Refugees and Digital Exclusion
Refugees and asylum seekers in the UK have faced disproportionate challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Even before the start of the pandemic the number of refugees and asylum seekers in poverty in the UK was rising.
Making responsibility-sharing operational: Comparing asylum and climate governance
International law demands that refugees obtain humanitarian protection in a safe country. However, which country should be responsible for which refugee remains a contested and unresolved question of international asylum governance.
Unpacking the New EU Approach to Asylum and Migration
18 December 2020
The contents of the New EU Pact on Migration and Asylum are complex and still in negotiation, yet are worth discussing as they represent a realistic starting point for a compromise to be (perhaps) reached in the EU on a crucial and divisive issue.
Making the Maritime Visible: Rethinking Humanitarianism at Sea
13 August 2020
The need for humanitarian assistance at sea is more pressing than ever. This article argues that maritime aid prompts us to reconsider traditional humanitarian practices and policies by de-territorialising the existing ‘land-bias’
Refugee Eligibility: Challenging Stereotypes and Reviving the ‘Benefit of the Doubt’
It is time to rethink the evidence so often submitted and relied upon in asylum claims, to return to a core principle of refugee law – the need to afford asylum seekers the benefit of the doubt.
Refugee-led Responses to COVID-19: A case study from Uganda
Refugee-led organizations are at the front line of COVID-19 responses. Ugandan refugee-led organization CECI presents its lessons for health awareness campaigns and makes recommendations to governments, INGOs and donors to improve their support to refugees.
Child Repatriation in the Time of COVID-19
Child protection concerns have never been central to refugee policy or practice. COVID-19 creates added pressure to repatriate refugees, but also an opportunity to rethink repatriation policies to better serve the interests of vulnerable child migrants.
IDP-led Women’s Assistance: New Roles for Traditional Groups
This research from Ethiopia highlights how traditional social groups, created by women refugees to offer a shared savings scheme, can increase both self-reliance and integration with locals, especially when international NGOs are impeded by Covid-19.
How New Tools are Meeting the Challenge of Measuring Refugee Self-Reliance
How can we measure refugee self-reliance, one of the objectives of the UN’s Global Compact on Refugees? In this article, the Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative presents a tool for measuring self-reliance and shows how it can be used in effective programming
Car-sharing in Lebanon: Overlooked practices of collective self-reliance
Humanitarian agencies often decide refugee eligibility based on identity categories that do not acknowledge the collective nature of socio-economic practices. This study of car-sharing in Lebanon challenges these approaches and offers an alternative model.
Rethinking Refuge from Gender-Based Violence: Persecution for Which Convention Reason?
Rarely consulted, specialist legal regimes developed to respond to violence against women offer an important legal framework for cases of gender-based violence constituting grounds for refugee status.
‘Who could thrive where?’ Imagining resettlement as a cooperative mobility strategy
Mobility is crucial for refugees to leave conflict zones and reach safety. Nonetheless, there are not many regular options for refugees to cross borders and enter third countries. But resettlement is one of them.
Rethinking Energy Economies for Refugees
Energy for refugees is often viewed as a niche sector but in many refugee settings energy plays a huge part in everyday life and work.
Should States Counteract Anti-Refugee Sentiments?
Current widespread anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiments are morally troubling from the perspective of liberal democratic political theory. Should liberal democratic governments counteract such views?
Rethinking the Controversies of Deportation
Deportation poses crucial ethical and political challenges to the liberal state. Yet largely overlooked is how deportation is related to discrimination and histories of injustice. How can historical contestations help us rethink deportation today?
Who Counts in Crises?
Defining and measuring populations is a core concern for governments, policy-makers, and many others—particularly regarding migration and mobility. Yet the ‘immigrant’ and ‘refugee’ that many people imagine often does not match up with the reality of data.
Rethinking the Duties of Refugees
Few would contest that refugees have rights or that those rights are often very much under threat in the contemporary world. But do refugees have duties, too, and, if so, what are they?
Smuggling Prohibitions vs. Duties of Humanity
The criminalisation of human smuggling has become central to contemporary measures to combat ‘irregular migration’. In this context there is an urgent need for policymakers to rethink the current definition of smuggling as well as its implications.
Are Reparations Owed to People Displaced by Climate Change?
While political theorists and philosophers alike have begun to consider the claims of climate refugees, they have largely ignored the question of collective rights stemming from the loss of an entire state. What might be owed as reparation?
Refugee Feedback: Sounding out everyday experiences of displacement
Creativity abounds in the various refugee communities living in the Greek capital – and these creativities feed back into host societies, remaking the city through the production of common spaces.