RESEARCH AND ORIENTATION WORKSHOP ON FORCED MIGRATION
Sixth Annual Research & Orientation Workshop
in
Global Protection of Migrants and Refugees
Kolkata, 15-20 November 2021
Conference Participants
Name & Details of the Conference Participants
Abstract / Full Paper
Paula Banerjee, Professor, University of Calcutta
Bionote: Paula Banerjee is a professor at the University of Calcutta and a member of the Calcutta Research Group. She is best known for her work on women in borderlands and women and forced migration. She is also the President of International Association For Studies in Forced Migration. She served as the Vice-Chancellor of the Sanskrit College and University. Winner of many awards and accolades, in 2013 she was awarded the Distinguished Fulbright SIR Award and a Visiting Professorship to SUNY, Oswego. Acknowledged as a radical and prolific speaker she has delivered lectures in all five continents. She has been a visiting professor in a number of universities including Helsinki University (Finland), Yunnan University (China) University of Paris 7 (France) and New School, New York (USA) and others.
Ayse Caglar, University Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology Vienna University and a Permanent Fellow at IWM
Bionote: Ayse Caglar is the University Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology Vienna University and a Permanent Fellow at IWM. She received her PhD at McGill University, Department of Anthropology and Habilitation in Sociology and Social Anthropology at Free University, Berlin. She has held visiting professorships in several universities including Stockholm University, IHS Vienna, Central European University, Budapest, Donauuniversität Krems, and Ethnologisches Seminar Zürich. She was a Jean Monnet Fellow at the European University Institute (IUE), Florence. She has served on the Advisory Board of the Institute of Advanced Studies, Berlin, Internationales Forschungszentrum Kulturwissenschaften (IFK), Vienna, Mirekoc, Istanbul and has been a member of the Advisory Board of NCCR –On the Move (National Centres of Competence in Research, Swiss National Foundation) and Ethos, Horizon 2020. She has been a panel member of European Research Council (ERC – starting and consolidating grants) and DFG (Clusters of Excellence). She was the co-editor of the journal Sociologus, the Associate Editor of Global Networks: a Journal of Transnational Affairs and is a member of the Editorial Board of the American Ethnologist, Focaal, Anthropological Theory, New Perspectives on Turkey, International Journal of Political Sociology, and Journal of Race, Ethnicity and the City. She is a member of Academia Europaea and the Science Academy Society of Turkey.
Meghna Guhathakurta, Executive Director of Research Initiatives, Bangladesh (RIB)
Bionote: Meghna Guhathakurta taught International Relations at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh from 1984 to 2007. She is currently Executive Director of Research Initiatives, Bangladesh (RIB) , a research support organization based in Dhaka, which specializes in action research with marginalized communities. Dr. Guhathakurta graduated from the University of Dhaka and received her Ph.D from the University of York, UK in Politics. Her field of specialization has broadly been international development, gender relations and minority politics. She is well published in migration trends in Partition histories, peace-building in post conflict societies and minority rights in South Asia. She is also Associate Editor of the Action Research Journal published by Sage and the Journal of Social Studies published from the Centre for Social Studies in Dhaka.
Ahilan Kadirgamar , University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka
Bionote: Ahilan Kadirgamar is Senior Lecturer, Department of Sociology, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Graduate Center, City University of New York, a MA in Economics from the New School for Social Research and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is a fortnightly columnist in the Daily Mirror, an Editorial Board Member of the Sri Lanka Journal of Social Sciences and a Board Member of Himal Southasian Magazine. He also regularly writes on the political economy of Sri Lanka and post-war issues in forums such as The Hindu in India. He is currently the Honorary Chair of the Northern Co-operative Development Bank and a member of the Jaffna Peoples Forum for Co-existence. He served on the Central Bank of Sri Lanka appointed committee to draft the Economic Development Framework for a Northern Province Master Plan (August 2018).
