Rebordering South Asia: Displaced Persons and Urbanization

Sharif A. Wahab and Ishan Ashutosh

Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 2022, vol. 112, issue 3, 742-752

Abstract: This article analyzes displacement in the context of three communities in South Asia: Afghan refugees in Pakistan, Sri Lankan Tamils in India, and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. In each of these cases, refugee management emerges out of the complexities of geopolitics and humanitarianism and becomes central to urban questions of the right to move and remain in the city. Drawing on scholarship in the geopolitics of migrant (im)mobilities, refugee studies, and South Asia studies, we argue that displacement threatens the contours of belonging and citizenship across South Asian nation-states. For these reasons, the cities where the displaced live have become the locus of national unbelonging and state violence through entangled forms of securitization and urbanization. In particular, we detail the spatial and socioeconomic segregation of displaced populations in which they are subject to mundane bureaucratic violence and the role that social class plays in navigating the exclusions triggered by displacement. In the cities where the displaced settle, the displaced shape the urban economy, whereas the state applies strategies of spatial control that aim to nationalize urban space while maintaining the refugees as forever displaceable.

Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/24694452.2021.2023001 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:raagxx:v:112:y:2022:i:3:p:742-752

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/raag21

DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2021.2023001

Access Statistics for this article

Annals of the American Association of Geographers is currently edited by Jennifer Cassidento

More articles in Annals of the American Association of Geographers from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().