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Susan Banki, "The Ecosystem of Exile Politics: Why Proximity and Precarity Matter for Bhutan's Homeland Activists" (Cornell UP, 2024)
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- [00:01]
A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm Natalie Pearson, senior Lecturer in Heritage Studies at the University of Sydney and co host of the New Books Network. Today I'm talking to Susan Banke, an associate professor at the University of Sydney and author of the Ecosystem of Exile why Proximity and Precarity Matter for Bhutan's Homeland Activists, published by Cornell University Press in 2024. Welcome, Susan.
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A
Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here.
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B
Thank you for joining us. I'm so pleased to finally have you on the NBN and to talk with you about your new book. Congratulations. Must be wonderful to have it out in the world.
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A
It is indeed wonderful. I love that it's out there in the world and I love that I've been able to share it with scholars and with members of the community that I've studied.
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B
So your book relays the events that led to the exodus of 1/6 of Bhutan's population and the activism that followed in response by the refugee diaspora. This seems to be not just a remarkable story, but also remarkably unknown and one that is quite at odds with how, you know, with global understandings of Bhutan as this sort of fabled Shangri La, with its Gross National Happiness Index and its benevolent king and beautiful mountain scenery. But you try to do a closer reading of Bhutan's history and reveal quite a different story. What can you tell us about these contrasting narratives? Is this what attracted you to the project in the first place?
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A
Indeed. Natalie, you point out the most important things that I'm trying to bring to light, which is an issue that has come out of Bhutan that very few people know about. You know, the expulsion of 1/6 of a population of a country that is known, as you point out, for its beauty, which it is, and its efforts for sustainable development, which are true, but also a fear of ethnic minorities. And in the book, I call that the Shangrilization of the country. There's this idea that the place is a Shangri La. So what could possibly be wrong in a place that calls itself a Shangri La? The truth of the matter is many, many people do not know this story. Even in my field, which is refugee and migration studies, I'll go to a conference or be talking about this issue and even, yeah, refugee scholars will say, I had no idea. Similarly, in examinations of social justice movements, it's not one that comes up. So I feel very lucky to be the one that has learned this story. And I try to tell it using as much voice from the refugee population.
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B
As I can so your book brings together 16 years of fieldwork, which is remarkable commitment on your part, and some 97 interviews with Bhutanese Nepali refugees. And that's a term I want to explore with you in a moment. But first, can you tell us about what sustained your commitment to the project over such a long period and how it evolved over time?
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A
Yeah, sure. I'll go back to the beginning and say when I had the opportunity to go to Nepal, there were in refugee camps to study this population. I knew the basics. What I knew is that there was an ethnic minority population in Bhutan, ethnically Nepali, and that starting in the late 1980s, the efforts of the Bhutanese government to integrate the population met with some significant resistance. They put into place some really strict language laws, which were really tough for those in the south where the ethnic Nepalis lived. There was a requirement of a dress code that was really problematic, very uncomfortable for the southern regions, which are quite warm down there, unlike in the north. And I will also just say that the ethnic minority of Nepalis in Bhutan looks, sounds and practices differently. So the language of the north is a language called Jonka. The people of the north look more Tibetan, as you might expect, and they practice, for the most part, Buddhism. Whereas in the south, these ethnic Nepalis, who were not spread entirely through the southern regions, but in certain concentrated places, they looked, of course, Nepali. They were ethically Nepali, they spoke Nepali and they practiced Hinduism. So this was both a physical manifestation of difference. Some political ones followed anyway. The government enacted a census to see who was legitimately a citizen and who was not. But even apologists for the Bhutanese government will say that that census was really not carried out terrifically, fairly or effectively. You know, people were trying to prove that they had a land receipt from 1958 in the hot, humid weather of southern Bhutan. What ended up happening is there were families that were spread apart by the divisions. This person is a citizen, this person is not. They were split into five or seven categories. And over time, you know, the Bhutanese, Nepalis of the south, they started to protest. And there were two big protests in September and October of 1990, and the population of the north just had not seen anything like it. I mean, this was a monarchy where the king was revered. And we know lots of countries where that's the case. But. But I think particularly, particularly in Bhutan, the monarchy was profoundly, profoundly revered. So this. This marching against what for all intents and purposes was the king, because there was no democracy at the time, was just viewed horribly. And those that participated in the marches or even family members were considered nalaps, which means anti national. And this led to the expulsion. So now I jump forward and answer your question. I'm sorry. It took me a while to get there. They ended up being pushed across the southern border into India. And from India they were really pushed west to Nepal. Interestingly, many had never been to Nepal. Despite being ethnic Nepali, they had never been to Nepal. So