Asylum Diaspora: Tamils in Switzerland

Author(s) : Christopher McDowell

Source : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-29904-4_55

Abstract:

“The roots of the global Tamil diaspora, which began in the 1950s but accelerated dramatically in the 1980s, can be traced back to three major historical processes which, in the final decades of the twentieth century, converged dynamically in the context of ethnonationalist conflict. Those processes are the formation of Sinhahla and Tamil cultural and linguistic consciousness in the nineteenth century, the twentieth-century processes of decocolonization and independence, and the rise of chauvinistic and authoritarian politics in the context of economic instability from the 1970s onward, leading to prolonged conflict.”

Keywords: Language Policy, Asylum Seeker, Chain Migration, Asylum Application, Tamil Language