JGU Digital Archive

These reflections from refugees living in India put into context all of the discussions, debates and concerns running through the collection. Of course, compliance with the GCR is not an end goal in its own right—the ultimate objective must be to ensure the safety, security and dignity of refugees in refuge and work towards a durable solution to their displacement. Nonetheless, the hope captured in this special collection—The Global Compact on Refugees: Indian Perspectives and Experiences—is ...

The purpose of the paper is to show that the experiment of ‘development,’ being a byproduct of modernity, is an experiment that has gone too far. Despite exposing its miseries, it sustains its popularity on its enchantment. This enchanted view is predicated upon a particular version of economic thinking that celebrates markets and continues to reproduce various visions of development, most ‘attractively’, urbanization. Given the acute failure of urbanization to develop an inclusionary society...

Government officials exert tremendous power when they buy goods and services from private companies. By setting the terms and conditions under which public procurement takes place, public officials help determine which companies will thrive and which ones will fail. This is one of the important ways governments help create and sustain monopolies in the private sector. But since the bidding process to sell products or services to the government is supposed to be an open and fair competition, h...

My aim in this chapter will be twofold. First, I attempt to discover and collate the blind spots of existing ethical frameworks which dominate climate change debate, and show how this leads to failed attempts for identifying a unanimoulsy binding framework. Second , I offer an alternative perspective, based upon a focus on rich and poor people, rather than rich and poor people, rather than rich and poor nations. Here, I will shift the attention from the international governance rubric to inte...

In this essay, we examine the dynamics of the proposed one-nation, one-election plan of BJP which has already attracted sizable criticisms. Unlike most other public discourses today, which are unfortunately and unsurprisingly focused on the debater rather than the debate itself, we look at raw electoral data and the rigor of the claims made on both the sides. Our preliminary finding is that there is no reason to snub the proposal off, but a careful re-engineering of the proposal to make it wo...

We argue in this note that the principles of validity need fresh understanding to explain the elements of private ordering exhibited in the vast swathes of informal markets around the world. Informal markets, by definition, lie outside formal legal systems and yet display a tenacious stability in their norms. We show that these norms are valid because they are driven by reputation rather than any higher order of law. In doing so, reputation drives efficacy into validity. By remolding Kelsen’s...

“Independent” sex work outside red light areas in big cities in developing countries is an understudied phenomenon. Through a survey of independent sex workers in Delhi, India, this paper sheds light on the governance of independent prostitution. It shows that in the sex work industry, which is informal in nature and faces a complex legal architecture, regulatory intermediaries (RIs) drive both regulation and responsibilization strategies. On behalf of the state, the police act as regulatory ...