the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees set up refugee camps in the eastern part of Nepal, in the districts of Joppa and Morang. And over time, the populations in those refugee camps grew and grew and grew. And when I had the opportunity to go meet some of these refugees and start a bit of a research project, I had this one very profound experience, which is I met a very well educated gentleman who was in the refugee camp and he told me that he had in his refugee camp hut a piece of the Berlin Wall. Now, as an American who has spent a lot of time in Europe, I can tell you, Natalie, it was the farthest thing from my assumption that I would meet a refugee in a refugee camp hut in Nepal that had a piece of the Berlin Wall. So there's a lot to say about the assumptions that go with that. Why do we think that a refugee in a camp hut would not have some interesting international marker? He had been a devoted and loyal government officer in Bhutan and he was sent to Berlin on a, like a junket, like a kind of a government funded little research project or a training, actually. And while there, the Wall came down and he realized the import of what was happening and he got a little piece of the Wall, he brought that back with him to Bhutan, and within some years he was a refugee. And I think that, I mean, that was one of the moments that made me realize this story encapsulates so much. It pushes back on our assumptions that refugees are uneducated and don't know the world, which is something I already knew because my father was a refugee himself and he was very well educated. It pushed back on an assumption that everyone that had been pushed out was somehow problematic when it came to the government. I mean, this gentleman loved his job and he was proud of the work he was doing for the government. He had no interest in leaving. And it contested a lot of those assumptions both about this situation and also more broadly about what it means to be a refugee. And that was my start. And then I just kept going. And the truth is, it took me a long time because I felt quite strongly that I wanted to get to know the community. I Hope the listeners of this podcast will be excited to go and get it, and they will not be disappointed to see it's actually quite a thin volume. Just because I spent that huge amount of time doesn't mean that I have a massive tome. I'd like to think that it is packed with lots of stories and. And information, but to collect those, and to collect it respectfully to ensure that I got as many voices as possible, you know, really, really not easy to do.
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B
Look, I completely agree with what you're saying about the foregrounding of the voices in the book. It's one of the things I really love about it. Each chapter opens with a quote from one of your interviewees, and you also begin the book with three stories or sort of vignettes of activists from outside their homeland. And I really did notice that this was such an effective way that you introduced to the book of bringing the voices of individuals into the project and into your research. I was going to ask you more about your decision to foreground these voices so actively, but perhaps I can focus my question a little bit more by picking up on your comment just now that your father was also a refugee, which is, you know, part of this quite profound reflection in the opening chapter about your positionality and this pivotal meeting you had with one of the activists that really deepened your understanding of your role as a researcher and what you were bringing to the project. Can you elaborate on that?
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A
Yeah, sure, I'd love to. And I love that I found a way of bringing in my father just for a mention because he meant so much to me. And I'm quite certain if you. You wouldn't have to dig too deep to figure out that the reason I probably went into a career in researching refugees is because of my own father. So the part in the book to which you're referring is where I had been advised for many, many years that one of the people that I really, really should meet in my research was a man named Balaram Podil. Balaram Podil was the head of one of Bhutan's exile political parties called the bpp, the Bhutan People's Party. I've been told he's a really important person to meet, but you have to be careful, because the BPP had been thought to be behind some recent revolutionary activity. Some things that, you know, maybe were a little bit more on the. On the violent side that had never specifically been substantiated in referring to the things that were mentioned to me. And I was told he didn't speak English and that it would be hard to access him. So it took me quite a many years. I finally had the chance to meet with him. He met me at my hotel. He shuffled in wearing his signature hat. He had a thick accent and he spoke quite softly and thoughtfully. And we had a great and long ranging conversation in which he said, you know, maybe the BPP had had some problems, but it certainly didn't define everything that his organization stood for. And we had a wonderful conversation. And at the end of it, when he was leaving, he took my hands and he put them on his head. And that was surprising because in South Asian cultures, often the idea is that an elderly person will put their hands on your head as a way of giving you a blessing. So by taking my hands and putting them on his head, it was that he was seeking my blessing. And he said, you know, I hope you continue to do good work for my people. I neglected to mention that actually his English was quite good. Anyway, as he walked away, I just felt tears come to my eyes. And I realized that while I had always thought about my positionality as a white person, as a woman, as opposed as a person with a passport, I had really not considered the reason that I went into the research that I did, which was because my father, my own father was a refugee himself. And this is not to compare Bhutan and Hungary, where he came from. It is only to say that there are so many assumptions that we carry with us into our research, how we design our research projects, the kinds of questions we ask, and of course our motivations. And even I, as a person that had thought about my positionality, hadn't really fully done it justice until. Until that moment.
