Presenting a Paradox

The Indian subcontinent stepped into its independent nationhood amidst the greatest refugee crisis in the modern era, when an estimated fourteen million people migrated across the borders of India and Pakistan. And yet, a theoretical understanding of the refugee phenomenon has evolved much more recently in the1990s. This is especially true of the International Relations literature in the South Asian region that has been dominated by the neo-realist analyses. This genre of literature has not addressed the refugee question mainly because of their state-centric analysis and excessive focus on power-politics while the neo-liberal approach only addressed the managerial and governability dimensions of refugee problems. The last decade witnessed some critical changes in the discipline though they were largely in response to international developments. As the Cold War unravelled, the conventional categories of analysis became a poor fit to new and much more complex realities.