In India, and South Asia more broadly, irregular migration is intertwined with histories of colonial extraction, border violence, caste and religious discrimination, militarisation, agrarian crises, and precarious labour economies. Over the past three decades, South Asian countries has seen a significant rise in internal and cross-border irregular migration, driven by conflicts, particularly those in Myanmar and Afghanistan, the long-term consequences of failed developmental policies, expulsions, and economic exploitation. These migrations are not confined to a single country in the region; rather, they highlight the interconnected ways in which people, labour, violence, and capital circulate across borders. Given this interconnectedness, our workshop brought together research from both within the region and beyond, creating a space to explore the narratives and experiences of women and marginalised communities across South Asia and its neighbouring countries. We viewed this as an opportunity to reflect on critical questions such as: how can we theorise survival instead of merely documenting it, and how can we build transnational feminist solidarities across different contexts in South Asia while acknowledging the significant differences that exist between them?
What were our key learnings from the conversations at the workshop?
We had two wonderful panels that brought together six researchers from different countries and academic institutions. Our panels on “Transnational Social Reproduction and Labour Migration” and “Gender, Dispossession and Urban Survival”, moderated by Jayashree Vivekanandan and Soumita Basu (South Asian University) respectively, included presentations on diverse contexts: the exploitation and depletion of migrant labourers brought to Australia through the ‘guestworker’ PALM scheme (Matt Withers, Australian National University), the revolutionary labour of love and care performed by women in the Kachin State in Myanmar to rebuild their homes and lives disrupted by war (Jenny Hedstrom, Swedish Defence University); the dispossession and displacement of informal fishing workers in Mumbai’s Lallubhai Compound (Gayathri Krishna, McMaster University), rural women’s leadership in resisting state-sanctioned land grabs in Cambodia (Saba Joshi, University of York) and the marginalisation and securitised representation of Rohingya refugee communities in digital spaces in urban India (Vaishali Barua, Jawaharlal Nehru University).
Though this research emerged from different empirical sites, the panels offered striking insights into how social reproduction, i.e., all those practices necessary for the maintenance of life, is stretched, weaponised, and made meaningful under conditions of violence. While in some instances, states deliberately restrict people’s social reproduction capacities through extractive labour regimes, in other instances, women mobilise their social reproduction responsibilities to collectivise and resist violence. The panels reaffirmed the interconnections between the violence of nation-states and capitalist economies. Both systems depend on the gendered and underpaid labour of social reproduction to support financial and economic growth, militarisation, revolutions, and nationalisms; yet they also increase the burdens on certain marginalised communities, particularly women, to ensure the survival of their communities. Critically, these conversations helped destabilise global-local scalar hierarchies by showing how local labour control regimes are deeply connected to global uneven development and care labour circulation and ecological destruction. They also demonstrate that war’s terrain extends beyond battlefields into homes, farms and lands left fallow in the wake of violence. These are not separate geographies but interwoven ones: exploitation relies on reordering care, land, kinship, labour, and, crucially, religion and caste in the case of South Asia, reinforcing rural-urban divides and actively reproducing marginalisation.
What should researchers and scholars keep in mind when engaging with these complex and critical issues?
Our keynote roundtable with Eva Abdulla (Maldives Policy Think Tank), Nimmi Kurian (Centre for Policy Research, Delhi) and Rita Manchanda (Independent Researcher), moderated by Elisabeth Prügl (Geneva Graduate Institute) and Shweta Singh (South Asian University), was structured around feminist praxis in research. Our panellists brought together their diverse experiences on the ground, ranging from internal migration in the Maldives, border zones in the Trans-Himalayan highlands and the Indo-Bangladesh border, to displaced Afghan refugees in urban Delhi. Panellists reflected on the ethical tensions inherent in such research: marginalised communities often find themselves unable to hide from the gaze of researchers, risking appropriation and loss of ownership of their narratives. Thus, collaborating with participants in the translation of research findings, wherever possible, is important. However, such collaborations can be interrupted by the excessive use of academic language, which can unintentionally exclude those it seeks to represent. Panellists reflected on the tension between using language that resonates with wider audiences and the need to retain nuance, especially when translating research into policy or public discourse. The panellists stressed the importance of translating empirical data into textured narratives that honour the complexity of people’s lives, without falling into the trap of overgeneralisations that flatten the realities of surviving along the margins.
For us, this conversation also reaffirmed a core belief and practice throughout our project: that of finding issue-based linkages across diverse contexts to promote deeper, more reflexive conversations about the politics of survival, knowledge production, and feminist international relations.
Insights from the workshop are informing our ongoing efforts to theorise survival from the margins, including by relating our findings from India and Turkey. We look forward to continuing these critical conversations with our network of scholars, practitioners, and students from around the world.