Paolo Novak , University of London
Bionote: Paolo Novak is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. His research is concerned with the conceptual and place-specific relation between borders, migration and development. His interdisciplinary publications focus on the geographies producing and produced by such relation and on the processes of legal and institutional change associated with it. He has conducted field research in Peshawar (Pakistan), Macerata (Italy), Meghalaya (India), Cairo (Egypt). His current research project, “Asylum seeker’s reception: taxonomies and location”, is concerned with identifying the multiple time spaces shaping the everyday life of buildings used as asylum infrastructure.
Joyce C.H. Liu, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University
Bionote: Joyce C.H. Liu received her Ph.D. degree in Comparative Literature in 1984 from the University of Urbana-Champaign, USA. Currently, she is Chair Professor of the Institute of Social Research and Cultural Studies and the International Center for Cultural Studies director, National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University. She also directs the International Program in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies of the University System of Taiwan. Her research interests cover geopolitics, biopolitics, border politics, internal coloniality, unequal citizens, epistemic decolonization, and artistic interventions. She is the author of six books, more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, and coedited nine books. Currently, she is leading two ongoing joint research projects: “Conflict, Justice, Decolonization: Critical Inter-Asia Cultural Studies” (awarded by the Ministry of Education, Taiwan) (2018-2022), and “Migration, Logistics, and Unequal Citizens in the Global Context” (awarded by CHCI-Mellon Foundation) (2019-2021).
Utsa Sarmin, Independent Research and Journalist
Bionote: Utsa Sarmin is an independent researcher and journalist. She holds her BA (Honours) and MA in Political Science from the University of Delhi and MPhil in Development Studies from the University of Cambridge. She had received the Great University of Cambridge Scholarship for her MPhil course at Cambridge. She worked as a contributing journalist for Free Press Kashmir in Srinagar. She has also worked with the Latin American news organization teleSUR English in Quito, Ecuador as a news writer and occasional on-camera political commentator. Utsa has worked as a research fellow for several research organisations and universities and written articles for local, national and international media houses. Her research interests include conflict, gender, violence, social movement and activism.
Abstract
Piya Srinivasan, Independent Socio-Legal Researcher
Bionote: Piya Srinivasan is an independent socio-legal researcher. She received her PhD from the Centre for the Studyof Law and Governance, Jawaharlal Nehru University, where she was a SYLFF Fellow. She has an M.Phil in Social Sciences from Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta and a Bachelors and Masters in English Literature from Delhi University. She has published academic papers, features pieces and book reviews in various publications and has worked for organizations like Save the Children, Mint Lounge and Mail Today. She was most recently Research Associate at Calcutta Research Group. Her interests lie at the intersection of law, culture, rhetorical and textual analysis, gender, and social justice.
Hari Sharma, Executive Director, Alliance for Social Dialogue/Social Science Baha, Kathmandu
Bionote: Hari Sharma is Executive Director, Alliance for Social Dialogue/Social Science Baha, Kathmandu. He has served in the government and academia in various capacities. He has 15 years of teaching experience in various academic institutions and departments of political science, Tribhuvan University’s (TU) and Kathmandu College of Management, and Kathmandu University (KU). He has Master’s Degree in Political Science from Tribhuvan University. He was a Fulbright scholar at Cornell University, US, where he received a Master’s in Comparative Politics. He is the co-author of Political Leadership in Nepal and Local Leadership in Nepal. He has also contributed chapters to various books.