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B
Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Susan, There is one other ethical consideration in the opening chapter that I just wanted to ask you about, which is your really careful consideration of language and terms and phrases. And earlier I used the words Bhutanese Nepali, which is a term that you deliberately use and, you know, state in your opening comments rather than lot. Champa so can you sort of elaborate on this with reference to the other terms that you explore in this opening chapter, like migrants, refugees, activists, terms such as exile politics, diaspora mobilization, homeland activism. What is the importance of language in framing identities and activism?
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Oh, Natalie, I love this question. And I'm going to back up only to say I have been teased endlessly for the mouthful that is my book.
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Title, which is the Ecosystem of Exile Politics. Why Proximity and Precarity Matter for Bhutan's Homeland Activists. What is the mouthful?
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A
I mean, it's a mouthful because Anyone that is not an academic would just say, I mean, you cannot get that out in one breath. It's got the word proximity and precarity. And of course, I'll get to in a moment why those are concepts that are important in this book. But there's so much in it that is just. Yeah, it has a very much of an academic feel. So I think learning to kind of explain these things in ways that are easy is difficult because there's a range of conceptual ideas that lie behind these and also a range of identities. So you've asked the right question, because I happen to have selected a subject which both the empirical case that I examine and the concept and the conceptual framework use a lot of phrases. So first we have the ecosystem of exile politics. Exile politics is essentially a way of saying the act of trying to work from exile to change your country back home to engage in efforts to reform the home country. It is most often used to describe those who are trying to change a country that has moved into authoritarianism. So another word that one can use for exile politics is homeland activism. The reason that I'm trying not to only use diaspora activism is that often that is a term that is used to describe any activism carried out by degrees, diasporas or refugees or migrants, even if it is about the host country they're in. So, for example, if I am a Mexican and I go to the United States, I could be doing homeland activism, which could be to work to change something in Mexico, or I could be doing activism to try to change things in the United States, likely to try to make my life a little bit safer. And God knows we do that right now. But my point is that that second kind of activism is about activism targeting the host, not the home. So exile politics or homeland activists are terms that are meant to describe activism targeting the home country. You've also asked about the population, and I have to confess to you, Natalie, that I change week to week on what I call this population because I am trying to reflect what I hear within the Bhutanese refugee community. And that changes from time to time. So originally, this population in southern Bhutan was called the Lo Champa, and in the language of Dzongka, which I mentioned, is the Bhutanese major language, that means Southerner or southern residing person. And that made sense because at that time, all of the ethnic Nepalis were essentially in the southern part of the country. But the truth is there are ethnic Nepalis in the north part of the country, and there are now increasingly a lot of the ethnic majority, the ones that I refer to either the ones that I referred to before also called the Drukpa who are moving to the south. So Lo Champa no longer works, even though, frankly, from a Google Scholar search point of view, it would have been great if we could keep using that. But no, life doesn't work the way we want. So the other possibilities was something either with a hyphen or that combined them. Bhutanese Nepali or Nepali Bhutanese. And really what this is meant to describe are those members of the population of Bhutan who had an ethnic Nepali background. And you know that that works when you say a Bhutanese Nepali refugee, but it also doesn't really roll off the tongue so often that that has been truncated into Bhutanese refugee. There's also people that say ethnic Nepalis. But the truth is, once someone resettles ethnic Nepali doesn't work because there are ethnic Nepalis, for example, in Australia who are not from Nepal, Bhutan. So I just realized by saying resettle, I need to back up or go into something else. Or would you like to ask me a question about that rather than my going into it like that?
