Urban Refugees and Education in the Contemporary World: A Case Study of Pakistani Christian Refugees in Bangkok, Thailand

Abstract

The study of education for Pakistani Christian refugees in Bangkok, Thailand (a developing country) identifies a problematic gap between the type of basic literacy education provided by INGOs (International non-government organisations) and the academic education desired by refugees in order to take them beyond literacy. I build the argument that the persistence of the educational gap can be explained by the location of today’s refugees outside the nationstate system. My original contribution to the refugee literature is the thesis that within the lacunae created by the absence of inclusion policies by developing countries for contemporary refugees, an older structure of patron-client relationships has been reactivated. INGOs now operate as patrons and refugees are their clients. The study of the Pakistani Christian refugees in Bangkok is used to illustrate the argument. The thesis takes a historical sociological approach to establishing the argument. It includes a history of refugees to show that a distinction between migrants and refugees occurred in the post-1970s’ decades which changed the earlier pattern whereby refugees often became migrant workers, even citizens, in developed countries. A new pattern has now emerged, one characterised by the permanence of the refugee status. Many refugees now exist in developing countries such as Thailand without access to the rights of citizenship. Their physical location within the nation but outside the nation’s socio-political system leads to the symbiotic, yet unequal, patron-client relationship that I theorise in the thesis. That inequality operates as the co-dependency between the INGO providers and the recipient refugees seen in the exchange of social services and in the ongoing educational gap.