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Refugee mobilities in East Africa: understanding secondary movements
There is significant policy interest in refugee migration, particularly in relation to ‘secondary movements’ – the movement of refugees from the first country in which they arrive. Yet, there is very little theoretical or empirical research on refugee mobilities in the Global South, where the overwhelming majority of refugees reside. Existing literature on refugee migration focuses mainly on people who have already selected onward migration to the Global North. This leaves a gap in terms of describing, understanding, and explaining refugee migration patterns within and from low and middle-income regions of the world. Drawing upon cross-sectional data for Kenya, Ethiopia, and Uganda, we describe aspirations relating to mobility; and drawing upon panel data for refugees based in Kenya, we describe actual patterns of mobility. While a majority of refugees ‘hope’ to migrate inter-regionally and a smaller majority ‘expect’ to migrate inter-regionally, actual mobility patterns are very different. Whereas refugees are highly mobile, the overwhelming majority of their mobility is internal and most international migration is intra-regional. By describing these patterns for one region, the article challenges policy assumptions relating to secondary movement and offers a starting point for further comparative research on refugee mobilities.
The Mediating Role of Education: Learning as Syrian Refugee Young People in Jordan
Chapter in A. North & E. Chase (eds) Education, Migration and Development: Critical Perspectives in a Moving World
Protection in refugee education: teachers’ socio‐political practices in classrooms in Jordan
This article examines why and how teachers of refugees enact protection by engaging with local forms of harm facing their refugee students. Through portraits of two classrooms in Jordan, we describe the relationships that form between Jordanian teachers and Syrian students, and the protection practices teachers develop in response. We propose a more comprehensive conceptualization of protection in refugee education that layers socio-political protection on legal and rights-based protection commonly embedded in humanitarian activities.
Quality and social justice in refugee education: Syrian refugee students’ experiences of integration into national education systems in Jordan
The past decade has seen a policy shift from separate and parallel education systems for refugees to integration into national education systems. The benefits from integration, including longer-term planning, more sustainable funding and opportunities to improve the quality of education are highlighted in the literature. However, there has been less attention to how integration is implemented in practice, how different models of integration are experienced by refugee students, and the extent to which they provide quality education and advance social justice for refugee students. This paper draws on Nancy Fraser’s principle of parity of participation and integration theory to examine Syrian refugee students’ perspectives across three models of integration in Jordan (camp, second shift and host community schools). Drawing on qualitative and quantitative data, we highlight how each model gives rise to social arrangements which, in different ways, impede socially just and equitable education.
Automating Immigration and Asylum: The Uses of New Technologies in Migration and Asylum Governance in Europe
This report maps out the existing uses of new technologies across European immigration and asylum systems both at the national and the EU level. This is the first mapping report under the AFAR project.
(Some) refugees welcome: When is differentiating between refugees unlawful discrimination?
Europe’s extraordinary response to those fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has prompted many criticisms of Europe’s treatment of other refugees, and indeed people of colour and members of ethnic minorities fleeing Ukraine. While stark, this differentiated response in not unusual: The global refugee regime treats different refugees differently, as a matter of course. Refugees often encounter racialized migration controls, and systems which privilege some refugees over others. The article seeks to clarify when these practices violate the international legal prohibitions on discrimination on grounds of race and nationality. To do so, it focuses on race discrimination in general international human rights law, clarifying the interaction between general human rights principles and instruments, and the specialist instrument in the field, the International Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination. We identify how differences in treatment on grounds of nationality may engage the prohibition on race discrimination both directly (in particular when nationality equates to national origin) or indirectly. Concerning nationality discrimination, the article focuses in particular on the added value of Article 3 of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, which obliges states to ‘apply the provisions of this Convention to refugees without discrimination as to race, religion or country of origin.’ We examine Article 3 both within the overall scheme of the Refugee Convention and as a source to guide interpretation of international human rights norms.
Humanitarian assistance as performance? Expectations and mismatches between aid agencies and refugee beneficiaries
When relief organisations provide assistance for refugees, aid providers expect particular responses from their beneficiaries that align with the desired outcomes of a given intervention. Yet, in practice, refugees often do not ‘perform’ to the script prepared by the organisations. When refugees’ responses to aid interventions fall outside of expectations, some aid workers struggle to understand the causes of mismatches, leading to the creation of labels such as ‘refugee syndrome’. Drawing upon two case studies in refugee camps in East and West Africa, this article examines the roots of such disjuncture between refugees and relief agencies through a lens of performance. While shedding light on dramaturgical setting in refugee assistance, the article particularly explores the social and political dynamics between different actors in the humanitarian sector and offers a theoretical approach to describe why such gaps emerge and endure in implementation of aid programmes.
