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Laura Affolter, Asylum Matters: On the Front Line of Administrative Decision-Making (Palgrave Macmillan, Cham 2021)

Asylum decision making is at the very heart of refugee protection, yet frequently operates as a ‘black box’ – especially if State authorities choose to assess applicants on an individual basis. Because the 1951 Refugee Convention does not specify the processes through which an applicant may be recognized as a refugee, different States recognize refugees through different procedures. If States choose to evaluate applicants individually, it becomes challenging, if not impossible, to understand from the outside how decision makers come to their decisions. This book sheds some light on that process as it operates in one jurisdiction – Switzerland. Laura Affolter’s analysis critically explores how asylum decision making is operationalized in the Swiss Secretariat for Migration (SEM) on a daily basis. It shows us clearly that, although decision makers have the independence to make their judgments, their decisions do not occur in a void. Decisions are brought to life in a particular space, or what Affolter, borrowing from Bourdieu’s concept of ‘habitus’, coins an ‘institutional habitus’ (p12).

The State of the Humanitarian Energy Sector: Challenges, Progress and Issues in 2022

The State of the Humanitarian Energy Sector (SOHES) report explores the major challenges, progress and issues associated with humanitarian energy. This seminal report was led by the Global Platform for Action on Sustainable Energy in Displacement Settings (GPA) and co-authored by leading humanitarian energy institutions: UNITAR, Chatham House, IOM, SEforALL, GIZ, Practical Action, NORCAP, Mercy Corps, University of Oxford, MECS, UNDP, Imperial College London, Selco Foundation, International Lifeline Fund, and UNHCR. The SOHES report aims to inspire and encourage humanitarian energy sector partners, the private sector, and donors to progress towards better funding, inclusive policy-making, enhanced data collection, and inclusive innovative delivery towards achieving SDG7 targets. The report demonstrates the value of inclusive research and shares a variety of insights from sector leaders, champions and voices from multiple humanitarian and development organisations, the private sector, academia and governments and most importantly displaced people themselves. The report builds on over 30 extensive interviews and a collaborative research process, evidencing ten years of progress, innovation and challenges for humanitarian energy. The nine chapters of the report provide a deeper analysis of coordination and governance, policy and advocacy issues, delivery and technical capacity building, financing and funding, and evidence within the sector, while the final chapters of the report outline progressive action and practice. The analysis also demonstrates the high levels of innovation and diversity of practice within the sector by different stakeholders, highlighting the need for further collective action and ambitious leadership to support the vision of reaching SDG7 for displaced people.

Urban Refugees and IDPs in Secondary Cities

This report examines the current reality of forcibly displaced people in cities and towns in East Africa, namely Arua, Uganda; Adama, Ethiopia; and Kakuma and Lodwar Town, Kenya. It argues that the growing urbanisation of forcibly displaced people has fostered increasing engagement and partnerships for assistance with local urban actors such as municipal governments and local civil society organisations while at the same time highlighting, and in cases exacerbating, the challenges that many municipalities face in terms of funding and a lack of recognition of urban needs. The report also discusses a crucial gap in research on forcibly displaced people: their often unacknowledged presence in so-called secondary (non-capital) cities and towns, which themselves often lack the resources to adequately receive them. Through examples from primary research in Uganda and Ethiopia, the report highlights the need for more comprehensive data and evidence on and assistance to forcibly displaced people residing outside of national capitals, which in many cases is also relevant to the poor and vulnerable nationals that urban forcibly displaced people live alongside. The report concludes with a discussion of the future of urban forced displacement and several recommendations for the further engagement of humanitarian, government, and other urban actors in urban assistance to displaced people. This report emerges out of a two-year project aiming to provide data and evidence on how secondary cities respond to and manage crisis migration, including IDPs and refugees, with the aim to provide information that can inform and improve future municipal responses. The project was undertaken by the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre as part of the Cities and Migration programme implemented by Cities Alliance and financed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC).