Oishik Sircar, Professor, Jindal Global Law School
Bionote: Oishik Sircar Professor, Jindal Global Law School, Adjunct Fellow, University of Technology Sydney Law School, Associate Member, Institute for International Law and the Humanities, Melbourne Law School and visiting faculty at the National Law School of India University. Oishik completed an LLB from ILS Law College, Savitribai Phule Pune University, an LLM from the Faculty of Law, University of Toronto and a PhD from Melbourne Law School, The University of Melbourne.Oishik was previously a Teaching Fellow at Melbourne Law School (2012-2015), an Assistant Professor at the Jindal Global Law School (2009-2012) and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Human Rights and Citizenship Studies, National University of Juridical Sciences (2008-2009). In 2015, Oishik was Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy Workshop. As a human rights law researcher, educator, and activist, Oishik has worked with Amnesty International, the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre and the Centre for Communication and Development Studies. Oishik’s broad research interests are in the areas of critical jurisprudence, cultural studies of law, queer theory, postcolonial feminism, visual cultures, Marxism and, law and social movements. Some of Oishik’s writings have appeared in the journals Childhood, Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Feminist Studies, Economic and Political Weekly, No Foundations, Human Rights Defender, Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left, and Humanity, among others, and book chapters in several edited volumes. Oishik is the co-editor of New Intimacies, Old Desires: Law, Culture and Queer Politics in Neoliberal Times (Zubaan and University of Chicago Press, 2017), and is the author of Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (Oxford University Press, 2021). Oishik’s next book, Ways of Remembering: Law, Cinema and Collective Memory in the New India is forthcoming in 2022 from Cambridge University Press’s Law in Context series.
Mujib Ahmad Azizi , Research Officer, AREU
Bionote: Mujib Ahmad Azizi is a Research Officer at AREU since 2011. From 2018 up to date works as research officer and field researcher for the Global Challenge Research Fund RC-UK proposal entitled “Drugs and (dis)order: Building sustainable peacetime economies in the aftermath of war.” This is also under AREU contract. Previously, He has worked as a deputy program manager for Mercy Corps in Kapisa – Afghanistan between 2009 and 2011 (Food Security and Natural Disaster for Urban and Rural People) and Community Development Programs (CDP). He has worked with Aga Khan Foundation as a social organizer and research assistant from 2006 to 2009. From 2002 to 2005 he worked as a health educator and community mobilizer in Afghanistan Red Crescent Societies for the returnees and migration. He holds a degree in English Literature from Baghlan University. He is also a member of civil society environmental activist working on climate change, natural resources and extractive industries. He has membership of Environment Natural Resources Management Network (ENRMNP) and member of Mining Watch Afghanistan (MWA) and active member of CoST Infrastructure Transparency Initiative.
Anjuman Ara Begum, Independent Researcher
Bionote: Anjuman Ara Begum is a human rights researcher and women rights activist based in Guwahati. She studied law and is a member of the Calcutta Research Group. She is currently associated with Purba Bharati Educational Trust and WinG Assam, Guwahati and working on gender education and human rights.
Fahmi Panimbang , Project Coordinator, Indonesia & Malaysia
Bionote: Fahmi Panimbang is a project coordinator at Solidar Suisse on Decent Work in the Palm Oil Industry in Indonesia and Malaysia, where he researches on the issues of migration and migrant rights in the region. His publications include Resistance on the continent of labour: Strategies and initiatives of labour organizing in Asia (2017), published by the Asia Monitor Resource Centre (AMRC), Hong Kong.
Reza Hussaini, Independent Researcher, Kabul, Afghanistan
Bionote: Reza Hussaini has ten years’ experience working with Research and Higher Education institutions in Kabul, Afghanistan. His research areas include gender, peace processes and migration. 2015-2018, he was Research Manager at the Afghanistan Center at Kabul University, where he collaborated with City, University of London on a study of Migration Decision and Policy-Making in Afghanistan. Currently he is PhD candidate at City, University of London working on his research using PAR methodology with displaced and Migrants.
Som Niroula, Program Officer, Alliance for Social Dialogue (ASD)
Bionote: Som Niroula is the Program Officer at Alliance for Social Dialogue (ASD). He is responsible for the Human Rights portfolio. He is providing strategic support to partners working in human rights issues in Nepal. He has a decade long experience of working in the field of human rights and he previously worked at the South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR) based in Kathmandu. He studied MA in Peace Education at the United Nations Mandated University for Peace (UPEACE), Costa Rica.
