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Research in Brief: The Syrian Humanitarian Disaster: Disparities in perceptions, aspirations and behaviour in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey
The speed with which Syria disintegrated into extreme violence and armed conflict shocked the world and left the humanitarian aid regime in turmoil as agencies struggled to respond to the growing displacement crisis on Syria’s borders. The mass displacement has left the neighbouring states of Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey in a quandary as to how to effectively provide protection for these people seeking refuge. None have granted the displaced refugee status; each has established temporary measures to deal with this crisis. In many cases the displaced and the host communities have not been consulted and thus tensions have quickly emerged among host communities, displaced Syrians and humanitarian policymakers and practitioners. The current situation is unsustainable and is testing the humanitarian aid regime’s preferred ‘solution’ of containing the crisis regionally. This research brief reports the findings of a study that has sought to: 1) understand the disparity in perceptions, aspirations, and behaviour of refugees from Syria, members of host communities, and practitioners in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey; and 2) identify what measures, if any, are regarded as important by the three target communities for future return and reintegration in Syria when conditions permit.
Forced migration in the ‘First World’: questioning the logics of a humanitarian concept
This paper uses the example of post-Olympics displacement in East London to challenge the boundaries of forced migration, and to question assumptions about where forced migration happens. The case of displacement in East London is helpful precisely because it lies on the margins of the forced migration concept. Testing forced migration at its limits allows for an interrogation of the assumptions that lie at its core. The following questions guide this exploration at the margins: How might the ideological underpinnings of the current category of forced migration exclude displacement in wealthy, developed countries from analysis? What does the exclusion of displacement in such contexts say about the nature of the forced migration category, about its implicit power relations and dynamics? How does the case of development and displacement in East London challenge the forced migration concept, and call for an evaluation of its underlying logic? Through exploring these questions, this paper puts forward two primary arguments. First, I argue that the forced migration concept is founded on an implicit humanitarian logic. Second, I argue that, if scholars are to truly consider the power implicit in locating forced migration elsewhere, it is necessary to both turn away from an apolitical humanitarian logic and to ‘invert the gaze’ by also examining displacement as it happens in the ‘West’. This paper thus serves as an initial call to critically reflect on forced migration’s underlying humanitarian logic—to consider, for instance, why displacement and dispossession are almost exclusively assumed to occur ‘elsewhere’ and the potential power implications this geography of forced migration might hold. Rather than seek definitive conclusions on causal links between development and displacement in East London, I conduct an exploratory and descriptive study that will raise questions for further research.
Research in Brief: Refugee Economies
There is a global displacement crisis. Around the world more people are displaced than at any time since the Second World War, and there are around 20 million refugees. Yet alongside this trend of rising numbers, governments’ political willingness to provide access to protection and assistance is in decline. In the face of these challenges, the existing global refugee regime is not fit for purpose. It tends to view refugees and displacement as a uniquely humanitarian issue. When people have to leave their homes or cross borders, the conventional response is to meet their immediate needs in terms of food, shelter, clothing, water, and sanitation. The approach is broadly effective for providing emergency relief, but in the long run, it can lead to dependency. Over half the world’s refugees are in protracted refugee situations, having been in exile for at least 5 years. For these people, the average length in exile is around 17 years. From Kenya to Thailand, many are hosted in refugee camps in which they do not have the right to work or freedom of movement. Effectively, they are ‘warehoused’ pending an opportunity to return home, with significant implications for human rights and international security. This conventional approach is unsustainable. Host countries are closing borders; international donors are less willing to indefinitely support large numbers of refugees within camps; and refugees embark on dangerous journeys in search of protection. In this context, there is a need to rethink refugee assistance. Existing approaches too often ignore the skills, talents, and aspirations of refugees themselves. Yet refugees have capacities. They need not inevitably be a ‘burden’ on host states but have the potential to contribute economically as well as socio-culturally. Around the world, even under the most constrained circumstances, and sometimes under the radar, refugees in camps and urban areas engage in significant economic activity, and in doing so often create opportunities for themselves and others. Development-based solutions have for a long time been recognised as one way to overcome the worst consequences of protracted refugee situations. There has been a longstanding debate on the transition from ‘relief-to-development’ in refugee work. However, such approaches have historically suffered from a range of weaknesses. They have generally been state-centric, relying upon the presumption that donor governments might provide additional development assistance to induce host states to commit to self-reliance or long-term local integration for refugees. What has been lacking is a focus on the market-based activities of refugees themselves.