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B
Well, why don't you expand on that? Because, I mean, obviously language is so is such an important consideration for your work in seeking to accurately and correctly identify the populations that you're working with and the issues that you're considering. So what is it about the term resettle that poses more questions?
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A
So one of the things that I didn't get to in talking about this population is that after the refugees left Bhutan and then fled west to Nepal, they remained in Nepal, the vast majority of them, for many years, until the mid-2000s, when there was up to 110,000. You know, they had been in the camps for many years and lots of births. So at that time, the international community engaged in what's called the process of resettlement, which is a really interesting phenomenon in the international community wherein countries of the global north get together and decide to accept refugees scattered all over the world for permanent protection in their countries. This is quite rare, and it's happening even less now with what's happened in the United States of America. But what's even rarer is what happened in the case of the Bhutanese refugees, which is the international community decided to resettle en masse the refugee population. So of that 110,000 that were in the camps in Nepal, about 103, somewhere between 100 and 103,000 were resettled. About 96,000 in the United States, 6,000 here in Australia, and then small pockets scattered in lots of different places, the uk, Norway, the Netherlands, lots of different little places in Europe, New Zealand, Canada. And while resettlement is a really interesting process, and in fact, my father himself was a resettled refugee, this, this, what this did was it meant that the large population that had been near the camps was now much further away. And that meant that the populations that had lived together in those camps for so long knew each other stories, knew each other news, were now embarking on new lives, and the activities that they were going to be engaging in necessarily changed. And that brings me, in fact, to the main argument of the book. So after the refugees left Bhutan, they ended up in Nepal. And many of them, and certainly the ones that I start the book with, really wanted to just get back. They did not want to be in Nepal, despite the fact that many of them had this ethnic heritage. They loved the king, they loved the country, as I've already mentioned. And there were essentially efforts in homeland activism to get back to Bhutan, to change things in Bhutan so it would be safe for them to get back. So in the book, I split this into three kinds of activism. I call this essentially, the promotion of human rights and democracy, the documenting of the human rights abuses that those who had fled suffered. There were people that were put in prison. There were families torn apart. There were all kinds of violences that happened to those populations that were expelled. And the homeland activists in Nepal wanted to do the work of documenting that. There were also calls for democracy in Bhutan, mindful that without representation, what would happen again to that community? And the third was what I call reversing exile. They wanted to go back. And so the homeland activism that followed was profoundly important to the refugees themselves and was carried out in a lot of different places, but primarily in the environs of eastern Nepal, with a little bit in India and then some places further afield. And the argument that I make is that this proximity to the homeland had a great power. I call it the power of proximity, which is problematically alliterative. And that power of proximity, I show, really allowed the refugees to kind of collect the information that I talked about to engage in symbolic protest in the region, in South Asia, so that newspapers that were interested in these issues could pick up the story and broadcast it. There was access to Nepali and Indian legislators in order to kind of tell these stories and to try to get it on the radar of important people. And those homeland activists were able to do that work quite effectively because they were nearby. And the story that I start the book with is the story of One of my research participants named Ratan Gazmir, very smart man, and he realized that one of the claims of the Bhutanese government was that most of the people that left, they were never Bhutanese to begin with. They had come to Bhutan illegally, or they had come to do work and they'd overstayed. They never should have been there anyway, so it was okay that they were expelled. There's lots to say about why it's not okay to expel someone, even if they don't have a passport. But nevertheless, Ratan looked around and saw his compatriots and said, the thing is, I know a lot of my compatriots were citizens. And he got a little bit of money from an NGO and he bought a scanner and he and his team went around and they took the documents. This is way before iPhones, so you couldn't just take a picture easily. Right. They got the documents from many, many refugees and they scanned them so that there would then be proof of passports, land receipts, tax receipts, things that would show that that population, in fact, were citizens. He put it into this ingenious database, which was on a CD ROM when I saw it for the first time, showing my age. And on that database, you could click on the name of a person and it would then show the district that they were from, and then you could click on another link and. And it would show in that district all the other people when they were expelled and their documentation. So it was this brilliant, systematic way of showing the extent to which citizens had been denationalized. And it is not going to be surprising to you to hear, Natalie, that of course, that kind of a job is made abundantly easier by being nearby, by being in a proximate location.
