This workshop is organised in the context of the study programme EMMIR - for readings and further information please contact

Workshop by Prof. Dr. Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury (Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata)

In 2014, the number of refugees in the world rose to 14.4 million. A further 5.1 million registered refugees are cared for in sixty-odd camps across West Asia by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which was set up in 1949 to care for displaced Palestinians. Latest figures from Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimate that, more than 19.3 million people were forced to flee their homes by disasters in 100 countries in 2014. Hundreds of thousands more are still displaced following disasters in the previous years. Over and above, since 2008, on an average 26.4 million people per year have been displaced from their homes by disasters brought on by natural hazards. This is the equivalent to one person being displaced every second. Similarly, at least 10 million people around the world are denied a nationality; they are usually referred to as "stateless people". In spite of torture, rape and killing of innocent people, and "well-founded fear of persecution", which very often lead to the flight of masses for weeks, months, or years, or even generations from their homeland. However, the refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and stateless persons are usually kept out of the purview of the initiatives to deal with the past injustices through measures such as trials, truth commissions, and restitution and/or compensation programmes. In recent times, more and more researchers are devoting attention to the links between transitional justice and displacement.
A collaborative research between the Brookings Institution-London School of Economics and the International Centre for Transitional Justice on Internal Displacement have already brought together researchers and practitioners from across the globe to explore the ways in which particular transitional justice measures have responded to displacement. They have also contributed necessary insights from experiences in the countries, like Guatemala, Colombia, Peru, Bosnia, Kosovo, Turkey, Iraq, Liberia and Timor-Leste. Therefore, more and more researchers are of the opinion that, transitional justice measures can support durable solutions to displacement. This kind of establishing linkages between displacement and transitional justice draws on a variety of disciplinary perspectives including political science, law, anthropology, and social work. But, in this context, there is a need for further research on the decision-making, advocacy and organisational strategies employed by different groups of displaced persons. After all, public participation in the negotiation and implementation of reparations and reconciliation programmes may help to shape favourable public opinions towards redress, repatriation and reintegration of the displaced persons. On the other hand, there is a serious dearth of information on how public participation influences the success of reparation and reconciliation programmes, and how programmes informed by popular participation fare in comparison to those that are not. The proposed workshop would prefer to address some of these issues so that we can explore the possibilities of offering durable solution to the problem of forced displacement.

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Professor Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhuri is the vice chancellor of Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata. He is a commentator of Indian and South Asian politics. His research interests include politics of globalization, democracy, development, displacement and human rights in South Asia. He is among the few experts on the Andaman and Nicobar Islands that India has.