Rethinking Displacement: Asia Pacific Perspectives

Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase is Professor in International Development, The Australian Catholic University, Australia and Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt is Fellow, Resource Management in Asia Pacific program, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, The Australian National University, Australia.

• Part 1: Neoliberal Globalisation and Displacement: States Displacing the Poor and the Marginal; Chapter 1: Dispossession, Placelessness, Home and Belonging: An Outline of a Research Agenda; Chapter 2: Neoliberal Development, Port Reform and Displacement: The Case of Kolkata and Haldia, West Bengal, India 1; Chapter 3: Youth on the Neoliberal Margins: Ethnography of Tourism-led Displacement in Kerala, South India; Chapter 4: Neoliberal Development and Displacement: Women's Experiences of Flight and Settlement in South Asia; Chapter 5: Aftermath of Dams and Displacement in India's Narmada River Valley: Linking Compensation Policies with Experiences of Resettlement; Chapter 6: Globalization and Occupational Displacement: Indian Artisans in the Global Economy; Part 2: Politics and Coercive Displacement: States Displacing Minorities and Indigenous Peoples; Chapter 7: The Land Issue on Banggi Island, Sabah, Malaysia: Deagrarianisation and Exclusion of the Bonggi; Chapter 8: Movement by Coercion: The Displacement of Indigenous Children in Australia; Chapter 9: Margin, Minorities, and a Political Economy of Displacement: The Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh 1; Part 3: Placeless Identities: Non-State Places and Floating Peoples; Chapter 10: Home-making and Regrounding: Lives of Bangladeshi Migrants on the Damodar Charlands of Lower Bengal, India; Chapter 11: Re-imagining ‘Refugeehood': Reflections on Hmong Identity(ies) in the Diaspora; Chapter 12: Globalised Cartographies of Being: Literature, Refugees, and the Australian Nation; Chapter 13: Dispossession, Human Security, and Undocumented Migration: Narrative Accounts of Afghani and Sri Lankan Tamil Asylum Seekers

’Displacement is the scandal of the closing decades of the last century and the beginning of the new one. Human rights activists, humanitarian agencies, policy makers, development experts, and government planners are struggling to cope with the problem of displacement. Part of the reason behind the apparent intractability of the issue is a lack of concrete analysis of the various causes and forms of displacement. This collection of essays not only manages to fill the need, by bringing in the perspective of the new global order, it manages to tell us a different story of the Asian Century. The victims of accumulation - the displaced - are put squarely at the centre of the Asian story of economy and progress. Rethinking Displacement: Asia Pacific Perspectives is must read for critical social scientists and developmental specialists of our time.’ Ranabir Samaddar, Director, Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group, India 'As a whole, the book should be welcomed by migration expert communities as it opens into a new venture of research investigation and invites the rethinking of displacement.' Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 'Rethinking Displacement: Asia Pacific Perspectives not only ’challenge(s) the compartmentalized treatment of displacement that we are becom­ing accustomed to’ (p. 26), but also provides insights into the displacement and the corresponding countermeasures in different contexts. This collection of essays would be very useful for academics, human rights activists, graduate students and policy makers in the field of social anthropology, development studies, displace­ment studies and Asia Pacific studies.' Journal of South Asian Development '... displacement and rehabilitation in the current global situation stands completely unbalanced in favour of neo-liberal economic fundamentalism. The present work addresses several of these concerns and compels us to rethink the current concept of development with theoretical insight and rigour.' Contemp