Research in Brief: Bottom-up Humanitarian Innovation
Innovation is playing an increasingly transformative role across the humanitarian system. International organisations, NGOs, governments, business, military, and community-based organisations are drawing upon the language and methods of innovation to address the challenges and opportunities of a changing world. At the Humanitarian Innovation Project, we are developing the concept of bottom-up innovation, in order to introduce an alternative way of thinking about the role of innovation in the humanitarian sector. Rather than only considering how innovation can help international aid agencies to be more adaptable and effective, a focus on bottom-up innovation aims to enable aid agencies to support the creativity and skills of affected populations. Bottom-up innovation can be defined as the way in which crisis-affected communities themselves engage in creative problem-solving, finding solutions to their own challenges. This brief provides selected findings from our research in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Jordan, and the United States.
The normative terrain of the global refugee regime
The global refugee regime encompasses the rules, norms, principles, and decision-making procedures that govern states’ responses to refugees. It comprises a set of norms, primarily those entrenched in the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which defines who is a refugee and the rights to which such people are entitled. It also comprises an international organization, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which has supervisory responsibility for ensuring that states meet their obligations toward refugees. The underlying ethos of the refugee regime is a reciprocal commitment to the principle of nonrefoulement, that is, the obligation not to return a person to a country where she faces a well-founded fear of persecution. As the preamble to the 1951 Convention makes clear, the premise of the refugee regime is international cooperation; specifically, that states reciprocally commit to provide protection to refugees....
Help refugees help themselves: let displaced Syrians join the labor market
There are now some 60 million displaced people around the world, more than at any time since World War II. The Syrian crisis alone, which has created the largest refugee shock of the era, has displaced some ten million people, around four million of them across international borders. In recent months, Western attention has focused almost exclusively on the flood of these refugees to Europe. Yet most of the Syrian refugees have been taken in not by Western countries but by Syria’s neighboring states: Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, whose capacity has been overwhelmed. Lebanon, with a population of around four million and a territory smaller than Maryland, is hosting over a million Syrian refugees. Young people are overrepresented in the refugee population, so that more than half of the school-aged children in Lebanon are now Syrian. International policy toward the Syrian refugee crisis is both antiquated and fueled by panic....
The 2015 Refugee Crisis in the European Union
According to the latest figures from UNHCR, more than 310,000 people have arrived in Italy and Greece this year alone to seek refuge in the European Union. Italy’s reception services are stretched beyond capacity and the situation is even more serious in Greece, where 200,000 refugees have arrived from Turkey so far this year – a staggering increase from 43,000 in all of 2014. In this CEPS Policy Brief, the authors examine the real issues regarding these arrivals, particularly those arriving from across the Mediterranean, and make concrete recommendations to alleviate the problems that both state authorities and refugees are encountering as a result.
Immigration detention: the grounds beneath our feet
Detention as part of migration control is sometimes portrayed as a ‘necessary adjunct’ of the state’s power to control immigration. This characterization is a masking device, obscuring the grounds of detention (or the lack thereof) from proper scrutiny. It has convincingly been argued that human rights law fails to scrutinize the necessity of immigration detention. Many scholars have pointed out the anomalous approach to assessing the legal justifications for immigration detention, compared with other forms of deprivation of liberty, which are more powerfully constrained by human rights law. Yet, cogent as this critique is, it sometimes fails to interrogate the related questions concerning the legal grounds of detention. A ground is a particular form of legal reason, which both explains and justifies the official action in question. By examining the question of grounds, this article aims to elucidate the manner in which immigration law itself produces reasons to detain, and by doing so creates detainable subjects, migrants. Basic liberty-protective principles and practices developed in other areas of law are notably absent. This state of affairs is not inevitable, and legal alternatives are within reach.