Pour une redéfinition de la notion de “retour”: Le cas des diasporas congolaise et rwandaise de Belgique
The issue of the return of African migrants settled in Europe is far from new, with work focusing essentially on the aspirations to return, and the processes of its realisation. As relevant as it may be, this focus is based on a limited approach, due to the privilege given to the spatiality of the phenomenon, which betrays a normative conception inherited from immigration and development policies. Submitting our understanding of return, to a category that is inseparable from the management of migratory flows, does not allow us to adequately consider return as a spatial, but also political, cultural and identity-based displacement, that must be resituated in the long history of this Afro-European space. This change of temporal scale implies a change of epistemological regime that we wish to explore from the point of view of people of Congolese and Rwandan descent who were born, socialised, or both, in Belgium.
The freedom to choose: Theory and quasi-experimental evidence on cash transfer restrictions
Should cash transfer programmes restrict consumer choice? For example, should food assistance delivered in cash be restricted to food and exclude temptation goods? Theoretically, restrictions induce (1) a substitution effect away from restricted goods and (2) a negative wealth effect if transfers are extra-marginal and the resale of goods is costly. The welfare impact on transfer recipients is negative. We test these predictions by exploiting a natural experiment in a refugee settlement in Kenya, where some refugees receive monthly cash transfers restricted to food while others receive unrestricted transfers. In line with theory, we find that restricted transfers increase participation in a shadow resale market and negatively affect non-food expenditure, temptation-goods spending, and subjective well-being. Consistent with theory, restrictions have no significant effect on food consumption. Our results show that policy-makers should avoid restrictions to maximise positive impacts on transfer beneficiaries, especially when extreme poverty implies that transfers are extra-marginal.
Book review: ‘Difficult life in a refugee camp: Gender, violence and coping in Uganda’, by Ulrike Krause, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2021, pp.250.
Refugee camps are established sites of protection for people fleeing from violent conflict and persecution. Yet, paradoxically, violence frequently occurs inside these refuges. In Difficult Life in a Refugee Camp, Krause offers compelling and nuanced insights into gender-related violence amongst refugees who escaped conflicts in Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo). The book is based on her extensive research in Kyaka II refugee camp in Uganda in 2014.
Rohingya in South East Asia: Opportunities for engagement
Including Australia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, this report maps the policy making environment and institutional architecture of Asian civil society organisations (CSOs) and communities engaged in issues of Rohingya statelessness and in supporting Rohingya refugees. The report documents and assesses the interests and capacities of these CSOs, and provides conclusions and recommendations to support development of stronger and more representative ADSP policy engagement and regional advocacy strategy.
Refugees and their return home: Unsettling matters
‘Return in safety and dignity’ is promoted as the optimum durable solution to refugee displacement. This paper explores the concepts of home and territory as dominant variables in refugee return, with their implicit suggestion of people ‘belonging’ to a defined territory and ‘remixed’ in a restoration of the status quo ante.
Refugee crises: an architype for crisis studies
Rather than directly entering a dialogue with the Lund authors’ paper, ‘The case for Interdisciplinary Crisis Studies’, I use their paper to engage with and reflect on the concept of crisis in my own field of study, refugees. The movement of refugees – exodus, displacement, arrival, settlement – is inescapably and almost without exception described as a ‘crisis’ in the popular imagination and in policy discourse – the 2015 European ‘refugee crisis’, the Syrian ‘refugee crisis’, the Rohingya ‘refugee crisis’ of 2016, and so on. The crisis epithet is inseparable from the phenomenon of the refugee. Indeed, refugee crises are an architype of the conditions the Lund authors explore in their paper. Refugee crises display many of the characteristics of temporality, spatiality and scale they highlight. Refugee crises also display some of the other paradoxical and contradictory constituents they identify: for example, the mistaken dehistoricisation of seemingly specific crisis events – the Rohingya ‘crisis’ of 2016 which, although a rapid onset and large displacement of refugees, has to be seen in the context of an episodic 40-year exodus. In addition, there are refugee crises which morph, more often than not, into situations of protracted displacement – we are now approaching a decade-long Syrian ‘crisis’, yet the crisis epithet remains in official documents. To the extent that the concept of refugee displacement as a ‘crisis’ has apparently become normalised, my response asks two questions. How and why have refugee crises become normalised? And what does the recent development turn in refugee policy tell us about alternatives to the crisis conception? With refugees as the variable, the paper offers a ‘case study’ of how a crisis is conceived and becomes institutionalised.
