This edited book entitled Refugee Education in South Asia: Policies, Practices, and Implications aims to understand the policies, practices, and limitations of refugee education in four South Asian countries: Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Evidence presents that refugee education in three countries including Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan is being viewed as a relief activity and education for Bhutanese refugees in Nepal is being observed as a development activity. This book suggests that refugee education in Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan should be provided from a development view by which refugee children and youth can live with honor and dignity if they get an opportunity to be integrated into host countries, resettled in third countries, or repatriated in their home countries.

The most powerful component of the executive government is the Australian Defence Force (ADF) because the executive ultimately relies upon military power to enforce its will. This has been the case since at least 1066: C Moore Crown and Sword: Executive Power and the Use of force by the Australian Defence Force (Moore), 7-8. Much of the character of executive power in a military context derives from the tension between the military having sufficient power to execute the will of government but not too much, so that the military remains subordinate to the executive of civilian ministers drawn from the democratically elected civilian parliament. Executive power is the principal source of authority for the ADF to carry out the functions of commanding its forces, fighting wars, defending the realm and conducting peace operations. It is the only source of authority to kill or capture the enemy in war. Even in domestic operations such as maritime law enforcement, aid to the civil power and emergency assistance, where the use of force is regulated primarily by statute, executive power is a significant source of authority. Positioning of forces and even the use of force in situations which statute does not address may rely on executive power: see S White Keeping the Peace of the Realm.

Executive power is actually a broad term for power exercised by the executive branch of government. It can range from the mundane, such as purchasing stationery, to the profound, such as invading another country. The actual authority for such executive action is to be found in the following sources most relevant to the ADF.

In contemporary English, the meaning of education has become largely synonymous with literacy. This is evident in expressions like ‘well-read’, insinuating that someone who is intelligent or well-educated must have read widely. By extension, such a person is necessarily highly literate. In Classical Sanskrit, however, the term equivalent to English ‘well-read’ is bahuśruta, literally “well-heard” (Rocher, 1994, p. 12). Innate in the Sanskrit term is the notion that an intelligent or well-educated person has imbibed much of their knowledge through the oral mode, with the written form of language playing only a subsidiary role. This notion is echoed in Sanskrit proverbs of the following kind, which remain popular even today.

Although driven primarily by the prospect of economic benefit, a central tenet underlying the Euro-Western colonial enterprise was the ideal of a notionally monolingual society, with the coloniser’s language at the top of the pecking order and Indigenous ones at the bottom. Former colonies of the Global South, in their modern avatar of independent nation-states, continue to retain latent imperialist linguistic ideologies in their political structure, wherein economically and/or politically dominant language(s) with codified written forms are perceived as having the most value and, consequently, designated the ‘national’ or ‘official’ languages. Besides undermining indigenous spoken traditions, such a capitalist, utilitarian and graphocentric approach to language use legitimises mutually competitive free-market behaviour among languages and entrenches a survival-of-thefittest attitude. Consequently, well-intentioned maintenance and revitalisation efforts often focus on increasing minority and Indigenous languages’ domains of use and creating or codifying a Roman-script orthography. Unfortunately, this inevitably sets minority languages on a collision course with socioeconomically powerful national or official languages and destabilises previously harmonious linguistic ecologies. In this chapter, we argue that apparent socioeconomic utility or availability of a standardised written form are neo-colonial and suboptimal metrics of language value. Moreover, sustaining minority and indigenous languages need not entail sociolinguistic one-upmanship. Rather, we posit that stable language use and maintenance are best achieved when languages find their respective niches in the ecology and co-exist in mutual harmony, with different languages being used in specific domains in a complementary manner. Not only does such an approach often dovetail with organic multilingualism prevalent in the precolonial Global South, but it also has the potential to liberate Indigenous communities from the implicit pressures of expanding their language’s domains of use and inventing a standardised written form as outward indicators of their language’s health.