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Externalisation / Mobility and agency in protracted displacement
Forced Migration Review issue 68 includes a major feature on Externalisation. With States increasingly taking action beyond their own borders to prevent the arrival of refugees and asylum seekers, we examine the consequences for protection. A second feature focuses on Mobility and agency for those living in protracted displacement, produced in collaboration with the TRAFIG research project.
Climate crisis and displacement: from commitment to action
Forced Migration Review issue 69 includes a major feature on ‘Climate crisis and displacement: from commitment to action’ in which authors examine how high-level policy commitments can be translated into concrete action in order to address the impacts of the climate crisis on human mobility. The issue also includes three articles on other topics: women, peace and security in displacement; cash transfers in Turkey; and asylum accommodation in the UK.
From coexistence to cohesion in refugee-host relations
Improving ‘cohesion’ has become a common objective in refugee-hosting contexts. But the term is often used without clear definition, which has consequences for policy and programming.
Knowledge, voice and power
Forced Migration Review issue 70 includes a major feature on ‘Knowledge, voice and power’ exploring issues of representation, influence, privilege, access, discrimination and more. People with lived experience of displacement need to be heard. Their perspectives, strategies and solutions should be at the centre of discussions about policy and practice. The authors in this issue reflect on progress made but also on the road still to travel. They challenge attitudes, highlight injustices and make practical recommendations for change. The issue also includes a feature on ‘Social cohesion in refugee-hosting contexts’, exploring the role of social cohesion in contexts of protracted displacement, with a particular focus on Kenya and Lebanon.
Urban refugees and IDPs in secondary cities
Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda each have a long history of hosting refugees and asylum seekers, with Uganda, one of the top ten refugee hosting countries worldwide, currently hosting 1.3 million (NRC, IRC). The INGOs, national and local governments in each country presently face unique and dire challenges, including civil war, climate crisis and COVID-19. At the same time, good practices exist in a variety of areas, including local leadership, social integration, employment and labour market integration, education, and refugee participation. This policy brief examines the impact of and responses to forcibly displaced people in cities and towns in East Africa, namely Arua, Uganda; Adama, Ethiopia; and Kakuma and Lodwar Town, Kenya. It 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, and secondary data collection in Kenya, this brief highlights the need for more comprehensive data and evidence on and assistance to forcibly displaced people residing outside of national capitals. In many cases the needs and challenges identified are also relevant to the poor and vulnerable nationals that urban forcibly displaced people live alongside. The brief concludes with recommendations for the further engagement of humanitarian, government, and other urban actors in urban assistance to displaced people.
Equipped to Adapt? A Review of Climate Hazards and Pastoralists’ Responses in the IGAD Region
Pastoralism offers a productive and profitable—but also sustainable—form of food production in many settings across the region covered by the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). While climate change is exacerbating many of the existing environmental challenges facing livestock producers—especially drought—pastoralism nonetheless offers an extraordinarily resilient form of primary production that is well-suited to adapt to these changes. Policies and programmes to support pastoral resilience often focus on promoting specific adaptations. While this may be beneficial in the short-term, trends change and old adaptation strategies may become less suitable or even maladaptive. Rather than following pre-selected adaptation pathways, pastoralists must be equipped to adjust their adaptive strategies in response to ever-shifting climatic and environmental changes. Accordingly, climate resilience policies should focus not only on promoting specific adaptations, but on providing long-term support for adaptive capacity. This report brings together the most recent literature on pastoralism, mobility and climate change in the IGAD region in order to highlight the regional climate hazards facing pastoralists in the years ahead, and to identify evidence-based strategies for promoting their resilience in the face of adverse and often unpredictable environmental changes.
The emerging world of humanitarian energy: A conceptual research review
The world is facing a humanitarian crisis, with over 102 million people now forcibly displaced from their homes due to wars, conflict, environmental and climate drivers, and disasters. The energy needs of displaced people are neglected both in humanitarian response, and in the academic literature. For many years it has been claimed that there is an extremely limited literature on humanitarian energy needs. This paper puts that claim to the test, by conducting a content review of the topic, interviews with sector specialists, and analysing existing literature to understand the current state of play of published work on energy in displaced contexts. The results reveal a rapidly emerging humanitarian energy literature: over 320 research publications were identified, including academic journal articles and substantive practitioner research outputs, with 115 Scopus records directly addressing humanitarian energy issues. The analysis highlights large gaps where new evidence is urgently needed and discusses how the future of humanitarian energy research could be informed by a range of disciplines. The paper argues that disciplinary diversity is essential to fully understand the complexity of energy issues in humanitarian settings, suggesting that there is considerable conceptual space for the development of new research within academia.
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.