UNHCR Asylum Capacity Development (ACD) Evaluation: An Independent Evaluation of UNHCR’s Support for Strengthening National Asylum Systems
This document summarises the findings, conclusions and recommendations of the Independent Evaluation of UNHCR’s Support for Strengthening National Asylum Systems. The overall purpose of the evaluation is to review how UNHCR has fulfilled its objective to support and strengthen the capacity of national asylum systems in the period 2015–2020 and thereby improve the quality of protection for persons of concern and the sustainability of the systems that support this.
Refugees and the Right to Citizenship…Somewhere
We all owe a debt of gratitude to David Owen and Alex Aleinikoff for their thoughtful reflections on the desirability and practicality of proposals and practices that divide the world between refugee hosting states (in the Global South) and refugee protection financing states (in the Global North). Given the way the winds have blown over the last decade, with Northern states assembling numerous measures to contain refugees in the South and to prevent them from accessing their territory, there can be few issues more important to the future of refugee protection. In this response I want to focus on the question of the desirability of proposals for what we might call differentiated responsibility between Northern and Southern states, the part of Aleinikoff and Owen’s discussion that considers whether ‘over there’ approaches might be acceptable from a realistic-utopian perspective.
Australia: Legitimizing Immigration Through Contrast
Commentary on the chapter 'Australia and New Zealand: Classical Migration States?' in the book Controlling Immigration: A Comparative Perspective, 4th edition, by James F Hollifield et al (eds)
Gender and access to justice in Uganda’s refugee settlements
This paper explores the gendered nature of access to justice among South Sudanese refugees in Uganda’s settlements. It draws on qualitative research conducted in the three refugee hosting districts of Lamwo, Adjumani and Kiryandongo, between July and September 2021, including 73 individual interviews and groups discussions with a range of officials and refugees. The objectives of the paper are threefold. First, to map the institutions and authorities that govern the resolution of disputes in the settlements, as well as their accessibility and availability to refugees. Second, to understand the gendered nature of the disputes and crimes that are most prevalent in the settlements. Third, to assess how gender norms and power dynamics shape the engagement of refugees with different authorities in the settlements and the responses of different institutions to conflicts.
Rethinking self-reliance and economic inclusion of refugees through a distributive lens: a case study from Uganda
This article examines trends in Uganda’s refugee protection model based on self-reliance and economic inclusion. It does this through a lens of distribution. While self-reliance and economic inclusion are increasingly centralised in the international refugee regime as tools of empowerment that benefit both refugees and their hosts, policymakers largely fail to consider the distribution and availability of local resources in promoting these ideas. Between 2013 and 2018, Uganda experienced a steep rise in the number of refugees within the country. Notwithstanding the global celebration of the Ugandan refugee policy, the empirical data demonstrate an increasingly demanding situation for refugees’ economic lives and ensuing difficulties in pursuing self-reliance. Implementing the Ugandan model without distributive thinking risks detrimental effects even for neighbouring host populations, who are also resource poor. Based on the perspectives of both refugees and host people, the article advances a debate about the efficacy of Uganda’s self-reliance and inclusion policies and concludes by pointing to the risks of framing the current Ugandan model as a ‘success’ for Africa’s refugee protection.
Public health and WASH / Non-signatory States and the international refugee regime
FMR issue 67’s main feature on Public health and WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) explores challenges, responses and innovations across a wide range of settings. A second feature focuses on Non-signatory States and the international refugee regime. Public health and WASH (water, sanitation and hygiene) have rarely been as much in the spotlight as they have been since the global COVID-19 pandemic began in late 2019, making our main feature particularly timely. Although a number of articles focus on the pandemic, this feature covers a broader range of topics, from practical improvements to WASH services in camp settings to community engagement around health issues in displacement crises. The second feature focuses on non-signatory States and the international refugee regime, with authors examining the implications for protection when States are not signatories to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (and/or its 1967 Protocol). In particular, authors explore the role of UNHCR, civil society and legal actors in facilitating access to protection in States such as Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Thailand, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.