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Methodological Quandaries of Studying Post-Soviet Displacements: An Invitation to Consider ‘Global Postcoloniality’ in Forced Migration Studies
No full textThis article is reproduced here with permission from the author and may be found online at http://www.mcrg.ac.in/rw%20files/RW60/RW60.pdf.As an alternative, this commentary is written in part as a preamble to this special issue of the "Refugee Watch" to facilitate and expand collaboration and innovative thinking by bringing together critical approaches to Afghan and Ukrainian refugee crises under the aegis of postcolonial conditionalities of forced migration studies and with specific reference to post-Soviet geographies of displacement. Part of the present historical task is to reveal and trace the textured histories of imperial and neoimperial legacies in the post-Soviet spaces of identity, belonging and survival. It is high time that we begin to envisage a ‘global postcolonial’ condition and systematically expand our understanding of postcolonial spaces of migration and dispossession
Uncertain Grounds: Key Moves in the Making of Modernity, from Tudor England to the Globalized Present
Get PDFWhich historical lens and what scope can capture modernitys complex social, political, economic, and epistemic permutations? Using an historical interpretive lens to explore contingent moments in its making, this work seeks to describe a core dynamic within modernity. In modernity, the assertion of freedom from rooted systems of meaning ushers in radical uncertainty. In response, new certainties are constructed for guiding human action, but being grounded upon indeterminacy these are necessarily provisional and open ended. Uncertainty thus grows in proportion to the expansion of freedom and the abstraction of foundations, making the drives to know and to control insatiable. To narrate a history of this dynamic, I frame it as a series of strategies for grounding upon groundlessness: surveying and mapping, enclosing and improving; risking and insuring. This narrative is largely set in the particular soil of British history, where the discourses surrounding efforts to ground property and knowledge upon new certainties uncovers the contingent nature of truth and legitimacy in modernity. In the Tudor period customary knowledge of the land was delegitimized as estate surveyors began to measure and represent land from the distanced perspective of geometry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the discourse of improvement legitimized the practice of enclosure as the means of securing certainty of ownership in order to cultivate endless growth, while Baconian science pursued a parallel strategy. In the eighteenth century, risk was objectified in probability theory and traded in insurance and investment markets. Since the nineteenth century risk management has been applied to populations and has become the guarantor of security and the means of governing societies across the globe. But perpetual efforts to know and contain risks have only generated more insecurity. I conclude that while founded upon freedom, modernity is a compulsion that draws us ever further from the soil of particularity. Using an historical interpretive approach and drawing on the histories of science, capitalism and insurance, as well as theories of modernity, property and risk, this project is an interdisciplinary effort to understand the making of key dynamics within modernity
Refugee Resettlement and Social Inclusion in Greater Vancouver: An Intersectionality-Based Policy Analysis of Local Immigration Partnership Strategies
No full text2025Using an intersectionality-based policy analysis, this research examined Local Immigration Partnership (LIP) strategic plans specific to the Greater Vancouver region of British Columbia, Canada, to assess how well these documents accounted for the intersectional identities of refugees. This paper accordingly explored the intersectional identities of refugees–race, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, religion–and how these identities affect the challenges of resettlement, how those challenges compare to those of other immigrant classes, and after an assessment of the way that LIP strategic plans account for these factors, proposes possible areas for strategy improvements. The analysis focused on LIPs in the Greater Vancouver Area, with a primary focus on the Surrey LIP. The reason for this focus is that Surrey, BC has a significant refugee population, and its LIP had the most robust strategy documents. This analysis revealed that LIP strategic plans had positive and thoughtful action points that would ease resettlement challenges, however, they did not consistently consider the intersectional identities of refugees. The analysis concluded that LIPs would benefit from engaging in intersectionality-based policy analysis in the process of writing their next round of strategic plans and action plans. This process would strengthen strategic plans so that LIPs can better support refugees in their communities as these groups carry out their key role in coordinating community services, ultimately easing the unique challenges that refugees of all identities face during resettlement
The Capacity to Aspire: Perceptions of Unattainable Success and Processes of Identity Formation among Marginalized Black Youth in the Greater Toronto Area