Negotiating durable solutions for refugees: a critical space for semiotic analysis
Despite the proliferation of specialised agencies designed to reduce the prevalence of refugees worldwide, the number of individuals fleeing persecution is increasing year on year as endemic violence in countries such as Iraq, Somalia and the Syrian Arab Republic continues. As a result, media broadcasts and political dialogues are saturated with discussions about these “persons of concern”. Fundamental questions nonetheless remain unanswered about what meaning these actors attribute to the label ‘refugee’ and what intent, other than paucity of knowledge, might be driving the term’s use or manipulation. Though this is evidently important in the public arena, where incorrect conflations fuel mistrust and misunderstandings, the ramifications of these divergent understandings at the level of multi-lateral politics have yet to be critically explored. This article applies Barthes’ theory of the multiple orders of the sign to address this. Using the case study of the negotiations preceding the invocation of the Cessation Clause for Rwandan refugees, it illustrates how the word refugee is susceptible to numerous, simultaneous understandings, and discusses the implications of these manifold interpretations for how durable solutions are envisaged and negotiated in the refugee regime. In the case of Rwandan refugees in Uganda, this has meant that over a decade of stalemated discussions between the Governments of Uganda and Rwanda and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees over their future have been broken by a series of bilateral concessions that, whilst diminishing the political significance attached to this protracted caseload, have failed to address the continuing precarity of their situation. By conceptualising the word refugee as a sign according to the Saussurean model of semiotics, this paper therefore argues that despite the term’s established legal-normative definition, its inherent malleability makes it susceptible to processes of political instrumentalisation. This elevates the refugee as a rhetorical figure above the refugee as a physical-legal body entitled to certain forms of assistance.
Refugees’ integration in Uganda will require renewed lobbying
Despite being a country with a relatively progressive history of responding to refugees, Uganda unfortunately appears nonetheless to be falling at the final hurdle. As it currently stands, a number of long-staying refugees within Uganda have approached the Department for Immigration to apply for citizenship and have been denied by the authorities on dubious legal grounds. On 30th August 2010 a Petition was therefore filed in the Constitutional Court on behalf of several Congolese refugees to request the interpretation of the law vis-à-vis the opportunities for refugees to naturalise in Uganda, that is, to become Ugandan citizens. This was in response to the concern of numerous actors that the supposed impediments to refugees’ naturalising within the country are a case of discriminatory practice, rather than legislatively justifiable....
Book Review: Life in Crisis: The ethical journey of Doctors Without Borders
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors Without Borders, remains the gold standard of medical relief. Fiercely independent, highly self-critical, resolutely professional, and able to mobilize at a moment’s notice, for many people it represents the best of the humanitarian ideal. The organization is surrounded by a number of myths and stereotypes: the oppositional spirit of ‘medical hippies’, the rebellion against the Red Cross, the heroic doctors in Biafra, the ‘unshaven, cigarette-smoking Frenchmen’ moving from crisis to crisis surrounded by fag ash and disruption. But despite a smattering of academic articles and a number of edited collections from MSF’s own think-tank, the story of MSF has not been examined in a lengthy scholarly study, at least not in the English language. With the publication of Peter Redfield’s book, which has been over ten years in the making, our knowledge of this influential organization and the literature on humanitarian aid has been significantly enhanced. A glance at the book’s subtitle would seem to suggest a work of moral philosophy or intellectual history, but this text is embedded in anthropology. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and documentary analysis, it contains ethnographic sketches that cover key themes in MSF’s history. Chapter Three, for example, studies MSF’s famed logistical capacity, examining how it maintains global reach through …
How projects rise and fall: the lifecycle of a dietary modernisation scheme
How do projects grow? How do they fail? What accounts for their changing fortunes? This paper uses the archives of a 1970s modernisation scheme to explore the life cycle of a long-running project, concerning the production of leaf protein in Nigeria. It argues that archives can be very useful for understanding success and failure, and encourages practitioners to take an interest in the story of past projects, even those that failed. Drawing on Actor-Network Theory, it argues that alliances are key to understanding project lifecycles, suggesting that practitioners focus on strengthening local relationships, rather than seeking answers in universal management templates.
