During the Sixth Winter Course on Forced Migration CRG hosted two public events. On 1 December 2008, Ranbair Samaddar delivered the inaugural lecture “Governing Unruly Population Flows”.  On 15 December 2008 noted human rights activist Mireille Fanon Mendes France delivered the valedictory lecture on “Racism, Immigration and Xenophobia in the World today”.

      Excerpts from the two lectures are provided below 

Governing Unruly Population Flows by Ranabir Samaddar 

In two sections in the first volume of The Materiality of Politics (Anthem Press, London, 2007), where I was dealing with technologies of rule, I had argued that of the basic technologies of rule under modern conditions governing population flow and achieving the right composition of the population, the right mix, was one. Yet I also showed in the course of same demonstration that the subject, that is the migrant, was refusing to be completely obedient to governmental methods and techniques, and that the subjectivity of the migrant remained unruly, defying categorisation, mixing up all kinds of flows and compositions, and remaining possibly the biggest question mark in the plan of reorganising the global politico-economic-strategic space. 

Involved in this discussion was another question, namely, that of the rights of the migrants, in particular the victims of forced migration, of protecting those rights, and the responsibility to protect the victims. I termed the way in which the government wanted to stabilise the population flow as the humanitarian method, also “the non-dialogic world of the humanitarian” (The Politics of Dialogue, Ashgate, 2004, Chapter 9), where humanitarianism reigned as the ruling administrative ideology. The institutional methods by which governments and the international administration governed population flows were known as humanitarian methods, and these were unilaterally decided, in short they were non-dialogic. 

Today, these two issues have come even closer – on one hand mixed up, messy, population flows, provoking desperate governmental methods, on the other hand innovations at a furious pace in humanitarian methods, functions, institutions, and principles. Suddenly governments have discovered why people move: not only violence, threat of violence, torture, and discrimination (by now banal causes), but they move also due to natural disasters, man made famines and floods, climate change, developmental agenda, resource crisis, environmental catastrophes, and the like. The humanitarian response has grown accordingly in range. Governments say that they have to gear up not only to emergencies but “complex emergencies” - a scenario that alludes to a complicated assemblage of factors and elements leading to the emergency situation. At the same time it is clearer than ever that the responsibility to protect the victims of forced migration must be wrenched away from its “humanitarian roots”, and located anew in the context of rights, justice, and the popular politics of claim making today. In this article I want to discuss three of the issues requiring discussion in this context: 

In this lecture I want to discuss three of the issues requiring discussion in this context:

          (a) The mixed nature of population flows and the governmental responses to this new phenomenon at both national and international levels;

         (b) The inadequacy of earlier legal definitions and the changing nature of the humanitarian response to these mixed and massive population flows;

(c) The emergence of the migrant as a significant subject under conditions of globalisation, transgression of borders, and a political economy that allows differential inclusion of migrant labour. 

          (The lecture text is available in Refugee Watch Issue No. 32. For details contact mcrg@mcrg.ac.in) 

Racism, Immigration and Xenophobia in the World today by Mireille Fanon Mendes France  

Two years after Ceuta and Melilla, some European countries that wanted to regulate their migration problem found themselves confronted with the same demand of men and women escaping either warfare and its violence, or misery and impossibility of living with dignity in their own country. Without forgetting all those living in a precarious way in an unstable ecological environment and which, with climate warming, are or will be forced to migrate - nearly 200 million men, women and children will be pushed to exile throughout the world from the end of this century.  

They pass thus from poverty to misery and from uprooting to exile. These victims of excessful liberal globalisation constitute a pool of cheap manual labour. But who still thinks of these young people whose lives ended against the barbed wire of the Spanish enclaves? The questions put by these young people searching for somewhere return more concretely to migration that constitutes, today, a more and more massive phenomenon, a strategy of survival. At the international level, it touches more than 175 million people, which means 30% of the world population. The reporter of the UN Commission of International Law, Maurice Kamto, noted that the majority of Western countries do not cease to implement twisted policies and thus face the inflow of the poor, the developed countries are transformed into impossible fortresses. They are closed more and more to certain categories of foreigners by tightening the control of migration and making the conditions of entry and stay on their territories increasingly more difficult ”. 

Migration is a phenomenon that dramatically reveals the socio-economic imbalances worsened by the globalisation and imposed by the neolibéral economy that causes impoverishment of the underdeveloped countries. Migration has become one of the most delicate social, economic questions in the last ten years.  

This speech is keeping in mind the fact that “any person has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country” from the Article 13 of the Universal declaration of human rights. Plunged involuntarily in the precarisation of their existence, the individuals, driven by the instinct of survival, resort to the old type of migration; the phenomenon that began in 1840s when 300.000 migrants annually crossed the Atlantic to settle in America. 

(The lecture text will be available soon. For details contact mcrg@mcrg.ac.in)