Get PDF2025This thesis examines how the inequities and inequality that low-income, marginalized Black youth experience affect their success. There may be a correlation between trauma and the limitations experienced, presenting as low self-esteem and unwillingness to succeed. My research is based on first- and second-generation Black youth living in the Greater Toronto Area. Through semi-structured critical ethnography interviews and a review of literature based on crime, education of racialized and marginalized people from low-income neighbourhoods and theoretical perspectives that explain the nuance of Black experiences, this study demonstrates that Black youth, regardless of their varying social identities, all experience some socioeconomic factor or adverse childhood experience that drastically influences their futures
Introduction: Syrians are Coming? Reframing the Syrian Refugee Crisis
No full textThis article is reproduced here with permission from the author and may be found online at http://www.mcrg.ac.in/rw%20files/RW48/RW48.pdf.In response to this ongoing state of crisis that marks the turn of the 21st century, "Refugee Watch" hosts this special issue on the plight of the Syrian people, with particular emphasis on those living as stateless people in neighboring countries across the Middle East. As millions of Syrians continue to be displaced due to the ongoing conflict in their home country, it is essential that a critical account of the global perception and reaction to this en masse refugee crisis is offered by engaged scholarship. The expert articles brought together in this issue discuss various aspects of the Syrian refugee crisis in an attempt to contextualize it in historical and global terms. Local and international human rights researchers, advocates, and organizations pertaining to the handling of Syrian crisis, local and international jurisprudence on the subject pertaining to the tinkering with the refugee law to keep Syrians out or to make them into cheap labor/second class citizens, deaths and disappearances in the Mediterranean sea and their banal perception, and, local, regional and international advocacy efforts and sources for support are among the subject headings covered in the following pages with a distinct emphasis on debates within the Global South. The issue provides a timely analytical intervention on the changing nature of the global refugee and immigration regime in response to the Syrian crisis
Rohingya Refugee Crisis and Ethno-Religious Conflict in South East Asia: From Burma to Bangladesh and Back
No full textThis article is reproduced here with permission from the author and may be found online at http://www.mcrg.ac.in/rw%20files/RW51_52/RW51_52.pdf.In this article I examine the regional as well as nation-state level dynamics that shaped the transformation of the Rohingya issue from an assumed internal ethno-religious conflict to a regional refugee crisis. The combination of humanitarian impulses, international pressure and the normative principle of popular sovereignty in Bangladesh led to difficult decisions concerning the Rohingyas who made their way across the border. Consequently, developing a policy of containment and enforcement of the right of return became a national priority. In the following pages, I will briefly trace the historical roots of the Rohingya problem in Burma/Myanmar, provide a summary of the current refugee crisis, and conclude with the challenges and responsibilities neighbouring countries face when inundated with the mass arrival of Rohingya refugees, in particular concerning the role played by Bangladesh
The Sublime in Contemporary Art and Politics: The Post 9/11 Art of Middle Eastern Diaspora in North America
Get PDFThis dissertation takes ethnographic approach to researching art with an emphasis on the artistic practices of Middle Eastern diasporic artists in Canada and the USA. This dissertation moves from an account of aesthetic theory to the revival of public interest in art related to the Middle East and the artistic challenges faced by diasporic artists from the Middle East in presenting depictions of their own subjectivity. The Arab Spring, revolutions, bloody protests and riots, as well as the attacks of radical Islamist groups have crowded mainstream news coverage with images of terror and the paradigm of radical destruction. Such reflections of horrific scenery emulate the aesthetics of the sublime in the imagination of contemporary politics. The increasing body of art emphasizing the region of the Middle East has also regenerated this mainstream media focus on the Middle East, Arab lands, and the Muslim landscape" with the same connotation of sublimity. I argue that these artistic reflections presume a particular Middle Eastern diasporic subjectivity that comes into visibility simultaneously as the translator and the witness, as well as the victim or perpetrator of this catastrophic imagery of the Middle East. I explore the artistic practices of the Middle Eastern diaspora in order to understand how they reflect their own self-image in the contemporary art scene to challenge this stereotype of the disaster carrier. I also investigate the novel ways in which the new social movements in the Middle East, such as the Green Movement in Iran or the various Arab Springs, are represented by the art works of critical diasporic artists living in North America and how such representations settle within the landscape of contemporary art. In this study, I consider two major subject matters that are present within diasporic artworks related to Middle East: the artistic representations of home countries and the current socio-political landscape; and the self-design art practices enacted through memories of immigration, performances of body and religiosity in the North American art scene. Rather than an analysis of hegemony, this dissertation analyzes how these art trends claim to be artistically valuable and aim to reach a wide audience, as well as what kinds of artistic desires they evoke. Drawing on critical studies of democratic process and social equity, this book contributes to aesthetic theory on contemporary art and puts forward questions concerning whether or not the oppositional capacity of contemporary art has withered away in neoliberal democracies
