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When States Take Rights Back: Citizenship Revocation and Its Discontents
When States Take Rights Back draws on contributions by international experts in history, law, political science, and sociology, offering a rare interdisciplinary and comparative examination of citizenship revocation in five countries, revealing hidden government rationales and unintended consequences. Once considered outdated, citizenship revocation – also called deprivation or denationalization – has come back to the political center in many Western liberal states. Contributors scrutinize the positions of stakeholders (e.g. civil servants, representatives of civil society, judges, supranational institutions) and their diverse rationales for citizenship revocation (e.g. allegations of terrorism, treason, espionage, criminal behaviour, and fraud in the naturalisation process). The volume also uncovers the variety of tools that national governments have at their disposition to change existing citizenship revocation laws and policies, and the constraints that they are faced with to actually implement citizenship revocation in daily operations. Finally, contributors underscore the extraordinary severity of sanctions implied by citizenship revocation and offer a nuanced picture of the material and symbolic forms of exclusion not only for those whose citizenship is withdrawn but also for minority groups (wrongly) associated with the aforementioned allegations. Indeed, revocation policies target not merely individuals but specific collective categories, which tend to be ethno-racially constructed and attributed specific location within the international status hierarchy of nation-states. International and interdisciplinary in scope, When States Take Rights Back will be of great interest to scholars of politics, international law, sociology and political and legal history, and Human Rights. The chapters were originally published in Citizenship Studies.
Building Refugee Economies: An evaluation of the IKEA Foundation’s programmes in Dollo Ado
From 2012–2018, the IKEA Foundation invested nearly 100 million USD in UNHCR operations in the five refugee camps of Dollo Ado in the Somali Region of Ethiopia. This is the largest private philanthropic donation that the UN Refugee Agency has ever received. The Refugee Economies Programme at Oxford conducted an evaluation of the multi-year investment to understand how the funding has impacted refugee and host communities in this borderland area. Qualitative and quantitative findings report on the performance of highly visible cooperatives and business groups that have transformed the economic and social landscape of Dollo Ado through projects relating to agriculture, renewable energy, environmental conservation, and the livestock value chain. The evaluation also explores the influence of IKEA Foundation's programmes on broader institutional and policy changes, considering the ways that Ethiopian authorities, UNHCR offices, and other stakeholders have adapted to better support sustainable livelihoods in remote, less-developed, refugee-hosting regions. Findings inform a broad set of conclusions and recommendations for stakeholders that are undertaking similar development-oriented programming in challenging humanitarian contexts worldwide.
Palestine at the UN: the PLO and UNRWA in the 1970s
This article examines the relationship of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) during the 1970s, the period when the PLO reached the zenith of its power in Palestinian refugee camps throughout the Levant. Based on archival United Nations (UN) and UNRWA documents, as well as the PLO's own communications and publications, the article argues that the organization approached its relationship with UNRWA as part of a broader strategy to gain international legitimacy at the UN. That approach resulted in a complex set of tensions, specifically over which of the two institutions truly served and represented Palestinian refugees. In exploring these tensions, this article also demonstrates how the “question of Palestine” was in many ways an international issue.
Border Justice: Migration and Accountability for Human Rights Violations
This Special Issue was prompted by a dual concern: On the one hand, we believed that accountability for human rights violations in the context of migration control is often insufficient, or lacking entirely; on the other hand, we observed that the mechanisms that may provide such accountability are poorly understood. Was the latter observation the reason for the former one? At the very least, in order to identify clearly the most serious accountability gaps, a cross-cutting study was apt. Such a study would aim to examine and integrate various legal disciplines, including international law, EU law, and domestic law. It would also try to capture a wide set of geographical contexts, with the caveat of also having an avowedly EU-centric view of things; for scholars working in and around the European space, there seemed to be some justification for such a focus. The collective study focuses on the practices of the EU and its Member States, and of other states in the “Global North” that engage in externalized migration control. These states have long-standing modes of sharing restrictive policies and practices, many of which are custom built to evade accountability. European practices in particular have been widely mimicked, although some policies that have been legally normalized in Europe have been successfully constitutionally challenged elsewhere. The Special Issue also examines EU practices, in particular those of FRONTEX and EASO. Two contributions in particular highlight poignantly that, while all EU agencies and bodies are bound to respect the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (Article 51(1) EUCFR), and the EU is purportedly as a “community based on the rule of law,” accountability gaps are hard-wired into these EU bodies.