François Crépeau , Faculty of Law of McGill University Francois_Crepeau.jpg
Bionote: François Crépeau is Full Professor and the Hans & Tamar Oppenheimer Chair in Public International Law, at the Faculty of Law of McGill University. He was the Director of the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism from 2015 to 2020. Pr Crépeau is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Agency for Fundamental Rights of the European Union, the Chair of the Thematic Working Group: Migrant Rights and Integrations in Host Communities, KNOMAD – Global Knowledge Partnership on Migration and Development, World Bank Group, Washington, DC, and a member of the Advisory Committee of the International Migration Initiative of the Open Society Foundations (NY). He is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Bureau for Children’s Rights (Montreal). He is a member of several editorial boards: Journal of Refugee Studies, Refuge, Droits fondamentaux, European Journal of Human Rights, Inter Gentes – McGill Journal of International Law & Legal Pluralism.
Sanjay Chaturvedi, Chair Professor in Political Science,Panjab University, Chandigarh
Bionote: Sanjay Chaturvedi was Lala Lajpat Rai Chair Professor in Political Science at Panjab University, Chandigarh before joining South Asian University, New Delhi, as Professor in International Relations in June 2018. His key research interest are the theory and practices of geopolitics; with special reference to Polar Regions and the Indian Ocean Region. From 1993 to 1995, he pursued post-doctoral research on “Polar Regions in International Relations” at the Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, England, with Nehru Centenary British Commonwealth Fellowship and Leverhulme Research Grant. A major output of this research was Polar Regions: A Political Geography (Chichester: John Wiley, 1996). He has received several visiting professorships and fellowships including Curtin University, Australia; University of Wurzburg, Germany; India-China Institute, The New School, USA; The University of Adelaide, Australia; University of Cambridge, England; University of Durham, UK; Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS)-Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore (2010-2012), Columbia University Institute for Scholars, Paris; Faculty of Law, University of Sydney; Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel; and Henry L. Stimson Centre, Washington D.C., USA. He is the co-author of Partitions: Reshaping Minds and States (Routledge, 2005, 2015); and co-editor of South Asia: Boundaries, Borders and Beyond, (Routledge, 2021) Environmental Sustainability from Himalaya to the Ocean: Struggles and Innovations in China and India, (Springer, 2017); Euro-Asia at the Crossroads: Geopolitics, Identities and Discourse (Shipra Publications, 2011); Geopolitical Orientations Regionalism, and Security in the Indian Ocean (Routledge Revivals, 2015); Energy Security and the Indian Ocean Region (Routledge Revivals, 2015); The Security of Sea Lanes of Communication in the Indian Ocean Region (Routledge Revivals, 2015). His recent co-authored books are: Climate Terror: A Critical Geopolitics of Climate Change (Palgrave Macmillan 2015, with Timothy Doyle) and Climate Change and the Bay of Bengal: Emerging Geographies of Hope and Fear (Institute of South East Asian Studies, Singapore, with Vijay Sakhuja).
Hamsa Vijayaraghavan, Ministry of Women and Child Development of the Government of India and UNICEF
Bionote: Hamsa Vijayaraghavan completed her law degree from Symbiosis Law School and her Masters from the University of Rouen, France. She has nearly 2 years of work experience with the UNHCR field office in India. Hamsa has previously worked with Bail for Immigration Detainees and with Refugee and Migrant Justice, both in London. Hamsa has also worked as a consultant with the Ministry of Women and Child Development of the Government of India and UNICEF, where she worked on child protection laws. At M.A.P, Hamsa manages all the programmes, supervises the legal team and undertakes fundraising. She has expertise in dealing with claims involving displaced women and children.
