NEWSLETTER: AALS Section on Law and South Asian Studies, Summer 2014

AALSMany thanks to Prof. Priya Gupta (Southwestern Law School) for preparing the first newsletter for the Section on Law and South Asian Studies of the Association of American Law Schools. The newsletter features a variety of updates, including details on the call for papers for the section’s program for the 2015 AALS Annual Meeting, updates on new scholarship of potential interest to section members, and other announcements.

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SAJAforum: PAKISTAN: An Update on Internally Displaced Persons

Back in July 2009, we took note of what experts then were calling an “impending humanitarian disaster“: the displacement of as many as 2.5 million individuals due to the government’s military offensive in the North-West Frontier Province. Soon thereafter, the Pakistan government announced plans to return displaced individuals to their homes, and mainstream news coverage of the crisis subsided and public attention turned elsewhere.

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SAJAforum: PAKISTAN: An “Impending Humanitarian Disaster”

PK - CampsThat’s what Audil Rashid and Mian Nazish Adnan sound the alarm about in the July 4, 2009 issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, following their recent visits to camps set up to house internally displaced persons (IDPs) fleeing the conflict zone in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. While Americans celebrate the Independence Day weekend with barbeques and fireworks, Rashid and Adnan paint a grim picture of the crisis in Pakistan:

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SAJAforum: McCain and Obama Debate Afghanistan and Pakistan

The South Asian subcontinent continued to feature prominently in the presidential race this week, as Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama clashed over U.S. policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan during their debate on Friday night. In the New York Times, David Sanger characterizes the exchange as a "role reversal," with Obama seeming "more aligned" than McCain "with President Bush’s current policy of authorizing American special forces to cross the Afghan-Pakistan border into Pakistan’s tribal areas that Al Qaeda and the Taliban have used as a sanctuary."

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