The Kalobeyei Settlement: a self-reliance model for refugees?
In 2016, the Kalobeyei refugee settlement was created, just 3.5 kilometres from the Kakuma camps in Kenya. In a departure from Kenya’s policy of not allowing refugees to work, its aim was to provide self-reliance to refugees and greater refugee–host interaction. But are refugee policies and programmes in Kalobeyei really different from those in Kakuma? If so, what are the differences? And do these differences actually translate into different self-reliance outcomes for refugees? Drawing upon a mixed-methods approach, we compare aid models, self-reliance enabling factors and self-reliance outcomes between Kalobeyei and Kakuma. After just 15 months, we find that self-reliance-enabling factors—such the environment, assets, networks, markets and public goods—remain similar across both sites and, in some cases, are better in Kakuma. The major differences between the sites are in the aid model: Kalobeyei’s cash-assistance and agricultural programmes. We find improved nutritional outcomes and a greater perception of autonomy in Kalobeyei, both of which may be attributable to differences in the aid models. These findings have implications for how we conceptualize the institutional design of self-reliance in Kalobeyei and elsewhere.
Warriors of self-reliance: the instrumentalization of Afghan refugees in Pakistan
In striking contrast to most other refugee groups, Afghan refugees in Pakistan during the 1980s have primarily been understood as a successfully self-reliant population. However, little work has hitherto focused on the international assistance programmes that sought to support their everyday self-reliance. Drawing on extensive archival research, this article presents four phases of self-reliance assistance for Afghan refugees in Pakistan between 1979 and 1995, which correspond to shifts in broader economic trends from Keynesian economics to neoliberalism. At different times the practice of self-reliance assistance promoted large-scale collective employment, individual income-generation, protection for vulnerable populations unable to succeed in the market-based economy, and finally morphed into a form of self-governance through the ‘Afghanization’ of NGOs after the Cold War. These stages of self-reliance assistance encompass periods of humanitarian focus on so-called ‘refugee dependency syndrome’ and self-reliance as psycho-social support, holding parallels to the practice and discourse of contemporaneous Anglophone Western welfare systems. This article illuminates another chapter in the history of refugee self-reliance, and demonstrates the dynamism of self-reliance as both a concept and a practice.
Self-reliance and social networks: explaining refugees’ reluctance to relocate from Kakuma to Kalobeyei
In 2016, refugees in the Kakuma camps in Kenya were offered the opportunity to relocate to the new Kalobeyei settlement, which ostensibly offered a better set of opportunities. While it was portrayed by the international community as objectively better for refugees’ autonomy and socio-economic prospects, most refugees in Kakuma viewed the opportunity differently. Less than 16 per cent of refugees who heard about Kalobeyei were willing to be resettled there if land were provided. For refugees, the main justifications for the reluctance to move were linked to the likely disruption to existing social networks. This example of ‘relocation for self-reliance’ has wider implications for how we conceptualize self-reliance. Although the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)’s definition of refugee self-reliance recognizes that it applies to the community level as well as the individual level, self-reliance programmes that exclusively target individuals risk rejection by communities unless they also take into account the importance of social networks.
Old concepts making new history: refugee self-reliance, livelihoods and the ‘refugee entrepreneur’
Although not new topics in the field of refugee studies, self-reliance, livelihoods and entrepreneurship have recently taken on a heightened emphasis. However, critical questions remain regarding how and by whom self-reliance is defined and measured, and the intended and unintended outcomes of historical and contemporary efforts to foster it. This introductory article highlights key points arising from the Special Issue and presents a short history of the evolution of the concept of self-reliance in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, including its linkage to livelihoods. The article then discusses contemporary connections between self-reliance and entrepreneurship vis-à-vis the promotion of the ‘refugee entrepreneur’. It concludes with a brief overview of the articles and themes in the issue. Overall, the article argues for an expanded definition of refugee self-reliance that promotes social as well as economic components and moves beyond narrowly implemented programmes targeting individual and market-based solutions.
