Two new articles are now available on the Rethinking Refuge website, both of which concern refugee self-reliance:
How new tools are meeting the challenge of measuring refugee self-reliance, by Dale Buscher (Women’s Refugee Commission) and Kellie Leeson (Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative)
and
Car-sharing in Lebanon: overlooked practices of collective self-reliance, by Estella Carpi (University College London)
Both articles present new ways of Rethinking the economic lives of refugees, which is one of six themes that offer innovative solutions to the problems facing refugees, including restrictions on the right to work and other rights impacting economic independence, such as freedom of movement.
The first article asks how we can measure refugee self-reliance, one of the objectives of the UN’s Global Compact on Refugees. The Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative presents a tool for measuring self-reliance and shows how it can be used in effective programming.
The second article looks at car-sharing in Lebanon to draw wider lessons for humanitarian agencies. Humanitarian agencies often decide refugee eligibility based on identity categories that do not acknowledge the collective nature of socio-economic practices. This study challenges these approaches and offers an alternative model.
Rethinking Refuge is an interdisciplinary platform that seeks to bridge the gap between scholarly research, policymaking, and public understanding to meaningfully engage with the challenge of forced displacement in the 21st century.