Exile and desire: Refugees, aesthetics and the territorial borders of international relations.

The thesis begins by exploring state-centric conceptualisation of refugees in international relations and the incapacity of territorialised notions of identity and responsibility to give a properly historical account of and response to displacement in the modern world. The onus is rather on defining refugees as a 'lack' or 'aberration' before the citizen. I suggest that this renders refugees effectively invisible and 'voiceless' 'others' whose personalities and experiences are appropriated to bolster the fundamental 'territorial' grounds of IR thinking on identity, ethics and responsibility. I explore this perception of refugees in an 'international refugee regime', focusing specifically on international refugee law and on humanitarian discourses on refugees. Two case studies are involved. One the marginalisation of child refugees by the terms of the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and, two, a study of Oxfam's Listening to the Displaced project in Sri Lanka. I argue that a consideration of refugees as subjects marginalised in international relations theory and practice opens up new theoretical spaces, throwing into stark relief the violence and Euro-centrism of prevalent 'territorialised' notions of identity, security, 'home' and 'culture' and, consequently, ethics and politics. Such a consideration of refugees questions the ascendancy of territorialised ethics and politics. The thesis critiques post-modern or post-structural attempts to widen the parameters of ethics and politics by noting that their methodology tends to fail to problematise the position of the critic, essentially making the geographical and historical 'locatedness' of the critic unimportant (thereby calling the non-western 'other' to definition in terms of yet another vein of the European canon). The thesis then argues that Theodor Adorno's aesthetic understanding with its emphasis on contingency, unceasing critique and the instability of all rational summations of the meaning of an object, both calls into question the subjective desire of the critic that influences what one sees and what one does not and provides a means for beginning with the marginalised experience of the other (rather than with the European canon)

Between Security and Mobility: Negotiating a Hardening Border Regime in the Russian-Estonian Borderland

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on 27th Feb 2015, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2015.1015408Since the end of the Cold War order post-Soviet borders have been characterised by geopolitical tensions and divergent imaginations of desirable political and spatial orders. Drawing upon ethnographic research in two border towns at the Russian-Estonian border, the article makes a case for a grounded examination of these border dynamics that takes into account how borders as sites of ‘mobility and enclosure’ are negotiated in everyday life and shaped by the differentiated incorporations of statecraft into people’s lives. Depending on their historical memories, people interpret the border either as a barrier to previously free movement or as a security device and engage in correspondingly different relations to the state – privileging local concerns for mobility or adopting the state’s concerns over security and sovereignty. Analysing these border negotiations and the relations between citizens and the state, articulated in people’s expectations and claims, can provide us with a better understanding of how people participate in the making of borders and contribute to the stability and malleability of political orders

(En)gendering the political: Citizenship from marginal spaces

This introduction sets out the central concerns of this special issue, the relationship between marginality and the political. In doing so it makes the argument that the process of marginalisation, the sites and experiences of ‘marginality’ provide a different lens through which to understand citizenship. Viewing the political as the struggle over belonging it considers how recent studies of citizenship have understood political agency. It argues that marginality can help us understand multiple scales, struggles and solidarities both within and beyond citizenship. Whilst there is a radical potential in much of the existing literature in citizenship studies it is also important to consider political subjectivities and acts which are not subsumed by right claims. Exploring marginality in this way means understanding how subjects are disenfranchised by regimes of citizenship and at the same how time this also (en)genders new political possibilities which are not always orientated towards 'inclusion'. The introduction then sets out how each article contributes to this project

Ethnic Diversity and Ethnic Strife: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

WP 2010-02 January 2010The objective of this paper is to present an overview of ethnicity, ethnic strife and its consequences, as seen from the perspective of the disciplines of economics, political science, social anthropology and sociology. What exactly is ethnicity--how is it to be defined, characterized and measured? What exactly are the causal links from ethnicity so defined to its presumed consequences, including tension and violence? What are the feedback loops from the consequences of ethnic divisions back to these divisions themselves? How can policy, if at all, mitigate ethnic divisions and ethnic conflict? Finally, what role does interdisciplinarity have in helping to understand ethnicity and ethnic strife, and how can interdisciplinary collaboration be enhanced? These are the questions which this paper takes up and deals with in sequence

Ethnic Diversity and Ethnic Strife: An Interdisciplinary Perspective

The objective of this paper is to present an overview of ethnicity, ethnic strife and its consequences, as seen from the perspective of the disciplines of economics, political science, social anthropology and sociology. What exactly is ethnicity--how is it to be defined, characterized and measured? What exactly are the causal links from ethnicity so defined to its presumed consequences, including tension and violence? What are the feedback loops from the consequences of ethnic divisions back to these divisions themselves? How can policy, if at all, mitigate ethnic divisions and ethnic conflict? Finally, what role does interdisciplinarity have in helping to understand ethnicity and ethnic strife, and how can interdisciplinary collaboration be enhanced? These are the questions which this paper takes up and deals with in sequence

Leadership, excellence and the marginalisation of refugees in Higher Education

In this article we trace the changing fortunes of an education initiative for refugees and other displaced people located at Central European University (CEU). The programme (OLIve - the Open Learning Initiative) has shifted: instead of being celebrated as an innovative response to the 'migrant crisis' of 2015 it was marked for closure by CEU's leadership in 2023. We locate this change in OLIve's fortunes in CEU's adaptations to the changing conditions of higher education, not least the potent combination of dynamics of marketisation and managerialisation. We suggest these have produced a reorganisation of power and authority within the university, encapsulated in the person of the Leader - and the organisational phenomenon of 'leaderism'. The Leader both announces and embodies the pursuit of 'excellence' as the core mission of the university, underpinned by the accumulation of financial and cultural capital ('prestige'). We trace some of the ways in which this mission reorganises the landscape of the university, marginalising those deemed non–excellent and the programmes that might support them. We suggest that these dynamics remain contested and contestable in important way

Health Seeking Behaviour and Healthcare Utilization in a Rural Cohort of North India

Background: The healthcare infrastructure of a country determines the health-seeking behaviour of the population. In developing countries such as India, there is a great disparity in the distribution of healthcare institutions across urban and rural areas with disadvantages for people living in rural areas. Objectives: Our objectives were to study the health-seeking behavior and factors associated with the use of formal healthcare among the Gorakhpur Health and Demographic Surveillance System (GHDSS) cohort of North India. Methods: The study was conducted in 28 villages from two rural blocks in the Gorakhpur district of eastern Uttar Pradesh, North India. Structured questionnaires were used to collect the data with regard to demographics, health-seeking behaviour and healthcare utilization. An adjusted odds ratio with 95% confidence interval was used to report the factors associated with the utilization of healthcare. Results: Out of 120,306 individuals surveyed, 19,240 (16%) individuals reported having any health problem in the last 15 days. Of them, 90% sought healthcare for their health needs. The formal healthcare utilization was 79%. The use of public health facilities was very low (37%) with most of the people seeking treatment from private healthcare (63%). Females, people with a higher level of education (graduate and above), and those belonging to rich and middle tercile were more likely to use formal healthcare services. Among different ailments, respiratory problems, gastrointestinal problems, and musculoskeletal problems were associated with decreased use of formal healthcare. Conclusion: About four in five individuals surveyed who had health problems sought treatments from formal healthcare with three in five preferring private institutions to public healthcare facilities due to a perceived higher level of treatment quality and nearby availability. There is an urgent need to re-establish community trust among public healthcare facilities with a focus on delivering on-site health care and enhancing the quality of services offered by public healthcare institutions