Language without a Land: Partition, Sindhi Refugees, and the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution

Scholars have paid significant attention to the linguistic reorganisation of states in India but there is less consideration of how the demands of linguistic movements to redraw the map of India is linked to the history of partition across the colonial-postcolonial divide as well as of the new minorities that linguistic states created. This article draws attention at first to the unsuccessful pre-partition resistance of Sindhi Hindus to the separation of Sindh from the Bombay Presidency on linguistic lines as separation would make them a religious minority. The article then discusses Sindhi resettlement in India as deterritorialised partition refugees, when they had to claim belonging in the context of reinvigorated calls for the redistribution of boundaries based on linguistic majorities. As an alternative to territorial representation, Sindhi refugees successfully sought inclusion in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India, a list of officially supported languages meant originally to enrich Hindi. This history reveals how partition and partition's refugees reshaped constitutional conceptions of minority citizenship in a manner not yet acknowledged. The inclusion of Sindhi in the Eighth Schedule transformed the Schedule's primary purpose from that of augmenting Hindi to additionally conferring protections to a group of minority languages. The Sindhi demand for inclusion paved the way for other minorities whose linguistic identity did not necessarily map neatly on to a geographically defined state to claim recognition in the Schedule. This opened a new but limited option for constitutional safeguards for linguistic minorities without a linguistic state in India.

Refugees, Self-Reliance, Development: A Critical History

This critical history of refugee self-reliance assistance brings new dimensions to refugee and international development studies. The promotion of refugee self-reliance is evident today, yet its history remains largely unexplored, with good practices and longstanding issues often missed. Through archival and contemporary evidence, this book documents a century of little-known efforts to foster refugee self-reliance, including the economic, political, and social motives driving this assistance. With five case studies from Greece, Tanzania, Pakistan, Uganda, and Egypt, the book tracks refugee self-reliance as a malleable concept used to pursue ulterior interests. It reshapes understandings of refugee self-reliance and delivers important messages for contemporary policy making. The first chapter is available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

Unprincipled and unrealised: CEDAW and discrimination experienced in the context of migration control

This article analyses the CEDAW Committee’s General Recommendations and Views on individual complaints, to evaluate its contribution to the elimination of discrimination against women experienced in the context of migration control. It makes two arguments. First, the Committee’s General Recommendations contain a range of doctrinal and empirical shortcomings. This opacity, and these omissions, considerably reduce the value of the Committee’s statements as a means by which States’ discriminatory migration control practices might be contested. Second, the Committee’s decisions, in communications concerned with discrimination experienced in the context of migration control, are inconsistent with those standards that it has set, and with the decisions it makes in other types of cases. A detailed analysis of the jurisprudence grounds the conclusion that the Committee is, in practice, according States a margin of appreciation that varies according to the subject of the complaint. Particular, representative communications are drawn on to argue that the margin granted in cases concerned with migration control is over-wide, characteristic not of appropriate (quasi) judicial restraint, but unprincipled deference. The article concludes by suggesting how some of the criticisms outlined may be remedied, notably by the Committee adopting its own justification and proportionality assessment.

Introduction to Special Issue: Displaced Syrians

The articles presented here in this special issue on Displaced Syria emerged from a workshop held at The Institute of New York University in Abu Dhabi in March 2019. Its aims were to encourage an examination of the perceptions and aspiration of displaced Syrians and practitioners in hosting countries in the Levant, the Gulf, and in Europe with special attention to the voices of the displaced, their reimagining of home and homeland, and the emerging transnational sense of identity and belonging.

Camps and counterterrorism: Security and the remaking of refuge in Kenya

This article examines the enduring entanglements of counterterror governance and refugee encampment in Kenya. The spectre of “terrorism” and its supposed remedy—“counterterrorism”—have loomed large in Kenyan politics since the 1990s and gained further traction since the country’s military invasion and occupation of southern Somalia in 2011. Few other spaces have been associated as persistently with threats to Kenya’s national security and sovereignty as the Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps in the country’s Northern belt, which are popularly depicted as “wombs” of terror. In this article, we analyze the transformation of refugee governance in Kenya under the auspices of the War on Terror and consider how counterterrorism has become a way of governing both refugees and precarious ethnoracialized citizens. We provide a multi-scalar analysis that moves between the scales of global militarization, Kenyan state governance, as well as securitized spaces of camps, checkpoints, and policing. The article concludes that refugee camps are not only gateways for imported global counterterror initiatives, but key sites of locally defined state-making processes in which Kenya’s counterterror state is (re)assembled as part of a planetary architecture of humanitarian containment and militarized apartheid.

Mobility and sanctuary: how to revive asylum in Europe

In the ‘global north’, successive waves of anti-refugee policies have so eroded the institution of asylum that it almost seems lost. The EU’s response to the unprecedented number of refugees from Ukraine demonstrates what it, and the UK, can and should do for all those fleeing war and persecution.

