Fences And Neighbours: A Multi-Level Analysis

analysis, and the relation among the two concepts state and society has to be clarified. In American political science in the post-war period there were two different responses to the problem of distinguishing the state from society and drawing clear borders (Mitchel 1991: 77). One was to abandon the state as a concept because of its openness and replacing it with the idea of political system, which seemed more a change of vocabulary than actually addressing the problem (Mitchel 1991: 77). The other was to ‘bring the state back in’, a response that was made popular by the work of Evans, Rueschemeyer and Skocpol in the 1970s. A weakness of these traditional-state-society approaches is that they tend to see the state as completely autonomous
Particularly in federal states, such as India, it needs to be clarified in how far local and provincial levels could play a role in shaping migration policies. In her book Fences and Neighbours: The Geography of Immigration Control, Money (1999) points to the fact that forced migrants are often concentrated within one particular state, for instance Bengali refugees in East Bengal or Tibetan refugees in Himachal Pradesh. The impact is felt by particular communities with high concentration of forced migrants, which often causes discontent since they feel that the refugee community is a threat to their local culture or receives more support by the government. Money (1999) argues that this becomes politically relevant in so far as the population might be an important electorate for politicians at the national level: “Local conditions drive local preferences, but national politicians are driven by national electoral incentives to play or not to play the ‘immigrant card (Money 1999: 10).” Units of analysis encompass therefore institutions and individuals within the government at national, state level and local level, as well as activists, interest groups and non-governmental organizations as representatives of society pressure groups (see
The first part of the empirical analysis will therefore be focused on which societal and political actors play a role in the coming about of refugee and immigration policies in India.
Thereafter this paper analyses which factors play a role in shaping policy towards forced migrants in India. The first area of inquiry is the role of political parties and whether they have an active impact on the coming about of refugee policies. One argument why political parties could play a role was given above by Money (1999) that showed that politicians are responsive to wishes of the electorate, which again is directly affected by influxes of refugees. As an incentive to be voted into office, political parties can therefore use promises of restriction in refugee and immigration policies.
Assuming that political parties play a role, it would be expected that: Hy1: The more “pro-refugee” the current political party in office is, the more liberal policies are towards forced