ARI Working Paper Series

The international bodies and legal instruments governing refugees, originating from European imperatives, have limited reach over the different types of forced migration circumstances we see today. Researching forced migration in Asia reveals a particular set of epistemological and political issues, including the sustained effects of colonial legacies and how culturally specific notions of territory, sovereignty and legal systems influence the treatment of refugees, internally displaced people and other types of forced migrants. Drawing on interdisciplinary insights, this paper urges researchers to study the interfaces in which a variety of social actors engage with one another, from the institutional level to more grounded interventions by forced migrants. The manner in which such engagements evolve temporally remains urgent issues to be unpacked by researchers. The paper also seeks to foreground the ‘multiplicity’ of forced migration regimes, which serves as an analytical tool for researchers to examine, first, the existence and evolution of multiple regimes governing human displacement which cut across various levels of analyses and spaces; and second, to underscore the nature of multiplicity contained in and enacted by these regimes. We argue that studying the multiplicity of forced migration regimes paves the way for critical analyses of human displacements.