Refugee Legal Challenges to the Bombay Government's Land Requisition Housing Scheme

Partition refugees who arrived in India challenged the laws that various provincial governments enacted to “regulate” and “rehabilitate” them. By looking at one of the earliest and key cases concerning writs that emerged out of Sindhi refugee legal challenges to the Bombay government’s land requisition scheme of 1947–48, this article suggests that partition refugees helped to shape the legal and constitutional landscape of newly independent India.

Following Richard Burton: Religious Identity and Difference in Colonial Sindh

Richard Burton, soldier, ethnographer, translator, philologist, and colonial intelligence-gatherer spent the early years of his career in Sindh and was the first and primary colonial ethnographer of Sindh. Burton was clearly attracted to the ecumenical complexity of Sindhi religious practice but was hostile in his descriptions of Sindh’s Hindus whom he viewed as a corrupt and scheming “race,” subjecting the Muslims of the province to their tyranny. The article examines how Burton’s racialised ethnographies of Sindh cast Sindh as distinct from “India” and Hindus as outsider immigrants to the province. Paradoxically, Burton’s narratives also created Sindh as the space par excellence of the negation of religious categories. However, this categorisation of Sindh also highlighted it as a space distinct from India. In conclusion, the article shows how the idea of Sindh’s separate identity maintained a strong afterlife in colonial Sindh, rearticulated in certain key contexts.

Camp Methodologies: The “How” of Studying Camps

This special section contributes to the growing interdisciplinary field of camp studies by examining the ways in which scholars methodologically approach and study camps and camp-like spaces. The characteristics of camps, which render them of interest to scholarship in the first place, simultaneously generate methodological, ethical, and practical questions for research. Yet comparatively few studies have explicitly addressed the methods and methodologies in camp research. How do camp contexts shape our underlying research philosophies and how do particular ways of doing research impact our conceptualisations of camps? The contributors to this special section provide a variety of answers to these questions, drawing on empirical research in/on current and historical camp settings. Overall, we gesture towards “camp methodologies” not as a set of prescribed tools, techniques, or epistemologies to be followed when studying camps but as a shorthand for approaches that consider first, how camp geographies delimit research activities and second, how methodological choices in turn (re)construct the camp conceptually in different ways. Ultimately, this collection aims to encourage critical debates and reflections to shed more light on the methodological effects, positionalities, responsibilities, complicities, and continuing necessities of studying camps.

Ukraine: the UK is failing to meet its obligations under the 1951 Refugee Convention

Social Cohesion and Refugee-Host Interactions: Evidence from East Africa

Building upon the literature on contact theory, this paper explores the role of inter-group interaction in shaping social cohesion between refugees and host communities in East Africa. It draws upon first-hand quantitative (n=16,608) and qualitative data collected from refugees and nearby host communities in urban and camp-like contexts in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Uganda. Focusing on the Uganda data, OLS regressions reveal a positive and significant correlation between refugee-host interaction and the perception of hosts towards refugees. This association disappears when an instrumental variable (IV) approach is used to address endogeneity issues, except when only data from the urban context is used. The analysis of cross-country data highlights further differences in the types of interaction and perception that matter between urban and camp-like contexts. It also suggests that ethno-linguistic proximity between refugee and host populations is associated with more positive attitudes. In all contexts, an important part of attitude formation appears to take place at the intra-group level, within households and immediate neighbourhoods, independently of individual interaction with the out-group. The paper proposes a series of policy recommendations to improve refugee-host social cohesion, with different approaches required in urban and camp-like contexts.

Methodological and Ethical Reflections on the Displaces Participatory Photographic Project in the ‘Calais Jungle’

Chapter in 'Documenting Displacement: Questioning Methodological Boundaries in Forced Migration Research', edited by Katarzyna Grabska & Christina Clark-Kazak. Legal precarity, mobility, and the criminalization of migrants complicate the study of forced migration and exile. Traditional methodologies can obscure both the agency of displaced people and hierarchies of power between researchers and research participants. This project critically assesses the ways in which knowledge is co-created and reproduced through narratives in spaces of displacement, advancing a creative, collective, and interdisciplinary approach. Documenting Displacement explores the ethics and methods of research in diverse forced migration contexts and proposes new ways of thinking about and documenting displacement. Each chapter delves into specific ethical and methodological challenges, with particular attention to unequal power relations in the co-creation of knowledge, questions about representation and ownership, and the adaptation of methodological approaches to contexts of mobility. Contributors reflect honestly on what has worked and what has not, providing useful points of discussion for future research by both established and emerging researchers. Innovative in its use of arts-based methods, Documenting Displacement invites researchers to explore new avenues guided not only by the procedural ethics imposed by academic institutions, but also by a relational ethics that more fully considers the position of the researcher and the interests of those who have been displaced.