Rethinking Refugee Self-Reliance
The aim of this Special Issue is to rethink and critically examine the concept of refugee self-reliance and assess its relationship with the broader topics of livelihoods and entrepreneurship for refugees.1 In so doing, it seeks to contribute to the existing body of literature critically assessing the provenance, practice and implications of refugee self-reliance and efforts to foster it. An outgrowth of a workshop on refugee self-reliance held in June 2017 (sponsored by the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford), this collection of articles includes, by design, diverse perspectives on the practice, theory and history of refugee self-reliance. The authors include both individual researchers (Capri, Easton-Calabria, Skran), research teams (Betts et al.; Field et al.; Krause and Schmidt) and members of humanitarian and policy organizations (Wake and Barbelet, Embiricos, Leeson et al., Meral, Slaughter). At the workshop, the group began by addressing a series of questions to appraise the dominant ahistorical and acritical approach to refugee self-reliance: (i) What is self-reliance for refugees and how has it been defined over time? (ii) How does self-reliance connect to strategies for durable solutions, such as livelihoods and entrepreneurship? (iii) How can self-reliance be measured and positive outcomes achieved in both theory and practice? (iv) How do refugees perceive their own self-reliance and international institutional efforts to foster it? (v) Is self-reliance an exit strategy for donors?
Hard protection through soft courts? Non-refoulement before the United Nations Treaty Bodies
This Article comparatively analyses how the prohibition of refoulement is interpreted by United Nations Treaty Bodies (UNTBs) in their individual decision-making, where we suggest they act as “soft courts.” It asks whether UNTBs break ranks with or follow the interpretations of non-refoulement of the European Court of Human Rights. This investigation is warranted because non-refoulement is the single most salient issue that has attracted individual views from UNTBs since 1990. Moreover, our European focus is warranted as nearly half of the cases concern states that are also parties to the European Convention on Human Rights. Based on a multi-dimensional analysis of non-refoulement across an original dataset of over 500 UNTB non-refoulement cases, decided between 1990–2020, as well as pertinent UNTB General Comments, the Article finds that whilst UNTBs, at times, do adopt a more progressive position than their “harder” regional counterpart, there are also instances where they closely follow the interpretations of the European Court of Human Rights and, on occasion, adopt a more restrictive position. This analysis complicates the view that soft courts are likely to be more progressive interpreters than hard courts. It further shows that variations in the interpretation of non-refoulement in a crowded field of international interpreters present risks for evasion of accountability, whereby domestic authorities in Europe may favor the more convenient interpretation, particularly in environments hostile to non-refoulement.
Border justice: migration and accountability for human rights violations
This introductory Article sets out the premise of the Special Issue, the entrenched and pervasive nature of human rights violations in the context of migration control and the apparent lack of accountability for such violations. It sets out features of contemporary migration control practices and their legal governance that contribute to this phenomenon, namely the exceptional treatment of migration in international law; the limited scope of international refugee law; and the pervasive use of externalized, delegated migration controls, in particular by the EU and its Member States. The roots of the current condition are traced back to the containment practices that emerged at the end of the Cold War, with the 2015 “crisis” framed both as an illustration of the failures of containment, and a source of further stasis. Following an overview of the contributions that make up the Special Issue, this Article identifies five emergent themes, and suggests further lines of inquiry. These are: the promise and limits of strategic human rights limitations; the role of both international criminal law, and domestic (and regional) tort law in securing accountability; the turn to positive obligations to challenge entrenched features of containment; and the role of direct action in support of and solidarity with those challenging migration controls most directly, refugees and migrants themselves. Rather than offering panaceas, the Article concludes with the identification of further new challenges, notably the role of new technologies in further dissipating lines of accountability for decisions to exclude.
