ABSTRACT
This chapter engages with the issue of power and responsibility at the margins, by which it means the postcolonial world. The chapter begins with a discussion on the global structure of relation between power and responsibility. It argues that in order to understand this structure characterised by a dissociation of power and responsibility it is necessary to study the role of the postcolonial nation state in offering protection to refugees and other victims of forced migration, and the specific pattern of the combination of power, care, and responsibility in the postcolonial world. The chapter then proceeds to examine the customary practices of hospitality, the long-term impact of partitions, border-making exercises, and borderland violence on the postcolonial life of the nation and on the region as a whole. The chapter argues that to make sense of the postcolonial milieu in which practices and norms of protection have evolved, it is important to bring in the issue of justice as a specific question of transition. Displacements in the era of transition have marked the agenda of justice. The idea behind this chapter is not to present the postcolonial milieu of power and responsibility as an ideal one, as a model that the structure of global governance should adopt. The idea is to give an indication of the particular realities of the postcolonial world existing under the so-called global realm of protection – existing almost as a parallel realm.
