This introductory chapter offers a critical framing of migration and refugee studies by examining the shifting register through which mobility is categorised and governed. Rather than neutral descriptors, terms such as “refugee”, “migrant”, and “asylum seeker” are shown to be juridico-political constructs that reflect sovereign priorities and regulatory ambitions. The chapter critiques how humanitarianism and state sovereignty converge to manage displaced populations as apolitical recipients of care, even while they are denied substantive rights and excluded from political membership. Drawing on theoretical insights from Arendt, Agamben, Foucault, and others, it explores how concepts such as “bare life” and “the right to have rights” illuminate the legal and political liminality experienced by mobile populations. Emphasising the South Asian context, the chapter argues that displacement is not a peripheral phenomenon but a constitutive force in the making of nation-states. Through four thematic clusters—legal categories, care and welfare, subjectivity, and labour—the volume seeks to interrogate the institutional, affective, and conceptual infrastructure that sustains regimes of mobility. It calls for rethinking the politics of migration beyond Eurocentric frameworks and towards a more situated analysis of mobility as a contested and ideologically mediated field of governance, power, and resistance.