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B
Absolutely. And that's one of the key arguments that you make in the book, which is that physical location really matters in exile politics. And that opening vignette, and then in a lot of depth in chapter four, which is all about the power of proximity, you do look at those really sophisticated strategies and technologies that the homeland activists were able to use to assert their rights and demonstrate that, you know, they had claims to land and citizenship as well, and they were able to mobilise networks and access to witnesses through their own contacts. One other thing that you talk about in that chapter, in addition to these really sophisticated technologies, which really struck me in terms of just how close those who were exiled were to their homeland, were these marches. But back to Bhutan. And if you look at it on a map, I mean, it's sort of Just across the way. Right. It's so close. And they held huge symbolic currency, these marches. They captured a lot of media attention. Most of the people who marched trying to return to Bhutan were not successful. They were captured and arrested. But, you know, what did these sort of physical actions represent these marches? And how did they sort of complement the sort of sophisticated human rights documentation that your research participants shared with you?
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Thanks for asking about that, because I think those marches are so important for anyone that is attached to land. We know that we can do marches in any place. But the refugees wanted to do a march that directed them back to Bhutan for many reasons. One is they wanted to show that they were peaceful. So as I already noted, there was this view that the Bhutanese refugees were anti nationals and they wanted to do a peaceful march that showed we're walking back to come to our home country and we're doing it peacefully. So that strategy was very important. The second part is that, and I will say to this day, my research participants, with whom I remain quite close, some of them, they yearn for that land. And so for them walking back to be close, close to the land is really a way of saying, look there, our country, there it is, just across the river, it's that close and we can't get to it. So the yearning, it was both symbolic and I think it was quite personal for some. I will say you are right, Natalie, that on a map, they look close, but they're still not as close as adjacent. There's a small strip of India that divides Bhutan and Nepal. And even though it looks like a tiny strip, it's enough that the walk between eastern Nepal and trying to get to the Bhutanese border, it is a couple of days walk. Which makes it all the more impressive that the Bhutanese dissidents and activists planned it, because it wasn't just like, yeah, grab a placard and let's go. It was, we're going to need to go in stages. We're going to have to figure out where to stay at night. We're going to have to have logistical coordination to make sure we stay together, to make sure we stay safe. Excuse me. To make sure we stay safe. And again, being close to the country, sure, you can do a march at the un, but that was not going to capture the imagination as much as a proximate march was. It did capture the march. And look, I write it about a little, but there are some other really profoundly moving sources that write about what it was like for people to try to get back into Bhutan. A couple of groups made it in and they were summarily pushed back out in ways that made them feel so sad and unwelcome because they went in peace to say, this is our home, our parents grew up here. And then, yeah, they were put on buses. One story was someone was put on a bus. A group was put on a bus and they were told they were going to be taken north to the capital, Thimphu. But they just lied to them. They put them on the bus and they just drew, they just drove them back across the border and pushed them off the bus. So, you know, there was a real, there was a real sense of feeling ostracized and unwelcome.
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B
So the proximity experienced by these people, you say that there was a lot of power in that, but on the other side of the coin is precarity. Right, right. Power and precarity, two sides of the same coin. How were they interlinked, these concepts and how did they sort of inform each other and change over time?
