The Mediterranean: Migration Corridor,Border Spectacle,Ethical Landscape

Talk of a ‘migration crisis’ calls forth three related spatial renderings of the Mediterranean Sea. Their social production involves a particular politics of visualization. First, the Mediterranean is but one leg of a longer migration corridor, yet as such substantiates a geo-racial border zone. Second, scenes of rescue at sea have functioned as border spectacles, naturalizing migration politics. Third, expanding surveillance infrastructure has undermined a firewall between border patrolling and search-and-rescue, thereby helping to create and sustain an ethical landscape of response-ability to routinized emergency. Visualizing and disseminating this landscape has, for the moment, created a political space between wanted and unwanted mobilities.     

"Birds of Passage": Migration of South Indian Laborers to Southeast Asia

This paper deals with the migration of south Indian manual and unskilled workers to Southeast Asian countries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It presents an analysis of the pattern of mobility of the laboring classes who crossed the seas and seeks to develop a migration paradigm that encompasses the various dimensions of the different types of intra-Asian migrations. The author argues that south Indian laborers who migrated to Burma and Malaya experienced both free and unfree migration situations during the colonial period. Different types and streams of migration coexisted and depending upon the changing strategies of employers, government, and laborers themselves the migrants were free and unfree at the same time. Hence, it is suggested that an a priori distinction between free and unfree labor migration is difficult to substantiate, at least in the case of south Indian labor migrations. In this study migration is conceptualized as an integrated and continuous process. For the lower castes and communities out-migration meant an opportunity to better their material conditions and to overcome social and caste oppression. In other words, migration to foreign countries certainly provided them avenues for social mobility that was denied in their native land.     

Crisis,Routine, Consolidation: The Politics of the Mediterranean Migration Crisis

The current ‘migration crisis’ is framed as a moment of reckoning in the EU’s dealings with its Mediterranean neighbourhood. Yet to what extent is crisis the most useful tool to account for migration and European border control practices in the current context? An exclusive focus on crisis, we argue, is misleading. To a large extent, the current crisis management builds on pre-existing practices and enables their consolidation. For us this is an invitation to discuss the relation between crisis, routine and consolidation in Euro-Mediterranean migration policies and practices. This intervention shows how ‘crises’ are spatio-temporally limited and used to further pre-existing migration control practices and techniques of governing. As such we interrogate what it means to talk of crisis versus routine in the field of Mediterranean security practices.     

The Prisoner Dilemma: Britain,Germany, and the Repatriation of Indian Prisoners of War

Abstract

Between October 1914 and December 1915, nearly 135,000 Indian riflemen—known as sepoys—fought in the trenches of France and Belgium at the battles of Ypres, Festubert, Givenchy, Neuve Chapelle, Second Ypres and Loos, suffering some 34,252 casualties. At a prisoner of war camp outside Berlin, Indian revolutionaries and emissaries from the Ottoman Empire attempted to convert the allegiances of the sepoys in their custody with a combination of pan-Islamic and nationalist appeals. Although this campaign ultimately failed, it profoundly shaped British repatriation policy at the end of the war when, cautioned Secretary of State for India Austen Chamberlain, the British could not allow men who had been exposed to ‘strongly hostile influences’ to return home unmonitored. The 1918 armistice and British repatriation policy therefore presented a host of new challenges to Britain’s colonial subjects from South Asia as they navigated the post-war imperial landscape and secured what was most important to them—safe transportation home.     

The Indian crisis: Muslim viewpoints

English Expansion in Iran 1914–1920. By L. I. Miroshnikov. Moscow, Academy of Sciences, 1962.     

Migration from Bangladesh: Impulses,Risks and Exploitations

Migration and emigration from Bangladesh is a pervasive phenomenon. Historically, large-scale migration from the region constituting the present Bangladesh started after tea plantations were introduced to Assam by the British in the early 19th century. Gradually, the number of migrants from this region increased due to geographic location, climate change and poverty. Over the years, there has been a change in the gender pattern of migration, where the proportion of female migrants has increased significantly. These migrants play a significant role in the Bangladesh economy, as remittances constituted about 8.21% of gross domestic product in 2014. This article examines why, despite the many dangers that the migrants face, including violence in the host countries and exploitation by their ‘masters’, the number of migrants from Bangladesh continues to rise constantly.     

Globalization and Migration: The Impact of Family Remittances in Latin America

Taking as its point of departure the relationship between migration and globalization, this article highlights the salience of remittances in the national economies of Latin America, especially Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean. It looks at the various actors that participate in the transfer of remittances and suggests that incorporating migrant labor dynamics as a category of economic integration will reveal a distinct landscape in the economies of Latin America.     

Review essay: Chattopadhyaya's Marxian interpretation of Indian philosophy,history, and society

Abstract

Although the Calcutta philosopher and historian of science Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya has been the major twentieth-century Indian Marxist philosopher, he has never received the recognition in Indian philosophical circles commensurate with his scholarly contributions. Such lack of status and recognition is an indication of the nature of Indian academic philosophy, of those who have had the power to define the profession and the discipline.     

Political Economy of Southeast Asian Borderlands: Migration,Environment, and Developing Country Firms

The Chinese way of development shares many characteristics with the East Asian developmental state model. Key elements of this shared development model include state control over finance, direct support for state owned enterprises by the government, import substitution industrialisation in heavy industry, a high dependence on export markets and a high rate of domestic savings. Even the reform of corporate governance is not likely to change the basic features of the East Asian model in China. Among East Asian countries, China shares more similar characteristics with Taiwan rather than with Japan or Korea since China, like Taiwan, also has an economy of dual structure that divides the public and non-public sectors.