While partition evidently upsets and shatters the pre-existing ‘ways of life’, it also gradually becomes ‘a way of life’ itself as people are forced to ‘select’ their nations and states ‘naturally’. One partition creates and hides many other partitions. In South Asia, at one level, instead of mitigating the Hindu-Muslim divide, it has sharpened and exacerbated it. At another level, it turns us away from what is called the ‘denationalized peoples’ perspective’— including the gender perspective on that epochal event. Now that the ethnicities and nationalities within each nation-state have become relatively free from the control of nation-states— owing to the forces and processes of globalization— their assertions too are couched in the demand for partition. The demand for partition re-enacts the territoriality of the nation-state as much as the demand also subverts it.

Partition also imposes on the people the obligation of making a choice from out of a menu of nations being partitioned or national alternatives. Non-national alternatives are clearly ruled out. One is obliged to belong to either of the two newly formed nations and cannot choose to remain stateless and without any nation in the wake of a partition. At the same time, partition is not an end in itself. Partition gives rise to a sort of sub-territoriality: a space situated within the territory of a state that has been for all practical purposes rendered ethnically homogeneous by one particular community or an organization claiming to represent it. Sub-territoriality also contests state territoriality.

Today multi-ethnic states are a global phenomenon and South Asia is no exception. Yet rising nationalisms the world over is privileging certain groups while others are being marginalized. A concrete example of this phenomenon can be found in the laws created by the states after what is now patently mythologized as 9/11. The attack on the World Trade Centre on September 11, 2001 became the raison d’être to enact many laws and treaties that severely curtail the movement of people in search of a better life and keep them trapped in precarious and often dangerous situations. Specific examples can be given from the US, Canadian, Australian and Indian contexts to illustrate how these new laws affect migrants. These laws, taken together, create a climate of intolerance towards immigrants and other migrants, especially people of colour resulting in racist attacks, endangering their physical and psychological security. Xenophobia and intolerance tear away at the fabric of all (and especially multicultural) societies. South Asia is by no means unique in its response to 9/11 and indeed it is not the worst amongst the regions of the world. However, when the rights of marginalized people are trampled upon to secure an imagined security, the rights of all citizens are at risk.

The category of forced migrants complicates the situation even further. While resource crunch, political choice, imperatives of national security and developmental paradigms are creating greater vulnerabilities and swelling the ranks of marginalized people, the walls of the nations are growing taller against those who are considered different/aliens. Faced with increasingly xenophobic states, the marginalized masses are either forced to remain within a state system that dispossess them or embark on dangerous migrations that can reduce them to near-slave situations and even cost them their lives.

This is the predicament that a course on forced migration today has to deal with. In this perspective laws, policies, and institutions on R&R will be discussed thoroughly.

The theme paper will focus on emerging issues in forced migration studies and the methodological implications for studying them.