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A
So the term precarity is one that some of my non academic friends tease me about. Susan, why can't you just say vulnerable? Why can't you just say precariousness? Why do we need this fancy word, precarity? There's a whole, there's a whole sort of literature about what's called the precariat. But the way that I talk about precarity in this book is the many kinds of vulnerability associated with not being a citizen. The precarity that comes with not being in a place that you can be permanently assured that you're going to be able to stay. And it, it happens to be the case across the world, Natalie, not just in this case, that when people flee from conflict and cross a border and remain nearby, it is extremely unusual for them to gain permanent protection. So they remain precarious. And the thing that I show in this chapter, in the next chapter is, is the problem of precarity. What happens when those proximate to Bhutan either doing dissident activities or simply just trying to live? What happens to them? And there's a lot of examples, some really deeply sad and troubling, of the way that precarity manifested itself. First of all, the dissidents were really instructed not to engage in political activism, which is really ironic, right, because one would imagine that those who flee a home country that is problematic would want nothing more than to be able to use their voices to let that home country know that they're unhappy or to broadcast to the world There are problems at home. So when political dissidents, or actually they didn't have to be political dissidents, just some kind of activists were told, you know, keep quiet, you're only here to be protected and not to do anything that can be considered political. One can imagine that that feels quite precarious because if you then do engage in those activities, you can get in trouble, you can be put in prison. Your refugee status could be. It didn't happen, but could be taken away. So there's political precarity. There was, of course, the legal precarity of not having the ability to be documented in any kind of a stable way. It was difficult. If you did want to do any international traveling, which a few were able to do in those early years, that was very, very difficult. And there was social precarity, just being nearby kind of heightened the tensions for those, even those that wanted to be doing those activities. Being nearby created a bit of an atmosphere of fear. There had been both successful and unsuccessful efforts by the Bhutanese government to extradite activists and bring them back into Bhutan to put them in prison and to silence them. And so being nearby again with all its power was also very scary, was quite precarious. And that's why I say in the book that proximity was a boon and a bane at the same time. They went hand in hand and things went on like that for many, many years with those tensions with proximity and precarity lying side by side.
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B
Yeah, you describe proximity as both empowering and dangerous. And it's really interesting to see how that balance changes over time. Right. For those activists, and we've already sort of touched on this, that post 2008 era of refugee resettlement, where over a hundred thousand or nearly 100,000 refugees were moved to the global North. How did that inform this wider ecosystem of exile politics? You know, they were suddenly very far away from their homeland. How did that change the dynamics of the activism that they were undertaking?
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A
Well, I'll mention two things that happened at once, and the reason why is it did change things profoundly. But it's really hard to separate out what happened because of resettlement and what happened because of the other thing that happened in the mid-2000s, which is that democracy came to Bhutan. The king abdicated the throne in favor of his son, but at the same time put in place democratic elections. Now, there are lots of cynical people that say this was only done cosmetically. I would not be one of those people. I think that Bhutan is in fact, genuinely moving in the direction of democracy. But not surprisingly, there's hiccups along the way, as one would see anywhere. But what it did mean is that some of the claims of the Bhutanese refugees who said, you know, there's no democracy in that country, well, those claims already were weakened. And then there were their desire to return to Bhutan. To this day, Natalie, there are refugees all over the world that want to return to Bhutan. But let's be honest, the claims feel weaker when you're so much further away. The urgency lessens. So the claims themselves were changing over time, both because of resettlement and because of democracy. And then there were the people engaging in those activities. I mean, a lot of those symbolic marches, they did continue to happen for a while. They did, but they were different. They were different in number, in size and in energy. Because, like I said, about 7,000 remained in the aftermath of resettlement, but that's such a smaller number. And the cohesion and the, dare I say, vibe had changed so much in that time. So I think. But one cannot say that it was gone completely. It changed in nature. And in fact, what this meant is that the hubs that were further away, the distant hubs, grew in strength and power over time. Not immediately. I mean, any migration scholar will tell you that the early years of integration does not allow much time for refugees to be involved in political activities, much less anything else. They're too busy trying to figure out new systems, feed their children, make sure they learn the language of the resettlement country. But over time, what we're seeing is that the ecosystem, which is to say hubs near and far, are changing, but the activism is not dying.
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B
So you sort of end your book on a note of hopeful speculation. You know, rather than saying that the urgency has completely vanished, you know, with these resettlements into the global north and the future of the movement is dead, you instead suggest or sort of open the door towards this idea that the ecosystem of exile politics might have a new role to play in reconciling this decades long diaspora with its homeland. And I really appreciated that note of hope. How do you understand the future of the movement now with Bhutanese refugees resettled in huge numbers all over the world? And that is something that's. They've had an opportunity to learn the languages and settle into the education system with their kids. Are they reconvening? Are they still engaging with the homeland? What do your conversations indicate?
