts. For example, the women fleeing organized crime in Guatemala and the women escaping ISIS in Syria may not share race or religion, or notions of femininity, or the same conceptions of family values, and yet, they are all running for their lives to escape violence, primarily at the hands of men, whether it is warring gangs, military operations, or domestic violence. Women on the run, fleeing for their lives, often with children in tow, rarely have the personal and institutional resources or authority for organized resistance to gender-based violence, or organized demands for adequate health care, food, water, and shelter. Furthermore, women refugees are neither Indigenous nor settlers, at least not as they are discussed in decolonial feminism. Although class is certainly a factor in their experience, even intersectionality cannot begin to address the special plight of women refugees who leave their homes with nothing but what they can carry, and often that means their children, and then only for as long as their strength holds out. And in terms of transnational feminism, women refugees challenge the very notion of national sovereignty assumed by the idea of transnational. Refugees challenge the conception of the nation- state at the heart of liberal political theory, and along with it the notion of the liberal autonomous individual with innate human rights universal to all human beings.
“From the initial idea and path breaking work on Refugee and Internally Displaced People’s rights by the Norwegian Diplomat and Humanitarian Fridtjof Nansen at the turn of last century to the evolution of refugee rights legal framework at the turn of 21st century, the principles and corpus of law related to it has been widely studied and put in action. But the recent influx of the Syrian IDP’s as refugees in EU especially Hungary and Greece as transit points and Germany, France and UK as the final destination has led to a compassion fatigue. On the other hand in the near neighborhood of South Asia though not even a single nation has signed and ratified the 1951 Convention on Refugee Rights and its 1967 Protocol it has done commendable work in hosting and providing legal and physical protection to Refugees and Internally Displaced persons by enacting Principles and National Laws as the case in the point are SAARCLAW and Model National Law.”
Power and Responsibility at the Margins: The Case of India in the Global Refugee Regime
Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees
Based on a study of the Indian experience of refugee protection, the article poses the issue of responsibility as a critical counterpoint to the question of power. Power may produce influence and power may be an element of influence. But how do we relate power to responsibility? Given the dominant discourse of “responsibility to protect” as part of the global governance regime, the article asks if there is a different way to conceptualize responsibility in the post-colonial context. Here the article seeks to make a second intervention. Responsibility takes us to the perspective of the margins.