Events / Program: Europe-Asia Research Platform on Forced Migration

	Title	Date	Type	Speakers
	The Impossibility of Politics: Brecht, Manto and Two Itinerant Situations	Tue, 19.10.2021	Lecture	Ludger Hagedorn Ranabir Samaddar	The Impossibility of Politics: Brecht, Manto and Two Itinerant Situations Tue, 19.10.2021 Speakers: Ludger Hagedorn Ranabir Samaddar Series: Lecture Two writings of Bertold Brecht and Sadat Hasan Manto are joined by a realisation that in certain situations political openings become impossible. Strangely these are not stable or more correctly speaking static situations but are situations of mobility. Yet the conditions of mobility bring to us only spectres of deaths. Political openings towards transformation at least in a conventional sense are ruled out. The severity of itinerant situations at times makes it impossible for the migrant subjectivity to become political. Read more
The Impossibility of Politics: Brecht, Manto and Two Itinerant Situations Tue, 19.10.2021 Speakers: Ludger Hagedorn Ranabir Samaddar Series: Lecture Two writings of Bertold Brecht and Sadat Hasan Manto are joined by a realisation that in certain situations political openings become impossible. Strangely these are not stable or more correctly speaking static situations but are situations of mobility. Yet the conditions of mobility bring to us only spectres of deaths. Political openings towards transformation at least in a conventional sense are ruled out. The severity of itinerant situations at times makes it impossible for the migrant subjectivity to become political. Read more
	The Afghan Crisis Reconsidered	Mon, 20.09.2021	Seminars and Colloquia	Ludger Hagedorn Nergis Canefe Paula Banerjee	The Afghan Crisis Reconsidered Mon, 20.09.2021 Speakers: Ludger Hagedorn Nergis Canefe Paula Banerjee Series: Seminars and Colloquia When the U.S. government announced its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Afghan government folded, the president abandonend his people and the army surrendered to the Taliban. Many people, including the U.S. president looked askance at this development. Banerjee argues that such a development was hardly surprising. When the U.S. attacked Afghanistan, it was to create a client state that would protect U.S. interests, not those of Afghanistan or its neighbours. In fact, the nascent process of nation-building was halted. The US wanted to impose its values and most Afghans who went along with it did so out of self-interest. At best, the U.S. created a “creamy layer of collaborators” that in no way had deep rooted impact. When the U.S. left, there was nothing to hold the amorphous group together and they could not think of themselves as one nation. Many have fled, the others have surrendered to the Taliban, portraying clearly that it was never their war. Rather, it was another episode of the great game. Nergis Canefe discussed the history of the Afghan refugee crisis that predates the withdrawal of the U.S. troops and the regional containment and redistribution of the dispossessed Afghan populations. Read more
The Afghan Crisis Reconsidered Mon, 20.09.2021 Speakers: Ludger Hagedorn Nergis Canefe Paula Banerjee Series: Seminars and Colloquia When the U.S. government announced its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Afghan government folded, the president abandonend his people and the army surrendered to the Taliban. Many people, including the U.S. president looked askance at this development. Banerjee argues that such a development was hardly surprising. When the U.S. attacked Afghanistan, it was to create a client state that would protect U.S. interests, not those of Afghanistan or its neighbours. In fact, the nascent process of nation-building was halted. The US wanted to impose its values and most Afghans who went along with it did so out of self-interest. At best, the U.S. created a “creamy layer of collaborators” that in no way had deep rooted impact. When the U.S. left, there was nothing to hold the amorphous group together and they could not think of themselves as one nation. Many have fled, the others have surrendered to the Taliban, portraying clearly that it was never their war. Rather, it was another episode of the great game. Nergis Canefe discussed the history of the Afghan refugee crisis that predates the withdrawal of the U.S. troops and the regional containment and redistribution of the dispossessed Afghan populations. Read more
	Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas	Wed, 15.09.2021 - Fri, 17.09.2021	Conferences and Workshops	Ayşe Çağlar Paula Banerjee Ranabir SamaddarSabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury	Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas Wed, 15.09.2021 - Fri, 17.09.2021 Speakers: Ayşe Çağlar Paula Banerjee Ranabir SamaddarSabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury Series: Conferences and Workshops "Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas" was a workshop on an edited volume (in the making) with the same title. It was being co-hosted with the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (MCRG) as part of the Europe-Asia Research Platform on Forced Migration. The workshop brought together scholars to address the distinctive dynamics of the different sites of the production of statelessness. Different sites evoke different histories and repertoires. They also bring different possibilities of alignment of the problematic, which the volume aims to address. Each contributor to the volume was paired with a discussant, workshop participants joined both physically and online. Read more
Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas Wed, 15.09.2021 - Fri, 17.09.2021 Speakers: Ayşe Çağlar Paula Banerjee Ranabir SamaddarSabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury Series: Conferences and Workshops "Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas" was a workshop on an edited volume (in the making) with the same title. It was being co-hosted with the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (MCRG) as part of the Europe-Asia Research Platform on Forced Migration. The workshop brought together scholars to address the distinctive dynamics of the different sites of the production of statelessness. Different sites evoke different histories and repertoires. They also bring different possibilities of alignment of the problematic, which the volume aims to address. Each contributor to the volume was paired with a discussant, workshop participants joined both physically and online. Read more
	The Intersections of Syrian Refugees’ Dilemma: Settlement, Onward Movement, and Return	Wed, 16.06.2021	Seminars and Colloquia	Ayşe ÇağlarAhmet İçduygu	The Intersections of Syrian Refugees’ Dilemma: Settlement, Onward Movement, and Return Wed, 16.06.2021 Speakers: Ayşe ÇağlarAhmet İçduygu Series: Seminars and Colloquia The international refugee regime and its national versions increasingly tend to offer a temporary protection mechanism that creates a “limboizing effect” on refugees’ lives. It also appears that these policies use temporariness as a political tool of governance. While these dominant international and national rulings ideally present the three choices of settlement (integration in the first country of asylum), onward movement (resettlement in the third country), and return (repatriation) as durable solutions to the refugee question, none of these choices easily become pertinent in the lives of refugees under their protracted situation and limitations of the international refugee regime. Consequently, refugees face with the challenges of living in an environment of uncertainties that is also labelled with the concept of permanent temporariness. In this presentation, Ahmet Içduygu referred to the concept of permanent temporariness, and answered the question of what is the role of international refugee regime and that of Turkey’s refugee policies towards Syrian refugees in the context of refugees’ aspirations for planning their future. He also questioned the polarized nature of the structure-agency debate, emphasizing the synthesis of these two influences on refugees’ aspirations in the context of settlement, onward movement and return choices. Read more
The Intersections of Syrian Refugees’ Dilemma: Settlement, Onward Movement, and Return Wed, 16.06.2021 Speakers: Ayşe ÇağlarAhmet İçduygu Series: Seminars and Colloquia The international refugee regime and its national versions increasingly tend to offer a temporary protection mechanism that creates a “limboizing effect” on refugees’ lives. It also appears that these policies use temporariness as a political tool of governance. While these dominant international and national rulings ideally present the three choices of settlement (integration in the first country of asylum), onward movement (resettlement in the third country), and return (repatriation) as durable solutions to the refugee question, none of these choices easily become pertinent in the lives of refugees under their protracted situation and limitations of the international refugee regime. Consequently, refugees face with the challenges of living in an environment of uncertainties that is also labelled with the concept of permanent temporariness. In this presentation, Ahmet Içduygu referred to the concept of permanent temporariness, and answered the question of what is the role of international refugee regime and that of Turkey’s refugee policies towards Syrian refugees in the context of refugees’ aspirations for planning their future. He also questioned the polarized nature of the structure-agency debate, emphasizing the synthesis of these two influences on refugees’ aspirations in the context of settlement, onward movement and return choices. Read more
	Fleeing and Staying	Fri, 04.06.2021	Lecture	Meghna Guhathakurta, Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury	Fleeing and Staying Fri, 04.06.2021 Speakers: Meghna Guhathakurta, Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury Series: Lecture This lecture was part of CRG’s proposed research on the Fifty Years of the Liberation of Bangladesh as well as its research programme on Migration and Forced Migration Studies supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna and several other universities and institutions and universities in India. Read more