Belonging in Berlin: An exploration of Syrian refugee-led organisations and volunteerism during COVID-19

Berlin, Europe’s third largest city at the turn of the 20th century, evokes images of the cultural metropolis and industrial center of the Golden Twenties, the darkness and cruelty of the Nazi regime, and decades of Cold War tension. Over 30 years now since the Wall fell, the unified capital has become a popular tourist destination. An international community of artists, academics, diplomats, journalists, and an increasing number of tech start-up workers also call Berlin home, contributing to gentrification and rising living costs across the city. However, not all of Berlin’s newcomers arrived out of choice. Six years after the influx of more than one million refugees in 2015, there are now approximately 50,000 Syrian refugees living in the city.

The Alevis in Modern Turkey and the Diaspora: Recognition, Mobilisation and Transformation

This book explores the struggles of a minority group – Alevis – for recognition and representation in Turkey and the diaspora. It examines how they mobilise against state practices and claim their rights, while at the same time negotiating how they define themselves. The authors offers a conceptual framework to study minorities by looking at both structural and agency-related factors in resisting state pressure and mobilising for their rights. The Alevis in Modern Turkey and the Diaspora is divided into three main sections looking into: the Turkish state and society’s pressures over Alevis; how Alevis struggle and obtain representation in various Western countries; and how traditional authority and rituals transform under these conditions. Studying this minority group’s experience helps to understand oppression and resistance in the broader Middle East.

How do refugees navigate the UNHCR’s bureaucracy? The role of rumours in accessing humanitarian aid and resettlement

In conflict situations, rapid changes can occur in the conditions in both host and home countries. In the context of such uncertainty, how do refugees navigate the bureaucratic apparatus of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to obtain humanitarian aid and resettlement? We carried out fieldwork in 2019 in Lebanon and found the UNHCR’s bureaucracy to be a ‘black box’ for refugees in relation to the provision of information on humanitarian aid and resettlement. In this context of limited information, we found that rumours – widely considered to be uncertain truths – contributed to shaping participants’ understanding of the UNHCR’s decisions on the provision of aid and resettlement. In this article, we highlight the interpretive aspect of rumours and argue that refugees engage in interpretive labour as a result of the unequal relationship between themselves and the UNHCR’s opaque bureaucracy and provision of information. While refugees have to provide the UNHCR with detailed and highly personal information in interviews and household inspections, officers provide refugees with only generic responses, leading refugees to make their own interpretations of the bureaucratic decision-making processes. We conceptualise this interpretive labour as a collective process that contributes to generating rumours among refugee groups.

Belonging to Syria. National Identifications before and after 2011

The five papers in this themed section seek to explain national identifications with Syria using diverse methods and focusing on various state and societal actors before and after 2011. Each contribution engages with the distinction of national identities into their ‘ethnic/primordial’ and ‘civic/constructed’ elements and examines their meaning within Syria in different times and contexts. Since its independence in 1946, Syria experienced strong tensions between sub- and supra-state identities and experimented with diverse territorial nationalisms in their pan-Arab and specifically Syrian forms. Through a distinctive mix of ethnic Arab and civic ideological elements, they helped to forge unity among a multiplicity of ethnicities, tribes and sects living on the Syrian territory and thus were moulded in tandem with the interests of those in power.

Collective identities amid war and displacement: Syrians and Syrian refugees imagine their country

This article is interested in Syrian and Syrian refugees’ ties of belonging to their country in times of war and displacement. By looking at individuals, the paper follows a micro-level approach to research societal ties of belonging to a country that has slipped into war. It argues that during conflicts, the meaning and boundaries of national identity are grasped in individuals' re-imagination of their country in either more “civic” or “ethnic” terms. As a result of this process, national identity may gain an inclusive, civic meaning based on the idea of citizenship or a more exclusive content based on the narrower confines of ethnicity and sect. Empirically, 100 Syrians and 100 Syrian refugees provided their vision of a future Syrian state in online interviews. The findings show that the majority of respondents’ visions of Syria follows a civic rationale, with most survey participants linking their belonging to a future Syria with the broader ideas of citizenship, political rights and participation, rather than identifying the country in ethnic/sectarian terms. Combined with the theories, these results offer a glimpse into the societal formation of a new Syrian “we” amid an ongoing war and continuing waves of displacement.