Webinars
Borders and Mobility
Speaker: Ranabir Samaddar,Calcutta Research Group Date: 5 April 2021
The lecture commenced with the mention of the book ‘The Postcolonial Age of Migration’
and its conceptual context on migratory flows. In the first section of the lecture the concept of border and its contradictory implications as a cartographic enclosure of delimitation and the role of border forces, border check points were discussed. Borderland was highlighted as a frontier of contact and interaction between people from different walks of life, in various forms be it the rivers, mountains, valleys, seas across the globe.
The second part of the discussion elaborated on mobility and its various registers, bringing out the crucial role of borders as an indicator of governance of people’s lives. It was stressed that mobility is the attribute that becomes prominent through migration and how the modern borders reflect the disciplining of masses. The importance of urban planning and the role of integrated border management were discussed with focus on the contradictions between the perception of border and regulatory zones.
The last section of the lecture dealt with the theme of ‘borders, mobility and our histories’
where Ranabir Samaddar spoke about the emerging issues and conflicts related to border regulations, immigration controls, surveillance, confinement, circulation, movement which are temporarily solved with the advent of modern political society, where citizenship, territoriality, borders, and sovereignty were combined on the template of the modern nation states. The discussion came to a close with emphasis on governmental reasoning, economic rationality and the attempts to secure perpetual peace through compacts among stable identities, that propagate the phrases, “to live dangerously”, “think dangerously”, because borders not only produce mobility, they often make people’s knowledge and understanding of freedom inadequate.
A brief question-answer session followed at the end of the lecture. Stress was laid on whether the pandemic has created a paradigm shift in the perception of borders or not? It was mentioned that although there has been no paradigm shift in the concept of borders, since the imposition of lockdown, the idea of borders was reactivated and mobility became a
much debated matter and has affected the response of government to migrants culminating into a crisis of employment, the threats of border, expulsion looming large.
Fleeing and Staying: A Nuanced View of Bangladesh Refugee Crisis of 1971 Speaker: Meghna Guhathakurta,Research Initiative Bangladesh
Date: 4 June 2021
Meghna Guhathakurta’s lecture on ‘Fleeing & Staying: A Nuanced view of the Bangladesh Refugee Crisis of 1971’ was organised by Calcutta Research Group in collaboration with Rosa Luxembourg Stiftung. With Bangladesh celebrating fifty years of its independence also reminds us that it also marks the fifty years of the brutal genocidal realities that went into the making of Bangladesh that started with the Operation Searchlight in Dhaka targeting to cut of the general masses from the rising dissent through the intelligentsia and gradually gripped the nation into unforgettable horrors of mass repression soaked in blood. The resultant was the unprecedented flux of refugees spilling into the neighbouring nation-India who not only hosted the refugees but later played an active role in drawing international attention to the necessity of recognition of the nationhood of Bangladesh and provided support in its liberation war. However, fleeing the genocide does not only involve the cure of cross-border migration but also rests in the plethora of citizens becoming refugees within their national boundaries and the crisis of identity that was similar if not analogous for these masses ‘fleeing and staying’ Bangladesh. go behind the predominance of the visual that comes across in the reporting of a refugee. It usually consists though are not limited to mass crossing the border, huddled together in the squalor of camps, railway stations, and market places. Dismal scenes of the day-to-day miseries and perilously close to disease and death but also projected are scenes of mass atrocities as root causes which made them play in the first instance retaliation and resistance of the victimised people also capture headlines but stories that are not told or those that blurred lines of/between fleeing or staying behind. Between attaining refugee status and remaining displaced within one’s own homeland.
Resilience and resistance, the day-to-day stories of survival both inside the camps as well as outside, and the way the dynamics of return or multiple returns are the ones that remained the focus of the discussion with reference to several personal narratives to elaborate the intricate complexity of the crisis from different perspectives. The narratives of Guhathakurta as a member of a war-affected family belonging to a minority community—a family originating in West Bengal whose migratory trend she traced in her The Family Histories of the Partition—and other narratives of observers and actors in the crisis like Julian Francis of Oxfam, Freida Brown of the Australian Communist Party, and K.K. Sinha, a radical humanist who died in a motor
accident while returning from relief works in a camp; all these are rather unknown stories holds the essentialities of the millions of suffered humanity often reduced to mere statistics. The lived experiences in the nine months to freedom is what went into the making of the identity politics of the Liberation War from individual fleetingness of struggles for survival to culminating into call for identifying the nationhood for Bangladesh.
Public Lecture (Hybrid mode)
Perspectives on Human Mobility: Normative and Political Speaker: Achin Chakraborty,Institute of Development Studies Kolkata Date: 28 October 2021
The word ‘migrant’ usually evokes, for good reason, images of people at their most vulnerable.
The perspectives to illuminate the complexity of what may be generally calledhuman mobilityare therefore overshadowed by a commonplace moral concern that overwhelms the numerous accounts of vulnerabilities of migrants. In this lecture the speaker gave an outline of a normative framework that was articulated in UNDP’sHuman Development Report 2009. The perspective here is of freedom–taken in the sense of either opportunity or capability–and therefore when an individual chooses to move, her capability set is supposed to expand. The importance of the vulnerability narrative, it is worth recalling that the majority of migrants, far from being victims, tend to be successful in the narrow sense of income gain, even though their exposure risks increases manifold and their freedom in several dimensions remain restricted. Following this perspective it is hard to see why the direction of policy in the origin country/sub-national entities should be towards ‘holding back’ the prospective out-migrants. By contrast, there are positive- analytic approaches that address questions like why do people migrate? We contrast these perspectives with a political economy approach which is needed to understand why the governments respond to the ‘problem’ of immigration (or in-migration) as they do. I argue that a judicious combination of arguments drawn from these apparently diverging perspectives may help us understand the policy issues better.
Panel Discussion (online)
Afghanistan: Transition and Justice
Panellists:Paula Banerjee, University of Calcutta& Calcutta Research Group Nergis Canefe,York University, Canada
Georgia Dona,University of East London, UK
Moderator:Anita Sengupta, Asia in Global Affairs &Calcutta Research Group
Date: 8 November 2021
Decades of conflict and a constant state of transition in Afghanistan has meant that a long term plan for securing justice has always come second to securing peace. This disengagement between transitional justice and the political process and sensitivities around transitional justice among sections of the population, has impacted social reintegration and reconciliation.
Lack of institutional reform and understanding of justice has meant that each stage of transition has been accompanied by violence and insecurity triggering, among others, the recent desperate need to escape from Taliban control. As the unending cycle of conflict and transition engulfs Afghanistan this webinar organized by the Calcutta Research Group focuses attention on the following themes (a) how a coherent strategy of reconstruction can only be based on creating conditions conducive to addressing the desire for justice among the people of Afghanistan (b) how the success of this process would ensure a lasting solution to the humanitarian crisis and the repeated waves of refugees who seek to leave the country with each stage of transition through an inclusive political process and (c) finally how the international community can support this process not only through programmes that support the process within Afghanistan but a recalibration of the understanding of Afghanistan as a Silk Road state.