Fleeing and Staying Fri, 04.06.2021 Speakers: Meghna Guhathakurta, Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury Series: Lecture This lecture was part of CRG’s proposed research on the Fifty Years of the Liberation of Bangladesh as well as its research programme on Migration and Forced Migration Studies supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and Institute of Human Sciences, Vienna and several other universities and institutions and universities in India. Read more
	Revisiting the Social History of Ethnic Violence in Rwanda	Tue, 25.05.2021	Lecture	Ayşe Çağlar Giorgia DonàErin Jessee	Revisiting the Social History of Ethnic Violence in Rwanda Tue, 25.05.2021 Speakers: Ayşe Çağlar Giorgia DonàErin Jessee Series: Lecture In this lecture, Prof. Doná revisited the social history of ethnic violence in Rwanda by focusing on marginalized voices. She introduced the constellation of genocide narratives to conceptualize the relationship between public and personal narratives of violence and its legacy and to identify connections among varied stories. This chronicle from below challenges a social history of almost totalizing violence to speak of continuity, embeddedness and the everyday. In doing so, it problematizes the narrative of ruptures between the “old” (pre-genocide) and “new” (post-genocide) reality; challenges the overlap of ethnic and social identities; and records the complex legacy of ethnic violence, as an event and as narrative, on the social and narrative lives of the nation and its people. Read more
Revisiting the Social History of Ethnic Violence in Rwanda Tue, 25.05.2021 Speakers: Ayşe Çağlar Giorgia DonàErin Jessee Series: Lecture In this lecture, Prof. Doná revisited the social history of ethnic violence in Rwanda by focusing on marginalized voices. She introduced the constellation of genocide narratives to conceptualize the relationship between public and personal narratives of violence and its legacy and to identify connections among varied stories. This chronicle from below challenges a social history of almost totalizing violence to speak of continuity, embeddedness and the everyday. In doing so, it problematizes the narrative of ruptures between the “old” (pre-genocide) and “new” (post-genocide) reality; challenges the overlap of ethnic and social identities; and records the complex legacy of ethnic violence, as an event and as narrative, on the social and narrative lives of the nation and its people. Read more
	Decolonizing Forced Migration Studies: Lessons from Borderlands	Wed, 12.05.2021	Seminars and Colloquia	Ayşe Çağlar Nergis Canefe	Decolonizing Forced Migration Studies: Lessons from Borderlands Wed, 12.05.2021 Speakers: Ayşe Çağlar Nergis Canefe Series: Seminars and Colloquia This presentation was an exploration of forced migration studies seen from the lens of de-colonial theory and invited us to consider shifting the geographies of reason habitually marking the field. Starting with a foundational critique of moralism and privilege marking canonized understandings of migration, precarity, displacement and dispossession, it unpacked the complexity of an existential political commitment to redefining forced migration not from the core/recipient states and societies but from borderlands. This work thus contributed to a long and rich—yet also troubled and deeply contested—conversation between postcolonial studies and forced migration studies. Read more
Decolonizing Forced Migration Studies: Lessons from Borderlands Wed, 12.05.2021 Speakers: Ayşe Çağlar Nergis Canefe Series: Seminars and Colloquia This presentation was an exploration of forced migration studies seen from the lens of de-colonial theory and invited us to consider shifting the geographies of reason habitually marking the field. Starting with a foundational critique of moralism and privilege marking canonized understandings of migration, precarity, displacement and dispossession, it unpacked the complexity of an existential political commitment to redefining forced migration not from the core/recipient states and societies but from borderlands. This work thus contributed to a long and rich—yet also troubled and deeply contested—conversation between postcolonial studies and forced migration studies. Read more
