Ever since their Palme d'Or-nominated Street of Crocodiles brought them to the attention of critics and new fans in 1986, identical twins Stephen and Timothy Quay (born 1947) have parlayed their willfully weird stop-motion animation into a dazzling array of projects for film, music and theater. Disciples of Czech surrealist animator Jan Svankmajer and early pioneers like Ladislav Starevich and Walerian Borowczyk, the Brothers Quay are masters of a dreamscape all their own, creating phantasmagoric fables literally cobbled together from the junk-box detritus of yesteryear: wire, string, spools, buttons, forks, doll parts, flywheels, and other antiquated oddities and homemade mechanisms. Equally inspired by the pessimistic strain of Continental literary fabulism (Kafka, Robert Walser, Bruno Schulz), their hermetic, quasi-mythic visions of madness and existential distress have an Old World patina that makes them as beautifully otherworldly as they are beguiling.

Natives of Philadelphia, the Quays attended the Royal College of Art in the 1960s for graphic design and soon acquired a taste for Eastern European animation and puppetry, especially the tradition of marionette theater extolled in German Romantic Heinrich von Kleist's famous 1810 essay, “On the Marionette Theatre.”

A true understanding of the problematic of rights of the refugees and the displaced demands a genuine understanding of the discourse and practice of a bunch of international humanitarian and human rights laws. Here, we define ‘law’ as a morally inspired system of rules, enforced through a set of institutions. Such a definition approaches ‘law’ from both a normative as well as a causal perspective. Seen from such perspectives, the study of law introduces us to the formal/approved patterns of the refugee regime. Simultaneously, it acts as a moral and practical tool to negotiate with various power formations, of formal or informal nature, both within and without the boundaries of nation states. In the following section, various aspects of this issue have been brilliantly discussed by well-known experts from around the world.

Jeevan Thiagarajah and Dinusha Pathiraja, in their thought provoking article, have offered a discursive analysis of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, with focus on the different types of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Sri Lanka and have found that ‘Sri Lanka has in many respects failed’ to address this issue. The authors await the completion of The Ending Displacement Act and hope that ‘it will be able to turn the lives of the internally displaced in Sri Lanka towards a better future’. On the other hand, Oishik Sircar, a bright young scholar of legal science, seeks to give the ‘increasingly self-contained discourse’ of international women' rights movement its missing link: the postcolonial angle.

I don't consider myself a professional interviewer, so I'm not writing this introduction in order to give “how-to” advice to anyone. All of my interviews with film directors have been done because I wanted to do them; I didn't do them for money, certainly, and a number of them lay unpublished–indeed, untranscribed–for a couple of decades. I think the filmmakers in question appreciated my amateur status and may have trusted me all the more because of it. This is especially true of the late François Truffaut, who–as a former journalist himself–seemed charmed by the fact that I had traveled all the way to Paris, at my own expense, just to have a three- or four-hour conversation with him that might, or might not, appear in print.

When I call myself an amateur, of course I don't mean “unprofessional.” I thoroughly prepare myself for every interview by seeing all of a director's films at least once (DVDs have made this a lot less difficult than it used to be!) and reading everything about him and his work I can lay my hands on. I also prepare lists of “good questions,” even though I don't always stick to the list. The trick in an interview is to “read” your subject and figure out how to get the most (by which I mean the best) out of him–and that sometimes means asking a provocative and even inflammatory question that's not on your list.

‘Refugee’, the Concise Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is ‘a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster’. Thus, even this simple dictionary definition makes ‘refugee’ a person living on the edge of human existence and at the mercy and will of ‘others’ (i.e. the willing and, most of the time, unwilling, even hostile ‘host-states’). And, the definition becomes complex and varied if we move through various international instruments that defined ‘refugee’ since the days of the League of Nations and the definition provided by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Pooja Ahluwalia's ‘Ethical Origins of Refugee Rights’ thoroughly deals with these definitions, especially with the later ones developed by the UNHCR and other organizations under the UN. Although the UNHCR definition is seen by critics as ‘too narrow’, as it does not include all the reasons that clearly inform us why someone might actually become a refugee, it is the world's largest refugee rehabilitation organization that is striving to protect refugee rights since its inception in 1950.

Ahluwalia meticulously follows the evolution of the discourse of definition provided by the UNHCR since the 1951 Convention and the subsequent development of another crucial category of Displaced Persons. This thorough and meticulous nature of the article makes it ‘a must’ for all who care for refugee rights.

The media has been variously defined as a public sphere providing space for issues of importance to be discussed and debated; a major collective source of information and images, which is essential for citizen participation; a network providing a crucial link between individuals and ‘the collective’, which is society. Its power stems from its ownership of the power to interpret, reproduce and disseminate information. It is a power that arises from the social recognition that all human beings have the right to information and the freedom of expression.

