Join us (for the first time in Chandigarh!) for a lecture that asks a question both urgent and uncomfortable:
Who decides what a refugee means?
About the Lecture
Displacement is not new. People have fled war, persecution, famine, and disaster for centuries. Yet today, the word refugee evokes anxiety, suspicion, and hostility across much of the world.
In South Asia, a region shaped by partitions, migrations, and ongoing displacement, tensions between state sovereignty and refugee rights are intensifying. Anti-refugee sentiment feeds policy shifts, and policy shifts in turn reshape public perception. Meanwhile, the international refugee protection regime, once seen as a moral and legal achievement, is being steadily eroded, often by the very states that helped build it.
What then is the future of refugee protection?
This lecture traces the evolution of international refugee law, its conventions, norms, institutions, and political foundations, before turning to the contemporary landscape of displacement. It examines how states are responding to increasingly complex crises, and how narratives around refugees are being constructed, circulated, and weaponised.
About the Speaker
Divita Shandilya is a Protection Associate at United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the Greater Delhi Area. Her work spans program management, protection research, and policy engagement in contexts of displacement and international development.
Prior to her current role, she worked with ActionAid India, where she led policy and research initiatives focused on South-South cooperation and global governance. Her research interests include gender, refugee protection, international development architecture, and mechanisms of global cooperation. She has been closely involved in multi-country research on refugee women and their experiences of displacement and exclusion, and has contributed to international advocacy platforms including Civil20, BRICS Feminist Watch, and Civil BRICS.
Her work sits at the intersection of policy, research, and lived experience — engaging both institutional frameworks and the human stories they seek to govern.
About unLecture
unLecture brings experts out of classrooms and into cafés, bars and neighbourhood spaces across Delhi. Created by three friends from college who wanted learning to feel warm, social and alive. unLecture turns an otherwise ordinary evening into a conversation you may think about long after it ends.
Where it is
Address : Blue Tokai Coffee Roasters Origins | HLP Gallerria Mohali, Shop No, GF, HLP, Galleria Gate, 32 to 34, Himalaya Marg, adjoining Cosmos Hospital, Sector 62, Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar, Punjab 160062, India
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