On an Empty Stomach: Two Hundred Years of Hunger Relief
On an Empty Stomach examines the practical techniques humanitarians have used to manage and measure starvation, from Victorian "scientific" soup kitchens to space-age, high-protein foods. Tracing the evolution of these techniques since the start of the nineteenth century, Tom Scott-Smith argues that humanitarianism is not a simple story of progress and improvement, but rather is profoundly shaped by sociopolitical conditions. Aid is often presented as an apolitical and technical project, but the way humanitarians conceive and tackle human needs has always been deeply influenced by culture, politics, and society. These influences extend down to the most detailed mechanisms for measuring malnutrition and providing sustenance. As Scott-Smith shows, over the past century, the humanitarian approach to hunger has redefined food as nutrients and hunger as a medical condition. Aid has become more individualized, medicalized, and rationalized, shaped by modernism in bureaucracy, commerce, and food technology. On an Empty Stomach focuses on the gains and losses that result, examining the complex compromises that arise between efficiency of distribution and quality of care. Scott-Smith concludes that humanitarian groups have developed an approach to the empty stomach that is dependent on compact, commercially produced devices and is often paternalistic and culturally insensitive.
Participatory research: still a one-sided research agenda?
Despite the prevalence of the term over the last two decades, scholars have not agreed on a definition of, or approach towards, participation, although critiques have emphasised that participation is not an equal process for all parties involved. By reviewing the literature and giving examples from fieldwork carried out in Lebanon, this article agrees with the common critique around participation and reflects over the limitations resulting from inherent power imbalances between researchers and participants and among community members. It also argues that the “glorification of methods” alone disguises the politics and the one-sided nature of participatory research and disregards the question of to what extent participants are involved in the construction of the methodology. This article suggests that – despite the pressure from funders to find out innovative methods – participatory researchers would benefit from understanding participants’ own ways of conceptualising and investigating a phenomenon, in order to build their methodology. This article explores these questions, particularly in research with migrants and refugees.
The Global Governed? Refugees as Providers of Protection and Assistance
When refugees flee war and persecution, protection and assistance are usually provided by United Nations organisations and their NGO implementing partners. In camps and cities, the dominant humanitarian model remains premised upon a provider-beneficiary relationship. In parallel to this model, however, is a largely neglected story: refugees themselves frequently mobilise to create organisations or networks as alternative providers of social protection. Based on fieldwork in refugee camps and cities in Uganda and Kenya, this book examines how refugee-led organisations emerge, the forms they take, and their interactions with international institutions. Developing an original theoretical framework based on the concept of 'the global governed', the book shows how power and hierarchy mediate the seemingly benign notion of protection. Drawing upon ideas from anthropology and international relations, it offers an alternative vision for more participatory global governance, of relevance to other policy-fields including development, humanitarianism, health, peacekeeping, and child protection.
What difference do mayors make? The role of municipal authorities in Turkey and Lebanon’s response to Syrian refugees
With the majority of refugees now in urban areas, mayors and municipal authorities have been recognized as increasingly important policy actors in the global refugee regime. This trend is acknowledged in the policy literature. However, there has been little systematic academic research exploring the conditions under which mayors make a difference to refugee-policy outcomes. Theoretically, we outline a heuristic framework aimed at disaggregating key variables, including the independent influence of mayors, in shaping municipal-level outcomes. Empirically, the article assesses the role of municipal authorities and mayors in the two most numerically significant host countries for Syrian refugees: Turkey and Lebanon. It comparatively examines variation across six metropolitan municipalities, three from each country: Izmir, Adana and Gaziantep (Turkey), and Qalamoun, Anjar and Zahle (Lebanon). We show that mayors matter because they may mediate the implementation of national policies and because they sometimes adopt supplementary refugee policies and practices at the municipal level, which may be more or less proactive or more or less restrictive than central-government policy.
Warriors of self-reliance: the instrumentalization of Afghan refugees in Pakistan
In striking contrast to most other refugee groups, Afghan refugees in Pakistan during the 1980s have primarily been understood as a successfully self-reliant population. However, little work has hitherto focused on the international assistance programmes that sought to support their everyday self-reliance. Drawing on extensive archival research, this article presents four phases of self-reliance assistance for Afghan refugees in Pakistan between 1979 and 1995, which correspond to shifts in broader economic trends from Keynesian economics to neoliberalism. At different times the practice of self-reliance assistance promoted large-scale collective employment, individual income-generation, protection for vulnerable populations unable to succeed in the market-based economy, and finally morphed into a form of self-governance through the ‘Afghanization’ of NGOs after the Cold War. These stages of self-reliance assistance encompass periods of humanitarian focus on so-called ‘refugee dependency syndrome’ and self-reliance as psycho-social support, holding parallels to the practice and discourse of contemporaneous Anglophone Western welfare systems. This article illuminates another chapter in the history of refugee self-reliance, and demonstrates the dynamism of self-reliance as both a concept and a practice.