Elspeth Guild, Professor, Queen Mary University of London
Bionote: Elspeth Guild is a Jean Monnet Professor ad personam in law at Queen Mary University of London and Emeritus Professor at Radboud University, Nijmegen, Netherlands. She is also a visiting professor at the College of Europe, Bruges and teaches at Sciences-Po Paris. She regularly advises EU institutions on migration and asylum related matters and has written studies for the European Parliament on the European dimension of the refugee crisis 2016, Euro-Mediterranean cooperation on migration. She also advises the Council of Europe and has written two Issue Papers for the Commissioner for Human Rights, one on the right to leave a country the other on criminalization of migration. In 2017 she co-edited with Stefanie Grant and Kees Groenendijk The Human Rights of Migrants in the 21st Century published with Routledge in the Focus series directed at the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.
Ulrike Krause, Junior Professor of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) and the Institute for Social Sciences, Osnabrück University
Bionote: Ulrike Krause is Junior Professor of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies (IMIS) and the Institute for Social Sciences, Osnabrück University as well as affiliated Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford. Her research interests are in the areas of the global refugee regime, humanitarian refugee protection, conflict displacement nexus, resilience, gender, violence, (post)colonial approaches and knowledge production. Her regional focus is on global developments as well as those in Africa, particularly East Africa. She is a co-founder and co-editor of the German Journal of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies, and board member of the German Network for Forced Migration Studies (NetzwerkFluchtforschung e.V.).
Dipanjan Sinha, Independent Journalist
Bionote: Dipanjan Sinha is an independent journalist. He has worked with major news organisations like The Telegraph, Hindustan Times and Midday in various roles for over a decade. As a freelancer, he has written for multiple local and international publications. The stories that fascinate him the most lie in the intersection of politics, culture and development. He graduated from Presidency College, Kolkata and holds a postgraduate diploma from Asian College of Journalism, Chennai.
Shahram Khosravi, Professor, Anthropology at Stockholm University
Bionote: Shahram Khosravi is a former taxi driver and currently an accidental Professor of Anthropology at Stockholm University. Khosravi is the author of some academic books and some articles but he prefers to write stories. He has been an active writer in the international press. His most recent book is an art book on Waiting and two years ago he started Critical Border Studies, a network for scholars, artists and activists to interact.
James Milner, Associate Professor, Political Science at Carleton University
Bionote: James Milner is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Carleton University. He is also currently Project Director of LERRN: The Local Engagement Refugee Research Network. He has been a researcher, practitioner and policy advisor on issues relating to the global refugee regime, global refugee policy and the politics of asylum in the global South. In recent years, he has undertaken field research in Burundi, Guinea, Kenya, India, Tanzania and Thailand, and has presented research findings to stakeholders in New York, Geneva, London, Ottawa, Bangkok, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and elsewhere. He has worked as a Consultant for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in India, Cameroon, Guinea and its Geneva Headquarters. He is author of Refugees, the State and the Politics of Asylum in Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), co-author of UNHCR: The Politics and Practice of Refugee Protection (Routledge, 2012), and co-editor of Refugees’ Roles in Resolving Displacement and Building Peace” Beyond Beneficiaries (Georgetown, 2019) and Protracted Refugee Situations: Political, Human Rights and Security Implications (UN University Press, 2008).
Kanak Mani Dixit, Journalist
Bionote: Kanak Mani Dixit, 65, is a writer and journalist as well as a civil rights and democracy activist. He is a campaigner for open urban spaces, and is also active in the conservation of built heritage. Dixit helped revive Nepal’s only public bus company and is involved in applying the concept of public transportation to the Valley. A long- time trekker, Dixit also writes on travel related themes. He heads the main archives of the Nepali language, the Madan Puraskar Pustakalaya. He is also active in developing of Southasian regionalism. Having suffered from a fall while trekking in 2001, Dixit helped start the Spinal Injury Rehabilitation Centre. Believing the power of non-fiction film, he started and heads the Film South Asia Festival of Documentaries. Dixit is also a translator, an author of political commentaries, and a popular author of books for children. Dixit has received the Prince Claus Award of the Netherlands. His writings are archived at www.kanakmanidixit.com .
