Commitment, Crisis, Capture: Analyzing the Evolution of South Africa’s Refugee Policy

Heather David, Masters Student, Political Science, Carleton University

Heather Davis: I am a Master’s student in the Political Science Department at Carleton University. I recently returned from a trip to South Africa where I was conducting field research for my Masters thesis. I initially became interested in the study of forced migration and refugees in a course I took last year, in the first year of my program. For that class, I wrote a paper exploring the nature of the global refugee regime in a country like India, whose history with colonialism, division, and the mass movement of people across borders, contradicts many of the international community’s ideas and definitions surrounding forced migration.