Post-Colonial State and Violence: Rethinking the Middle East and North Africa Outside the Blindfold of Area Studies
No full textThis article is reproduced here with permission from the author and may be found online at http://www.mcrg.ac.in/rw%20files/RW45/RW45.pdf.In the final analysis, this paper provides an overall assessment of migration before and after the uprisings in the Southern Mediterranean. In particular, it reviews state policies regarding forced migration in the MENA region. Notably, migration (forced displacement as well as voluntary flows) to Europe has not been accelerated by the Arab Spring, apart from a short-lived movement from Tunisia, but has simply continued along previous trends. In sharp contrast, migration within the Southern Mediterranean as a region has been deeply impacted by the events as outflows of migrants and refugees fleeing instability and violence in Libya and Syria. This is a noteworthy phenomenon in terms of understanding and deciphering global migration flows in the Global South and constitutes fertile grounds for comparison between the Middle East and other regions living under the aegis of post colonial/post-imperial states such as South Asia
Migration as a Necessity: Contextualising the European Response to the Syrian Exodus
No full textThis article is reproduced here with permission from the author and may be found online at http://www.mcrg.ac.in/rw%20files/RW48/RW48.pdf.In this vein, I trace the regional and global underpinnings of what I call ‘migration as necessity’ that is currently engulfing Europe with reference to the Syrian crisis. My aim is to develop an idiom of collective moral responsibility as a strong alternative to the dominant political discourse of surveillance and security in the area of forced migration. Developed in particular to explain the migration of those who suffer in search of either sheer survival or a way of rebuilding lives, the concept of migration as necessity draws renewed attention to the right to life above and beyond the migration studies framework. This angle allows us to demonstrate the limitations and constraints of the traditional takes on migration relating it either to individual choice or to labor mobility. In particular, existing political debates bracket forced migration as a distinctly temporary phenomenon, and the emphasis is put on its management and when possible, curtailment. Instead, in the following pages I argue that we must re-engage with debates concerning structure and agency to make a case for the recognition of histories of migration, and in particular cases of exodus. Only then could we attend to the social and political meanings and new realities created through mass movements of population
Psychonalysis, Fantasy, Postcoloniality: Derivative Nationalism and Historiography in Post-Ottoman Turkey
Get PDFProbably nowhere are the themes of tolerance and multiculturalism more prominently at display than in the recently flourishing literature on Ottoman religious-ethnic communities in Turkey, wherein Ottoman rule, particularly the Millet System of the 15th -17th centuries, is romanticized by Turkish nativist historiographers as a perfect model of peaceful coexistence distinguished by exemplary hospitality and multicultural tolerance toward the Other, the “minorities”, be they Jews, Armenians or Greeks. In this dissertation, I investigate the role of these nativist historians and their historiography in the recuperation of Turkish national imagery, as well as the pitfalls of this sort of remembrance. While doing so, I draw upon the psychoanalytically-inspired concept of fantasy and postcolonial theory to demonstrate how the fantasy of Ottoman tolerance as a melancholic attachment to the past deals with the empire’s loss by pointing to internal and external enemies as threats to the unity and coherence of the nation. Domestically speaking, this fantasy promises to bring back the golden age in as much as enemies new and old will be eliminated on the way to restoring the nation’s power. At the same time, this fantasy takes on an international significance as it captures the essence of the reaction to the European imperative: “you should become multicultural and liberal like us.” The fantasy of the Ottoman Tolerance beats its European Other at its own game by claiming: “we were already multicultural.” Seen in these terms, the analysis of the nostalgic literature on Ottoman peace can illuminate how the “Occident/Western” and “Oriental/Derivative” (i.e. the Ottoman and Turkish) formations of the national imaginary are constructed, remembered and contested in the contemporary Global South. In light of these discussions I will question the conditions and possibilities of the ethics of remembering the Empire, and of entertaining a different relationship to the past in contemporary politics in Europe and Turkey. The key concern of my work is then to inquire into alternative ways to remember the Empire without remaining trapped in the fantasy of Ottoman tolerance, or its obverse, the fantasy of Oriental/Ottoman Despotism
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