- [40:29]
A
So the first thing is some of the initiatives are ones that continue to try to urge that those remaining 7,000 be able to go back to Bhutan that has currently fallen on deaf ears. There's also great efforts by an incredibly hardworking Bhutanese refugee based in the Hague, Ram Kharki, to push for the release of 35 political prisoners who remain in prison, who had been tried or investigated and imprisoned prior to democracy. So the claims by Ram Karki, Human Rights Watch and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention of the UN all say those investigations and those trials, such as they were, were not credible because there was no due process. It was prior to democracy. So there's a real effort to try to remove, get, release those 35, about approximately 35 political prisoners as of yet. We have not seen too much movement on that. There have been a couple that have been released and are now back in Nepal, but there's really efforts to do that. There have also been Bhutanese Nepalis that now have passports in their third countries that have tried to get back into Bhutan just for a visit, just to see this place that their families called Rome. Some for many generations. But for any listeners that have gone to Bhutan would know Bhutan has a famously strict visa regime. You cannot just show up. I mean, if you look South Asian enough, you can cross the border from India into Bhutan. But that's not as easy. It certainly wouldn't be easy for somebody like me, for example. And so coming from say, a country of the global North Australia or the United States, if they want to try to go to Bhutan, they have to apply for a visa. And to my understanding, not one, not one until now has been permitted to go, even on a tourist visa. So part of what they would like, the Bhutanese refugee community would like is to say, look, not all of us want to come back to live, but we would like to visit. Maybe there could be some special arrangements and special trips, something like that. And the last, and the final thing I'll say is that on a personal and individual level, there are, you know, thanks again. And this, this now goes to the, to the online space, which really is less about proximity, but thanks to Facebook and other means of communication, there are individual class members, people that went to high school together that remember fondly being on picnics with people from different ethnicities who are, are starting to speak. From my limited understanding, no one's having the knockdown, drag out conversation about what happened that many years ago. But there has been an opening, an opening for conversation which I think could really be enabled by having different ecosystems. I think when refugees were so close, when they were in Nepal, it felt too close, it felt too dangerous. Even if that was an unfair characterization. So proximity had that power, but also maybe a little bit too close for those within Bhutan. The distance permitted a little bit more of that ability. And God, I hope someone from Bhutan, from the north, listens to this podcast and then realizes, okay, well, here's a way in. There's a way to start having these conversations among Bhutanese, Nepalis, and the Drukba of the north, because I do believe that they share one thing, which is a deep love for that country. But many of the elderly, I'm sad to say, are dying. You know, those expulsions, Natalie, those happened 36 years ago. So 30, 35 to 36 years ago. So, you know, the time to be having those conversations is now.
- [44:44]
B
Well, it's really great that we are having that conversation and that your book is out in the world. Susan, you do talk in the very beginning of your book about this ecosystem and this idea of differentiated hubs of activism, which I think is such a valuable way of thinking about the questions you're asking and the people that you're speaking with. So I guess one of my final questions would be, what does framing exile politics as an ecosystem help us understand about the spatial dimensions of homeland activism as well as the political and the emotional dimensions of homeland activism?
- [45:20]
A
That's such a great question. And in fact, I'm working on a new project in which I hope to explore that not just for Bhutan, but for other countries like Myanmar. Because the argument I'm making about the power of proximity and the problem of precarity, I think is relevant all over the world. I mean, yes, I know we have the Internet, Natalie, but we also know that the Internet does not allow us to understand everything. Being in a room with someone and hearing things that happen is one way of absorbing information. There's also the fact that, you know, Internet gets shut down, emails are surveilled. So the possibility to be near a border, to hear things about what's happening inside from people that can come across that border and hear it as firsthand as possible, still hold great power. And we are in a position right now in the world with an enormous amount of democratic backsliding, of authoritarianism, and to hear the voices of those who were inside recently or further or longer ago, to know what their ideas were about, what that country looked like, the dynamics from that country. It's incredibly critical to know where they are, where are they? In the diaspora, we know that not everybody is going to stay nearby and not everyone's going to be far away. And that is, I mean, the word Diaspora means seed, right? So being spread out. So we know that diaspora is spread out. Even the Nepali one, which stayed so the Bhutanese Nepali one, which stayed so close, eventually spread out. This is true of, I don't know, the Tibetan diaspora, the Palestinian diaspora, the Chinese diaspora. I mean, all over the world we see that spreading out. So knowing where the hubs are and understanding that they feed into each other, that there are power differentials, that some offer information, whereas others may be the ones that are able to collect resources is really valuable. And frankly, it's interesting because it maps onto natural ecosystems. I mean, one of the analogies that I make in the book is that for any kind of like, you know, nature nerds like me, one of the things that we have been loving learning about is the way that mushrooms and fungi, they. They use glucose to, in effect, communicate with one another underground, subterraneously. I think a botanist would be horrified at my explanation. But nevertheless, we know that there's a lot more going on underground than we thought. Likewise, there's lots of underground things happening in an ecosystem where people are trading information quietly. And information is what I call the carbon of activism. Just like in the natural world, we need carbon to keep going, we need information. And that is all the more true right now. When we have a crisis of sharing information, when we live in a society where we are worried about what is true and what is not true, we need proximate actors to collect that information. And then we need a larger ecosystem to be able to broadcast, not just through the Internet. I don't want to put down the importance of the Internet, but neither can we entirely rely on that. We're learning that more and more now.