Control and biopower in contemporary humanitarian aid: the case of supplementary feeding
The concept of biopower is often used in the analysis of contemporary aid. Referring to a power that is exercised over life and that operates through self-government, it seems very appropriate for the operations of humanitarian agencies, particularly in refugee contexts. This article critiques the application of biopower in studies of humanitarianism, arguing that many aid operations are based on top-down control, rather than self-government and the internalization of norms. As an illustration, I examine a supplementary feeding programme in South Sudan, looking at how food was provided, how hunger was measured, and pointing out the hierarchical and paternalistic control involved. As well as suggesting that biopower often lacks relevance in refugee contexts, I also argue it has been applied too broadly. By being associated with a vast array of humanitarian practices, it risks losing any analytical utility, becoming a substitute for detailed descriptions of power. This article seeks to return to that detail, describing a humanitarian programme and pointing out some discrepancies with the ever-popular notion of biopower, which, I argue, has a tendency to be applied without an adequate definition.
Beyond the 'raw' and the 'cooked': a history of fortified blended foods
This paper offers a history of fortified blended foods, a humanitarian product that first emerged in the middle of the twentieth century. Tracing its emergence and development, the paper argues that this food was the product of four key historical trends: (i) the search for a compact and efficient diet in the wake of the Second World War; (ii) the high modernist movement that saw science and technology as a way to improve on traditional foods; (iii) the state-led industrialisation of the development decades oriented around the notion of a worldwide 'protein gap'; and (iv) the legacy of 'productivist' agriculture in the United States, generating massive surpluses in certain crops that had to be adapted creatively for a multitude of uses. The paper positions fortified blended foods in these broader historical processes, and asserts that humanitarian techniques are very much rooted in cultural, political, and social conditions.
Sustainable Refugee Return: Triggers, constraints and lessons on addressing the development challenges of forced displacement
By the end of 2014 the total worldwide displaced population of concern to UNHCR stood at an unprecedented 57.7 million persons, and of these 19.5 million were refugees and 38.2 million internally displaced persons (IDPs). Significant in the context of the present study is that the number of refugees under UNHCR’s mandate had increased by 23% on the previous year, 45% of the refugees are in a protracted displacement situation, and 86% of the world’s refugees are hosted by developing regions. Moreover, in 2014 only 126,800 refugees returned to their country of origin, a thirty year low and significantly lower than even one year earlier. The aim of this study is to identify the conditions that influence the decisions by refugees in protracted displacement regarding return to their home country - when, why, and by whom are decisions on return or other coping strategies made, and how are these decisions affected both by life in exile and by the situation in the country of origin. The primary purpose of the study is to inform the World Bank’s country and regional strategies, as well as its operational approaches on ways to address forced displacement by showing that well thought out development actions that are responsive to the circumstances of specific displacement situations can contribute to the sustainable return and reintegration of the displaced people. In addition to the World Bank, the wider audience for this analysis is the community of development and humanitarian actors together with the governments of refugee origin and refugee hosting countries. All these actors need to better take into consideration the development dimension of displacement and return, as well as the concerns and coping strategies of the refugees themselves both while in displacement and upon return in order to promote sustainable solutions.
Enhancing the Common European Asylum System and Alternatives to Dublin
Upon request by the LIBE committee, this study examines the reasons why the Dublin system of allocation of responsibility for asylum seekers does not work effectively from the viewpoint of Member States or asylum-seekers. It argues that as long as it is based on the use of coercion against asylum seekers, it cannot serve as an effective tool to address existing imbalances in the allocation of responsibilities among Member States. The EU is faced with two substantial challenges: first, how to prevent unsafe journeys and risks to the lives of people seeking international protection in the EU; and secondly, how to organise the distribution of related responsibilities and costs among the Member States. This study addresses these issues with recommendations aimed at resolving current practical, legal and policy problems.
