Emerita Professor Dawn Chatty has contributed a chapter on ‘Refuge in Syria: where Duty Outweighs Human Rights Based Approaches’ to the edited collection Urban Displacement: Syria’s Refugees in the Middle East (Are Knudsen and Sarah Tobin, eds).
The chapter provides an overview of the history of displacement in the region and the deterritorialized nature of belonging in the then Ottoman Empire and its millet system. She then examines how Syrian society allowed Iraqis to integrate and to make themselves ‘at home’ without letting go of their Iraqi identity, following the 2003 Iraq war and humanitarian crisis. She argues that “These social norms and practices can be regarded as continuities in duty-based approaches to hospitality for the stranger that emerged from and were encouraged in late Ottoman responses to mass influx.” When Syrians were forced to flee a decade later to neighbouring states, they were “dutifully regarded by their hosts as temporary guests or workers”. She asks the question, “As these norms and social acts are at variance with standard practices in the international refugee regime, are there lessons to be learned regarding duty-based and human rights-based approaches to refuge and asylum?”
Dr Jeff Crisp, RSC Visiting Research Fellow, has also contributed a chapter to the collection. In his chapter, 'The Syrian Emergency and its Impact on the Evolution of Global Refugee Policy', Crisp analyses the way in which the Syrian displacement crisis put the refugee issue at the top of the global policy agenda. He demonstrates how the Syrian emergency encouraged the international community to pursue new strategies in relation to the settlement of refugees in urban areas and outside of camps, and to adopt a long-term and developmental approach to the refugee issue.