Nasreen Chowdhory – författare

This book examines forced migration of two refugees groups in South Asia. The author discusses the claims of “belonging” of refugees, and asserts that in practice “belonging” can extend beyond the state-centric understanding of membership in South Asian states. She addresses two sets of interrelated questions: what factors determine whether refugees are relocated to their home countries in South Asia, and why do some repatriated groups re-integrate more successfully than others in “post-peace” South Asian states? This book answers these questions through a study of refugees from Sri Lanka and Bangladesh who sought asylum in India and were later relocated to their countries of origin. Since postcolonial societies have a typical kind of state-formation, in South Asia’s case this has profoundly shaped questions of belonging and membership. The debate tends to focus on citizenship, making it a benchmark to demarcate inclusion and exclusion in South Asian states. In addition to qualitative analysis, this book includes narratives of Sri Lankan and Chakma refugees in post-conflict and post-peace Sri Lanka and Bangladesh respectively, and critiques the impact of macro policies from the bottom up. 

This volume is about migration across South Asia and the complex negotiation of borders by people and the states in the process. A border is understood as a form of demarcation, but it also opens up the flow of people, goods, and ideas of legality and illegality. Borders are dynamic and dyadic in the interface of state and non-state actors involved in border operations. Consequently, transborder movement becomes a complex web involving concerns of security, trade, militancy, and questions of citizenship, along with discourses of ghettoisation, belonging and otherness. Since the mid-20th century, the South Asian region has witnessed growing social and political instability and breakdown of regional cooperation. In this context, the volume casts a wide, interdisciplinary lens across South Asia and discusses economic migration as well as forced migration due to persecution and natural disasters. It looks at how understandings of ‘territoriality’ and ‘border’ become blurred due to increasing transborder migration in the region: how states in South Asia address transborder movements at both policy level and on the ground; and how borderlands become spaces for illegal trade and informal economy in South Asia and for negotiations between states and refugees on identity and citizenship.

This highly topical volume is for a wide group of scholars and students interested in South Asia, ranging from sociology, anthropology, political science, history, to interdisciplinary fields like migration studies, peace and conflict studies, and development studies.   

The book focuses on voices of displaced women who constitute a critical part of the migration process through an unravelling of the engendered displacement. It draws attention to the various processes, methods and approaches by national and international human rights and humanitarian laws and principles, and the experiences of the relevant communities, organisations towards peaceful co-existence. The contributions to this volume embellish the argument that there is a direct correlation between an academic researcher''s positionality, methods and trajectories of critical knowledge production. In particular, feminist epistemologies with specific emphasis on post-coloniality utilized in conjunction with scholarship related to transnational migration studies constitute a distinctly powerful vantage point for challenging methodological nationalism and the syndrome of ''seeing like the state'' in the area of forced migration studies.