Contenu du sommaire : Des migrants birmans dans la ville

This article examines the social and political mobilization of Burmese communities of Indian origins, who repatriated from Burma (Myanmar) back to India between the 1960s and 1980s. Drawing on recent fieldwork carried out in several Indian cities, this paper explores the sociopolitical world subsequently created by these repatriated communities within the urban and peri-urban spaces they were resettled in — spaces thereafter known throughout India as “Burma Colonies”. Interviews have revealed how the returnees have mobilized around issues of urban housing, land and property rights, and organized themselves to protect their emerging business interests in local “Burma Bazaars,” and to secure the welfare of their community. The research suggests that their struggle has proved a critical component of their search for urban, and subsequently national, citizenship rights in the erstwhile homeland they were returning to. Political activism and social mobilization using specific urban spaces have therefore greatly facilitated the (re)integration of these returnees into the wider Indian public realm. However, most Burmese repatriate settlements have progressively been absorbed by a sprawling “Indian” urban and political landscape. Furthermore, the second generation of returnees — now well integrated into India's citizenry — has mostly demobilized. India's “Burma Colonies” have therefore today lost much of their significance as specific sites of mobilization for citizenship, the article concludes.

This article interrogates the link between urbanity and “precarity of place” for non-citizen populations, relying on evidence drawn from the transnational homeland activities of Burmese migrants in two global cities (Bangkok and Tokyo). First, the article builds upon literatures of precarity and global cities to detail the complexity of urban spaces in relation to migration, and draws upon understandings of political mobilisation to explain homeland activism among non-citizen populations. It then focuses respectively on Bangkok and Tokyo, demonstrating the ways in which migrants from Burma of varying precarity utilise or forgo urban structures in each city. The article concludes that precarity does not necessarily reduce homeland activism, but may change its outward appearance. Urban structures, to a greater or lesser extent, influence that relationship.

While coming to Delhi to seek asylum, Burmese enter a refugee-apparatus, i.e. the different actors that deal with them, the values they carry and the interactions they create. This very complex situation places the refugees in a transnational world made of multiple references and logics. Refugee women organizations represent a target-group of this apparatus and are at the core of this paper. We analyze the importance of the city of Delhi on the Burmese refugees and more precisely on Chin women through the actions of the multiple actors on the problems these women face. We observe that the city creates problems (precariousness, violence) and exacerbates women's vulnerability and at the same time generates new opportunities and reinforces the women's mobilization capacity via the multiple levers provided by the different actors.

The Rohingya in exile has attracted the attention of the world media, the NGOs and the scholars for their hazardous migrations in the Bay of Bengal and their settlement under the UNHCR near the Bangladesh border. But the biggest part of the migrants lives outside those camps in the region of Chittagong. No studies have been carried out regarding their presence in the eponimous capital city where the most important part of the migrants remain in a very precarious manner but most probably on their way towards (re)intégration.

The foundation of monasteries in Singapore (a dozen) by Buddhist migrants from Burma, is part of the migratory phenomenon common to the whole of contemporary Burma. This note is a first presentation of these places, adapted to the specific context of Singapore. Most of them were founded within the last decade, doubtlessly by permanent residents (monks and laymen), which indicates a degree of implantation or integration in Singapore society. Through these monasteries and their religious activities, migrants maintain also strong links with their society of origin in accordance with their values. Transnational networks have been elaborated through which circulate invited monks, money and other goods.

This note summarizes thirty years of exporting female labor forces in Hong Kong at a time when Indonesia, a leading provider, decides to put an end to this practice. It highlights this ambiguity and paradox of the status of foreign domestic helper in Hong Kong : discreet or even invisible at the employer's home during the week and highly visible and activist during the weekend. This quest for visibility, which has resulted in highlighting the difficulties inherent in the status of migrant domestic workers, is certainly one of the main causes for the questioning of the opportunity of such jobs.