Günther Rautz, European Academy Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC)
Bionote: Günther Rautz was born in 1968 in German and Slovene speaking Carinthia — a region in Austria that illustrates the richness and the many-layered complexity of European diversity. For more than 2 decades, he has lived in the trilingual region of South Tyrol (Italy). Since 1997 he has been a Senior Researcher at the European Academy Bolzano/Bozen where he is Head of the Institute for Minority Rights. The institute provides policy advice in minority issues particularly in Europe but also around the globe, including in Asia, where Günther Rautz is coordinating Human Rights projects, such as advising Tibetans in living in exile. He was also teaching at the University of Temeschwar/Timişoara (Romania) and till 2017 he was General Secretary of MIDAS — a European umbrella organisation bringing together over 30 dailies published in a regional or minority language. On European level he was author of the Commentaries in German and English of the CoE-Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities, he drafted some recommendations of the European Citizen Initiative “Minority Safepack Initiative (MSPI)” presented to the European Commission by FUEN and covered the minority media sector of the OSCE-HCNM joint Report on “Mapping Integration Indicators. A Reference Tool for Evaluating the Implementation of Ljubljana Guidelines-based Policy”
Sohini Sengupta, Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work, at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai
Bionote: Sohini Sengupta is an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Work, at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, India. Sohini completed her Ph.D. in Anthropology at SOAS (London). Her research interests are in the area of tribal land rights, agrarian and environmental history, social media and gender and social policy. Sohini has also worked in development policy making and as a research fellow with the World Commission on Dams. Sohini is currently engaged in a writing project that is exploring the anthropology of land. Her contribution examines how the power of modern states to distribute, re-allocate, expropriate or extinguish land rights create dislocation for some but may promise protection or security for a deserving vulnerable group such as rural women, tribal people or non-human species. Land governance and re-distribution are important areas of exploration for socio-environmental justice as important revisions in thinking about land takes place in the context of climate change in mainstream development policy. Preliminary ideas from the project will be presented in the American Anthropological Association 2021 Meeting (below).
Umut Kuruuzum, IWM fellow in Vienna, Austria
Bionote: Umut Kuruuzum is an assistant professor of cultural economics at Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ), Turkey and a recent IWM fellow in Vienna, Austria. He is a London School of Economics (MSc, PhD) trained economic anthropologist working on contemporary war economies, recycling industries, and labour movements in the Middle East. He has recently been awarded the COP26 British Council Climate Change Grant and GIZ Promotion of Economic Prospects Grant, and is currently working on plastic recycling, toxicity, and waste economies of industrial agriculture in Turkey, while leading research on the social life of the building materials and reconstruction industry in Iraqi Kurdistan. His book ‘Building from Scrap: War, Recycling, and Labor in Iraqi Kurdistan’, based on his ethnographic fieldwork in the northeast of Iraq, is coming out from Palgrave Macmillan U.S. soon.
Sara Hossain, Practicing in the Supreme Court of Bangladesh
Bionote: Sara Hossain is a barrister practicing in the Supreme Court of Bangladesh, mainly in the areas of constitutional, public interest and family law. She is a partner at the law firm of Dr. Kamal Hossain and Associates, and serves pro bono as the Honorary Executive Director of the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust. She is a member of the Board of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture, and associated with several international civil society initiatives including South Asians for Human Rights, and the International Commission on the Chittagong Hill Tracts. In 2016, Sara was appointed by the President of the UN Human Rights Council to serve as a member of the Group of Experts on Accountability in the DPRK, and from July 2018 to March 2019 as a member of the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Gaza Protests of 2018. Sara also participated in the Task Force on Justice, convened by Pathfinders International, focusing on SDG 16. Sara ran the South Asia Programme at INTERIGHTS from 1997 to 2003. She was a founding board member of the South Asia Women’s Fund (now the Women’s Fund Asia) and served as a Commissioner of the International Commission of Jurists. Sara had participated as a volunteer lawyer in the UN investigation led by Cherif Bassiouni on sexual violence in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s Sara had contributed to the submission of an amicus brief to the ICC regarding the opening of an investigation into the forced deportation of Rohingya from Myanmar. Through BLAST, she has also been involved in its initiatives on providing legal support to the Rohingya community in Bangladesh in partnership with other organisations, such as Naripokkho, and UNHCR.