Having said this, let us look at this resource a little more closely. The fact that it has often proved unequal to the task it is expected to do is to state the obvious: its silences often being as significant as its statements. It would be useful to ask ourselves, then, why this happens. Well, society as we know it is a terrain in which various discourses, reflecting the interests of discrete groups, are constantly competing with each other for supremacy. While some of these get to the top of the heap, the rest are marginalized, and often forgotten. The newspapers we read, the television we watch, the internet we scan, contributes in no small measure to this process. But, that's not all. The media, even as they attempt to reflect social and political events occurring around us, are themselves sites where contending ideologies and viewpoints do battle. But there is a further complication to consider.

BACKGROUND

Following the independence in 1947, the economic development planning in Pakistan, was based on large-scale industrialization. In less than the period of the first five-year plan, various mega development projects were launched to exploit natural resources.

The projects for building large dams at Terbela and Mangla were initiated in the early decades of independence to rise among the industrialized countries of the world. In the later years, Ghazi Brotha and various other medium scale dams were also constructed to regulate water resources. Although these projects played an important role in the economic development of the country, at the same time they caused havoc in terms of depletion of natural resources and particularly the displacement of thousands of people from their ancestral homes and habitats. People living on dam sites for centuries were not only physically displaced but they also lost their livelihood. Consequently, the displaced populations faced various kinds of impoverishment risks like landlessness, joblessness, homelessness, marginalization, food insecurity, loss of common resources, among others. […]

With regard to delayed resettlement, Tarbela Dam Project is the most relevant example where a significant number of families are yet to be resettled. The land given in compensation was not as good in terms of quality as was acquired by the government. Either resettlement was delayed or just could not be done. Cash compensation to the affected people was not adequate either. The dislocation of the landless has gone unnoticed in all water related projects.

As the lights at Arclight's swanky movie theater go up at the end of Mania Akbari's 20 Fingers at Los Angeles' 2004 AFI Film Festival, a swarthy Iranian gentleman seated more or less center/center stands up and begins the Q&A session with the following in Farsi:

And that wasn't all. After he had received a measured answer from the director–she acknowledged there were many forms of cinema, and that a plot-driven drama that might have appealed to him was not the film she was interested in making–her interlocutor stood up again to rail against the film and ask his second question: Why did this film not resemble another film he'd seen and liked much more, Shabeh Yalda, which also dealt with relationships?

There was more to come…

As Akbari (born 1974), an attractive 30-year-old Iranian woman with close-cropped short hair, walked out of the movie theater at the end of this official Q&A, a slightly older Iranian came up weeping and accused her of propagating, “lies and filth” about Iranians and their relationships, “up there on the screen.”

I have been thinking a lot about Robert Wise (1914–2005) lately, partly because he is one of Hollywood's most underrated directors–hardly acknowledged as a true “auteur”–and partly because so much of his work falls into the genre that interests me most at this time: film noir.

The virtues of Wise's Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) became apparent when it was issued in a widescreen video version. Unfortunately, when the film was originally released, the virtues of the director's vision were completely eclipsed by viewers' feelings about the Star Trek television series.

Viewed now–independent of one's previous attitudes toward Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock–Star Trek is an impressive achievement. It is a classic example of what Raymond Durgnat calls “a compass and protractor film,” in which the sheer interplay of abstract colors, forms, and motion is consistently pleasing to the eye; and Wise, apparently, was given plenty of room to indulge his penchant for abstract exercises of this sort. For example, a sequence whose only narrative significance can be summarized in the words, “Kirk returns to his ship,” is elaborated by Wise into a six-minute tour de force of music, composition, and montage.

But, as in most of Wise's best work, the tendency toward abstract formalism is balanced by reserves of feeling. Here, most of the feelings cluster around the film's “monster,” an enormous thinking machine attempting to evolve into human form (specifically, the form of beautiful Indian actress Persis Khambatta), and the reciprocal feelings of one of the crew members (Stephen Collins) toward this pseudo-human.

Although forced migration in India is usually divided into two broad types – internal and external, depending on the territorial expanse within which it occurs, we propose to concentrate more on the first type for reasons not beyond our comprehension.

First, while the problem of immigration from across the international borders has been a topic of frequent discussion and responsible for sparking off many a nativist outburst in different parts of India, the issue of internal displacement has assumed alarming proportions especially in recent years, but has hardly received any attention worth its name in popular circles. There is no denying the fact that the issue of internal displacement is yet to acquire the kind of legal standing – whether national or international, that is usually accorded to the external one – particularly of the refugees. Secondly, whereas India's role as a refugee receiving country has been widely acclaimed both within the country as well as abroad, her role in generating refugees has been of marginal significance compared to that of some of her next-door neighbours. This, however, does not leave any room for complacence, and the pressures on the state to adopt certain pre-emptive and corrective measures are now formidable. […] Thirdly, it is difficult, if not impossible in some cases, to make a watertight distinction between these two types for much of what we call, internal displacement is externally induced and has international spillovers at least in the neighbouring regions.

South Asia has the fourth largest concentration of refugees in the world. A majority of displaced persons who have crossed international borders in this region are not regarded as ‘refugees’ by the host governments. They are usually treated as ‘undesirable aliens’ or ‘illegal immigrants’. There are no national laws, which define or distinguish ‘refugees’ from others who cross the borders. The governments in this region have also not signed or ratified the 1951 UN Convention Concerning the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol, the only available UN mechanism for the protection and rehabilitation of refugees.

