Keywords on Forced Migration and Refugee Studies

This compilation of key terms used within the fields of refugee studies and forced migration studies was released by the Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group with help from Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, South Asia in 2023. The contributions to this handbook come from recent debates and discussions – spanning several histories of forced and voluntary human migration, displacement and dispossession, climate crises as well as challenges emerging from global pandemics, international government policies, the state of human rights, and the heterogeneity and agency of forced migrants.

Despite many developments in migrant and refugee studies, the vocabulary for these discussions has not yet been compiled in a comprehensive manner, which is the gap this publication seeks to fill. Understanding keywords, their contested meanings and the debates surrounding their definitions is crucial as they help us recognize the social relations of power and exploitation. The publication states that studying these concepts will enable readers to understand the unique marginalities that migrants, refugees and people living at the borders occupy.

Apart from the scholars of the Calcutta Research Group, this handbook draws from the work of social scientists and researchers from the Institute of Asian Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, University of Delhi, Magdeburg-Stendel University of Applied Sciences, Germany, and National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.

The following are extracts from a few of the 84 selected terms from the collection that are especially relevant in present times:

Asylum Seeker: An individual who is seeking international protection. […] Not every asylum seeker will ultimately be recognized as a refugee, but every recognized refugee is initially an asylum seeker. A person becomes an asylum seeker by making a formal application for the right to remain in another country and keeps that status until the application has been concluded.

Belonging: The discourse on belonging differentiates two positions. The first, from the purview of the nation-state, where the norms and contours of belonging are instituted from above, necessitates a top-down approach. The second, conversely, a bottom-up conceptualization, signifies the ways in which individuals perceive their belonging in terms of their association with a particular environment, community, or even the nation. Here, belonging becomes inherently rooted in the way individuals subjectively perceive their own connections, attachments and relationships to a specific surrounding.

Border: In its widespread prevalent meaning, it is a cartographic institution of demarcation, identification, enclosure, delimitation, and protection. […] Borders also denote passages – of people, information, money, commodities, and cultural and social artefacts. In short, a border indicates crossing, passing – to be allowed or disallowed. […] Borders and mobility produce the “borderlands.” […] Borderland does not mean boundary between countries, rather it points to a frontier region expanding between settlements belonging to two state territories. […] People of borderlands are not migrants; they are denizens of the borderlands. Histories of Asian countries straddling the Mekong, Brahmaputra, and Gangetic deltas are replete with such borderlands.

Climate Migrants: People who have to leave their homes or place of dwelling because of climate stressors like floods, erosion, droughts, changing weather patterns, etc. The IOM [International Organization for Migration] specifically stresses on the need to distinguish between climate refugees and climate migrants. […] Climate migration is generally internal and the migrants mostly remain under the protection of their own state.

Climate Refugee: According to the UNHCR, there may be situations where the refugee criteria of the 1951 Convention or the broader refugee criteria of regional refugee law frameworks could apply. […] Regardless, the term “climate refugee” is not endorsed by the UNHCR, and it is more accurate to refer to “persons displaced in the context of disasters and climate change.” The term and those displaced across borders owing to climate change do not have any formal validity within borders, and further disenfranchise the already displaced as they often take shelter in places at the margins and are vulnerable to climate change.

Cultural Assimilation: Assimilation is a much contested notion whereby, on entering a new country, immigrant groups are encouraged, through social and cultural practices and/or political machinations, to adopt the culture, values, and social behaviour of the host nation in order to benefit from full citizenship status. […] Cultural assimilation involves ethnic groups taking on the cultural signifiers of the host nation. Here, minority groups are expected to adapt to the everyday practices of the dominant culture through language and appearance as well as via more significant socioeconomic factors such as absorption into the local cultural and employment community.

Dominant Culture: Dominant culture is the one whose values, language, and ways of behaving are imposed on a subordinate culture or cultures through economic or political power. This may be achieved through legal or political suppression of other sets of values and patterns of behaviour, or by monopolizing the media of communication.

Integration: Immigrant integration refers to the incorporation of new elements (immigrants) into an existing social system. Integration is often understood as a multi-dimensional concept. Structural integration, including socio-economic aspects of integration referring to education and employment, is only one part of the integration of refugees and immigrants into the host society. Equally important are the social and cultural aspects of integration, referring to cultural adjustment, shared norms and social contacts of immigrants with natives.

Internally Displaced Persons: Internally displaced persons (IDPs), have been defined by the United Nations Guiding Principles on Interna Displacement, as “persons or groups of persons who have been forced or obliged to flee or to leave their homes or places of habitual residence, in particular as a result of or in order to avoid the effects of armed conflict, situations of generalized violence, violations of human rights or natural or human-made disasters, and who have not crossed an internationally recognized state border.”

Medicalized Borders /Medicalization of Borders: Medicalized borders and medicalization of borders refer to bordering processes that implement biomedical means to control the mobility of humans, animals, plants and commerce. […] [Certain academics] suggest three types of technologies for controlling human mobility to prevent the spread of disease on the European continent, in history and the present: quarantine (including lazarettos at the maritime and inland borders), containment in camps, and the selection of migrants and border crossers by biomedical means. All these biomedical technologies reveal the porosity of the borders and their filtering function as an apparatus of control, selection, and classification of potential border crossers.

Muhajir/ Mohajir: Muhajir/Mohajir is an Urdu term. It means a migrant or a refugee whose decision to leave their homeland is directly related to the preservation of their faith. A Muhajir is someone who performs the act of ‘Hijrat’, which comes from Arabic and connotes “separation, migration, flight, specifically the flight of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina.”

Right to Return: Legally, this right is considered as a bedrock of the international refugee conventions. Article 13 (2) of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) states that, “everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country”. […] While theoretically the right to return exists, in practice often this becomes redundant, or the changed situation often turns out to be unfavourable to the returnee migrants or refugees.

Focus and Factoids by Nivedita Sinha.