Rohini Mitra

• Gender
• Governance and conflict
• Migration, mobility and urbanization

• Bangladesh
• India

Thesis: This doctoral project aims to contribute to a growing body of scholarship around refugee experiences of onward migration in countries of the developing world. Focusing broadly on South Asia and the case of the Rohingya refugee community in India, the research is a multi-sited inquiry into the journeys, networks, and everyday experiences of the Rohingya in India. Drawing from conceptual frameworks in migration governance, migrant integration, transnationalism, and translocality, it focuses on two research questions, posed within the context of an increasingly fragmented and ad-hoc refugee governance in India: (a) What has been the lived experience of refuge and fragmented governance for the Rohingya, and (b) what role do transnational and translocal networks play in helping refugees navigate and negotiate this? The empirical chapters speak to different aspects of the research questions and draw from a variety of qualitative methods – 67 life history interviews with refugees, 23 in-depth interviews with NGOs, over 10 informal group discussions, and extensive field notes across 3 cities (Delhi, Jaipur, Hyderabad) in India. The first two chapters focus on network building, tracing how processes of translocal network building, complemented in recent years with reconstructed transnational networks influence mobility decisions, onward migration journeys, everyday life in the early years, as well as the establishment of a spatially dispersed but well-networked refugee ‘community’ in India. The third and fourth empirical chapters explore how fragmented governance increasingly impacts everyday life, access to critical services, and trust within the refugee community as well as how refugees in different parts of India respond to this. The doctoral project engages with and contributes to existing scholarship on cross-border mobility and statelessness in South Asia, refugee resilience and protection, and migration governance in developing country contexts. 

Research Co-ordinator, India Migration Now (2019-2021)

Master of Arts (Development Studies), Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai (2019)

Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS)

Navigating (Dis)Integration: Experiences of the Rohingya Refugee Community in India

Prof. Dr. Conrad Schetter