- [48:48]
B
Looking back across your book, I mean, you must be very pleased that it's in the world and that it's bringing together conversations you've had and starting new conversations. What do you think are the most urgent or overlooked questions that, you know, scholars, policymakers, activists, should be asking about Excel politics today?
- [49:09]
A
First thing I want to say is I have loved doing this talk and I love sharing my ideas with scholars. But by far my most gratifying book talks to date have been with the community. I have been greatly, greatly honored to be welcomed to different communities in Adelaide, in Manchester, uk, in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to talk about this book with the communities. And it makes me so gratified that those communities have appreciated my work and have been grateful for the work that I've done, even though I don't see myself as the person that deserves kind of gratitude for It. I feel like I'm the one that has the gratitude. So that's been wonderful. The first thing that I want to say on your last wonderful question, Natalie, is that I think many of us have an assumption that once you have a passport in a country, you're safe. Like somehow this binary have a passport, you're okay. Don't have a passport, you're not okay. And in fact, this has in some ways been reinforced by what the Trump administration is doing right now. Anyone that doesn't have a passport, but that has legal documentation of other kinds is certainly at higher risk. But the truth is, having a passport is not enough. What the case of Bhutan's refugee shows is that there are other ways of denationalizing people. It's not just in Bhutan, it's happening in other countries. And this gives us pause to think about what international protection means and what kinds of regimes do we think about. When we think about how borders are built, we know that borders are constructed things. So theoretically and conceptually, there are real questions to ask about what a border is and what nationalism is and how those both play against each other and support one another. And then on a practical level, there are really big questions about the best ways to communicate the kinds of abuses that we see in countries that have pushed out their citizens. The truth is, Bhutan is not the worst of them. That's. I think what's important here is that Bhutan committed something really terrible, but we see far greater instances of authoritarianism in the world. Essentially, if it can happen in Bhutan, it can happen anywhere. And I think that knowing what those who are expelled or those outside the country can do and what those ecosystems look like is a really important way for us to understand what the future might look like in an increasingly authoritarian world.
- [52:12]
B
Thank you so much, Susan, for your insights into exile politics and the experiences of Bhutan's refugee population. And congratulations on your book. Before we wrap up, do you want to tell us a little bit more about what you're working on now?
- [52:26]
A
Yes. So there's two populations that I study. One is Bhutanese refugees, and the other diaspora that I study is refugees from Myanmar and Burma. And this is yet another instance where the Myanmar diaspora is spread out across the world. And I'm really interested in the ways that physical space, so not just proximity and distance, but also kind of the buildings that are used and the access to transportation and the times when populations move and the anniversaries on which things happen, how time and. And place affect what diaspora mobilization looks like. So that's something that I've started to look at. I had a little mini project that was in New York City and now I'm hoping to go broader.
- [53:18]
B
Susan Banke, thank you for joining us on the New Books Network to discuss the ecosystem of exile politics, why proximity and precarity matter for Bhutan's homeland activists.
- [53:29]
A
Such a pleasure.
- [53:30]
B
You've been listening to the New Books Network. If you enjoyed this episode, you can listen to hundreds of other conversations about new books on this channel. You can download or stream these interviews free of charge from the New Books Network website or subscribe through your favourite podcast app. I look forward to joining you again before too long for another stimulating conversation.