Rez Gardi, International Lawyer and Human Rights Activist
Bionote: Rez Gardi is an international lawyer and human rights activist. Rez sought to use her difficult start in life as motivation to succeed, becoming New Zealand’s first female Kurdish lawyer. She graduated as a Fulbright Scholar with a Master of Laws from Harvard Law School. She is the first Kurd in history to graduate from Harvard Law. Prior to joining R-SEAT, she worked in Iraq as a Harvard Human Rights Fellow on cases for the prosecution of ISIS regarding their targeted genocidal campaign against the Yezidis, including mass executions, kidnapping, torture, sexual violence, and other egregious human rights abuses. Rez is the founder of ‘Empower’ – a youth and refugee-led organisation aiming to address the underrepresentation of refugees in higher education. Rez represented New Zealand in the first ever Global Refugee Youth Consultations in 2016, and helped form the Global Youth Advisory Council to the UNHCR. She helped establish the Refugee Steering Group to the UNHCR Annual Tripartite Consultations on Resettlement and currently leads as one of its representatives. She was awarded the Young New Zealander of the Year in 2017 for her services to human rights. She was a Women of Influence Finalist and NEXT Woman of the Year Finalist in 2018. In 2019 she was awarded the Outstanding Youth Delegate Award at the UN Youth Assembly and selected as an Eisenhower Youth Fellow. In 2020 she was awarded a Global Impact Award for her work fighting for justice and in 2021 she was selected as a Peace Ambassador for the One Young World Summit.
Pampa Mukherjee, Professor of Political Science at Panjab University, Chandigarh
Bionote: Pampa Mukherjee is currently Professor of Political Science at Panjab University, Chandigarh. With more than two decades of experience in teaching and research, she specializes in the arena of development, environment with focus on institutional governance of natural resources, public policy and politics of hill states in India. She has been associated with several international development agencies as thematic experts on gender and development like ICIMOD, UNDP, UNESCO among others. She completed a major ICSSR funded research project on common land related issues in Punjab sponsored by ICSSR. She is a reviewer for several reputed journals like Asian Ethnicity, Journal of Legal Pluralism, Millenia- Sage, Evironmental and Sustainability Science at Elsevier among others and is also the Chief Editor of Panjab University Research Journal Social Sciences. Currently she is working on Farmer Managed Irrigation Systems (FMIS) in collaboration with Ostrom Center AIT, Bangkok. She is one of the core research members of ‘Asian Initiative on Legal Pluralism’ which is a part of the Commission of Legal Pluralism. She has published extensively in contemporary development issues in peer- reviewed journals and has book chapters in volumes published from Taylor and Francis, OUP, Orient Black Swan etc. Some of her publications include Facing Globality: Politics of Resistance, Relocation and Reinvention in India Oxford University Press, co-edited (2012) Common Land and Politics of the Local: Insights from Punjab Villages, Orient black Swan(2021), Electoral Politics in a Hill State: 2019 Elections in Uttarakhand, Routledge (2021) Legal Pluralism, Forests and Local Institutions: The Case of Uttarakhand, Routledge (2015) The Creation of a Region: Politics of Identity and Development in Uttarakhand ,Routledge (2011) She earned her degrees from Lady Sri Ram College, University of Delhi and Masters, M.Phil and PhD from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.