	Forced Migration, the Antinomies of Mobility, and the Autonomy of Asylum	Wed, 14.04.2021	Seminars and Colloquia	Ayşe ÇağlarNicholas de Genova	Forced Migration, the Antinomies of Mobility, and the Autonomy of Asylum Wed, 14.04.2021 Speakers: Ayşe ÇağlarNicholas de Genova Series: Seminars and Colloquia Rather than seeing the ever more devious reaction formations of border policing and militarization, migrant detention, immigration enforcement, and deportation by state powers as if these were purely a matter of control, it is instructive to situate this economy of power in relation to the primacy, autonomy, and subjectivity of human mobility on a global (transnational, intercontinental, cross- border, postcolonial) scale. This is true, I contend, as much for refugees as for those who come to be derisively designated to be mere “migrants.” If we start from the human freedom of movement and recognize the various tactics of bordering as reaction formations, then the various tactics of border policing and forms of migration governance can be seen to introduce interruptions that temporarily immobilize and decelerate human cross-border mobilities with the aim of subjecting them to processes of surveillance and adjudication. Indeed, it is this dialectic that reconstitutes these mobilities as something that comes to be apprehensible, alternately, as “migration,” or “asylum-seeking,” or the “forced migration” of “refugees” in flight from persecution or violence – which is to say, as one or another variety of target and object of government. Yet, even under the most restricted circumstances and under considerable constraint, these human mobilities exude a substantial degree of autonomous subjectivity whereby migrants and refugees struggle to appropriate mobility. Even against the considerable forces aligned to immobilize their mobility projects, or to subject them to the stringent and exclusionary rules and constrictions of asylum, the subjective autonomy of human mobility remains an incorrigible force. Read more
Forced Migration, the Antinomies of Mobility, and the Autonomy of Asylum Wed, 14.04.2021 Speakers: Ayşe ÇağlarNicholas de Genova Series: Seminars and Colloquia Rather than seeing the ever more devious reaction formations of border policing and militarization, migrant detention, immigration enforcement, and deportation by state powers as if these were purely a matter of control, it is instructive to situate this economy of power in relation to the primacy, autonomy, and subjectivity of human mobility on a global (transnational, intercontinental, cross- border, postcolonial) scale. This is true, I contend, as much for refugees as for those who come to be derisively designated to be mere “migrants.” If we start from the human freedom of movement and recognize the various tactics of bordering as reaction formations, then the various tactics of border policing and forms of migration governance can be seen to introduce interruptions that temporarily immobilize and decelerate human cross-border mobilities with the aim of subjecting them to processes of surveillance and adjudication. Indeed, it is this dialectic that reconstitutes these mobilities as something that comes to be apprehensible, alternately, as “migration,” or “asylum-seeking,” or the “forced migration” of “refugees” in flight from persecution or violence – which is to say, as one or another variety of target and object of government. Yet, even under the most restricted circumstances and under considerable constraint, these human mobilities exude a substantial degree of autonomous subjectivity whereby migrants and refugees struggle to appropriate mobility. Even against the considerable forces aligned to immobilize their mobility projects, or to subject them to the stringent and exclusionary rules and constrictions of asylum, the subjective autonomy of human mobility remains an incorrigible force. Read more
	Borders and Mobility	Mon, 05.04.2021	Lecture	Ranabir SamaddarNasreen Chowdhory	Borders and Mobility Mon, 05.04.2021 Speakers: Ranabir SamaddarNasreen Chowdhory Series: Lecture It is difficult to define the concept of the border with rigour and precision; it is easier to make sense of it as an institution and a practice with the help of associated concepts, such as boundary, frontier, borderlands, etc. The border as a mode to protect and delimit a territory is old. Read more
Borders and Mobility Mon, 05.04.2021 Speakers: Ranabir SamaddarNasreen Chowdhory Series: Lecture It is difficult to define the concept of the border with rigour and precision; it is easier to make sense of it as an institution and a practice with the help of associated concepts, such as boundary, frontier, borderlands, etc. The border as a mode to protect and delimit a territory is old. Read more
	“We Are All Refugees”: Informal Settlements and Camps as Converging Spaces of Global Displacements	Wed, 17.03.2021	Seminars and Colloquia	Ayşe ÇağlarFaranak Miraftab	“We Are All Refugees”: Informal Settlements and Camps as Converging Spaces of Global Displacements Wed, 17.03.2021 Speakers: Ayşe ÇağlarFaranak Miraftab Series: Seminars and Colloquia Faranak Miraftab presented her most recent work in which she relationally theorizes realities of those living in slums and in camps in the era of intensified global displacements. Read more
“We Are All Refugees”: Informal Settlements and Camps as Converging Spaces of Global Displacements Wed, 17.03.2021 Speakers: Ayşe ÇağlarFaranak Miraftab Series: Seminars and Colloquia Faranak Miraftab presented her most recent work in which she relationally theorizes realities of those living in slums and in camps in the era of intensified global displacements. Read more