Cities and towns
Cities and towns are on the frontline of receiving and welcoming people who have been displaced. In this issue of FMR, policymakers, practitioners, researchers, representatives of cities and international city-focused alliances, and displaced people themselves debate the challenges facing both the urban authorities and their partners, and the people who come to live there. The issue also includes two ‘general’ articles on other topics.
A call to action: mobilising local resources in Ethiopia for urban IDPs
In 2018, about 1,340 registered households as well as many unregistered internally displaced persons (IDPs) fled ethnic conflict in the Somali region of Ethiopia to seek safety in Adama, the capital of the Oromia region, approximately 100km southeast of Addis Ababa. The IDPs, who were mainly ethnic Oromo, arrived in Adama over the course of several months. The sudden and huge influx of IDPs put immense pressure on the city’s capacity to provide the necessary support. While most of the focus on internal displacement in Ethiopia remains on the Somali region (which hosts the majority of the country’s approximately three million IDPs), significant lessons can be learned from Adama’s response. In the absence of large-scale international assistance, a little-known campaign to address the needs of IDPs led to a multi-level response from federal, regional and – in particular – local urban actors. Ultimately, under the auspices of the city administration, all 28 sectoral government bureaus, hundreds of private sector actors, 18 kebeles (neighbourhood districts), 243 Idirs (community-based associations) and many local non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and individuals participated in supporting and settling the IDPs. This may be a unique instance of an entirely Ethiopian, collective and largely local effort to operate successfully at this scale and within such a short period of time.
Perverse incentives: an analysis of the border-management industry in the United States
Since the end of the Cold War, migration has become a key security issue in the US. This securitization has resulted in the militarization of US border management. However, these policies have failed to halt undocumented immigration and instead increased the US’s unauthorized population. Since 2000, apprehensions along the US-Mexico border have been declining relatively steadily. At the same time, detainee populations have expanded enormously. This is the central puzzle of this thesis. If these policies are failing to achieve their goals, or are simply unnecessary given the lack of a threat, why do securitization and counterproductive border management policies continue to perpetuate? Are they truly counterproductive when we interrogate unofficial aims as opposed to publicly stated goals? To answer these questions, I advance and develop the concept of the “border-management industry” which I define as the vast network of actors who profit economically and politically from the securitization of migration and deployment of restrictive policies, technology, and infrastructure both on the US-Mexico border and throughout the US. I utilize this framework to argue that militarized border management endures and expands because, in the context of unstated aims, these policies are extremely productive and profitable for a variety of actors. The unstated aims I identify are profit (loosely interpreted to include funding and campaign contributions), political capital, and economic development. In the context of immigration detention, private companies, and even non-profits, publicly argue for efficiency and lower costs, but have increased government expenditures and profited handsomely. State agencies and politicians, allegedly acting to curb immigration, work to ensure their continued funding and the economic development of their constituencies, often in ways that perpetuate the problem. As these actors benefit substantially, perverse incentives are created, and they actively seek to ensure that restrictive policies continue to be implemented. In undertaking this analysis, this dissertation contributes to the literature an improved understanding of the securitization of migration and the militarization of US border management.
Overcoming refugee containment and crisis
Imagine a system in which you had to break the law and risk your life in order to enjoy its key right, a right to live lawfully in a political and legal community. That is the open secret at the heart of the so-called “Common European Asylum System” (“CEAS”). The EU and its Member States systematically erect barriers for those who would enter to claim asylum, forming part of the system of the containment of refugees in the Global South. Refugee containment is not only a European practice, but many of the policies and practices that are central to refugee containment are of fairly recent European origin. This Article identifies the costs of this refugee containment, not only for refugees and asylum-seekers, but also for Europe itself, its politics, and its adherence to the rule of law in particular. Containment contributed to the events styled as the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe, yet the crisis has generated a more intensified set of containment practices, also likely to backfire.