However, we have to first consider, who is a refugee? Traditionally, any person who has been forced to flee his or her home for fear of life or lack of subsistence is regarded a refugee. However, in international law only those who are denied protection of their home states and as a result have crossed international borders to seek refuge in another country are accepted as refugees. Faced with the problem of a large number of displaced and uprooted persons after World War I, the western nations created international instruments for the protection, return as well as resettlement of these persons in other countries. The so-called Nansen Passport was created to provide these stateless persons with a temporary identity. Between 1922 and 1926 under the auspices of the League of Nations, several treaties created certain obligations on the contracting states, making it necessary to define the term ‘refugee’.

FEAR, MEMORY AND THE CONTEXT

There has been a tendency to focus on the communal and violent nature of partition and the mass exodus accompanying it. This has been more the case of the Punjab frontier where forced migration took place on a large scale. Along the Bengal border things were different. For some families it was a matter of conscious choice. For example, this was a choice for families whose members were in government service and who were given an option to take equivalent work on the other side. It is mentioned by some families, however that often one had to decide in a very short period of time, so that people who took the option also had to reach a hurried decision and later regretted it. For others, the decision to migrate was taken almost overnight, especially if the family was directly or indirectly hit by a communal carnage that succeeded the partition. But for most families the decision to migrate was deliberated slowly and in waves within the circles of the family a process that continues even today. This created a curious effect on the social makeup of the region resulting in a diaspora of families. Hindus, Muslims, Biharis, Chakmas, Garos, etc, separated and divided, living on either side of the lines chalked out by the Radcliffe Award, each part engrossed in its own struggle for survival or achievement and yet still connected to each other by ties, emotional, imaginary and real. […]

In war, all attention focuses on war news. The soldiers are the main concern of the media. This is natural. However, this one-sided coverage often ignores the plight of the civilian population who are affected by the war. Non-combatant civilians get killed, maimed and dispossessed. […] There is enough evidence to show that during war the border population gets pushed around by the very army, which is supposed to protect it. The media also tends to ignore or play down the plight of the war refugees, as these stories are perceived as less important.

It has been reported that the ongoing war in Kargil has created about 35,000 refugees. I was told by an official of the Jammu and Kashmir government that the heavy shelling by Pakistani forces in Akhnoor sector of Jammu has forced about 70,000 persons to leave their homes and take refuge in refugee camps set up in school buildings and tents. While the government claimed that all arrangements were made for proper relief of the refugees in Kargil and Jammu sectors, there were newspaper reports that the government had failed to provide even the basic necessities to the refugees. […] A few newspapers had reported that in the Kargil sector civilians were forced to work as porters for the army without any pay while others claimed that the people of the Kargil region were willingly carrying loads for the army.

Summary

In this chapter, I explore the effects that FDI can have on domestic investment in recipient developing countries. An attempt is made to determine the circumstances under which FDI may be expected to induce additional investment from national firms, which is labeled as “crowding in” (CI). Under other circumstances, FDI may well displace investments that would have been made by domestic firms in the absence of the foreign investor, i.e., “crowding out” (CO) those investments. A third possibility is that FDI may translate into real investment on a one-to-one basis, a situation I label as “neutral effect.” Recent findings suggest that FDI, over the period 1971 through 2000, has generally had neutral or CO effects on domestic investment. This means that a liberal policy toward FDI should be complemented with an effort to ensure that the recipient country attracts those investments that are more likely to maximize their investment rates.

Introduction

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is prized by developing countries for the bundle of assets that multinational enterprises (MNCs) deploy with their investments. Most of these assets are intangible and are particularly scarce in developing countries. They include technology, management skills, channels for marketing products internationally, product design, quality characteristics, brand names, etc. In evaluating the impact of FDI on development, however, a key question is whether MNCs crowd in (CI) domestic investment (as, for example, when their presence stimulates new downstream or upstream investment that would not have taken place in their absence) or whether they have the opposite crowding-out (CO) effect of displacing domestic G44 producers or pre-empting their investment opportunities.

The largest Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb so far on the English mainland exploded in Manchester on 15 June 1996. It destroyed most of the main shopping mall in the city centre. There was a forty-minute warning, but the area was not fully cleared and many people were injured. This time nobody was killed, unlike the Canary Wharf bombing in London earlier in the year that signalled the end of the recent ceasefire. Manchester has a large Irish community, and that day there was an Irish festival in nearby Bolton. The Irish came over last century to build the infrastructure for England's industrial success, with labourers working on the waterways which run from Liverpool through to the Manchester Ship canal. In some senses, then, Manchester was an obvious economic target, with the Provisionals taking back what Ireland had built with a demand that the six counties in the North of their country be returned, united in one thirty-two county republic.

English identity is bound up with Ireland, and the complex cultural processes that reconstitute this identity with each attempt and failure to make reparation are ripe for psychoanalytic study. But as well as needing to fix on appropriate psychoanalytic frameworks to make sense of this mess, we also need to locate those frameworks themselves in the culture that spawned them, in the mess itself.