Refugee Innovation: Humanitarian innovation that starts with communities
Even under the most challenging constraints, people find ways to engage in creative problem solving. Refugees, displaced persons, and others caught in crisis often have skills, talents, and aspirations that they draw upon to adapt to difficult circumstances. Although ‘humanitarian innovation’ has been increasingly embraced by the humanitarian world, this kind of ‘bottom-up’ innovation by crisis-affected communities is often neglected in favour of a sector-wide focus on improving the effectiveness of organisational response to crisis. This oversight disregards the capabilities and adaptive resourcefulness that people and communities affected by conflict and disaster often demonstrate. This report focuses on examples and case studies of ‘bottom-up innovation’ among different refugee populations. Whether in the immediate aftermath of displacement or in long-term protracted situations, in both urban and rural areas, refugees frequently engage in innovation. By definition displaced across international borders, refugees face new markets, a new regulatory environment, and new social and economic networks in their host countries. Being adaptive and creative is often necessary in order to meet basic needs, to develop income-generating activities, or to keep long-term aspirations alive. Even where there are legal constraints on the right to work or freedom of movement, the capacity of refugee populations to engage in iterative problem-solving is nearly always evident.
The Recast Asylum Procedures Directive 2013/32/EU: Caught between the stereotypes of the abusive asylum seeker and the vulnerable refugee
Forthcoming in V. Chetail, P. De Bruycker & F. Maiani (eds) 'Reforming the Common European Asylum System: The New European Refugee Law' (Martinus Nijhoff, 2015). Available at SSRN:- This piece provides a detailed analysis of the Recast Asylum Procedures Directive (Recast APD). Although we are now two decades into harmonization of asylum procedures at the European Union (EU) level, we begin in Part 2 by revisiting the rationale for this process. We contend that the most persuasive rationale for procedural harmonization, in an EU legally committed to refugee protection, is to ensure fair procedures, and to prevent a race to the bottom in procedural standards. Efficiency must serve fairness, not vice versa. The original Asylum Procedures Directive (APD) failed to meet this aim by a long margin. The Recast APD is the product of the new, post-Lisbon legislative environment, so as Part 3 suggests, it comes with high hopes for improvement, particularly given the Parliament’s relatively new role as co-legislator on asylum matters. Our analysis reveals that the Recast APD contains many improvements on its predecessor, but overall our assessment is mixed, particularly if we assess it in terms of the objective of setting clear basic minimum standards of fairness. We attempt to explain this ambivalent outcome by suggesting that the Directive reflects two competing stereotypical views of the asylum seeker. On the one hand, there is a strong notion that asylum procedures must work to weed out ‘abusive’ claims. In contrast, there is also a strong acknowledgement that some asylum seekers are particularly vulnerable or have special needs (as will be seen, different terminologies are used in different contexts). As we argue, these stereotypes create complexity, and crowd out the basic notion of refugee status determination (RSD) as a process for recognising refugees, on the assumption that many (although of course not all) of those who apply will be so recognised.
Refugees and justice between states
Abstract: In this article, I consider the neglected question of justice between states in the distribution of responsibility for refugees. I argue that a just distribution of refugees across states is an important normative goal and, accordingly, I attempt to rethink the normative foundations of the global refugee regime. I show that because dismantling the restrictive measures currently used by states in the global South to prevent the arrival of refugees will not suffice to ensure a just distribution of refugees between states, a more detailed account of how responsibilities should be shared between states is required. To this end, I make three claims. First, I argue that the definition of ‘refugee’ must be broadened beyond those subjected to persecution to include harms of action or omission by states that seriously jeopardise personal security or subsistence needs. Second, I argue that allocating a fair share of refugees to states should be based on state’s integrative capacities. Finally, I argue that distributive justice between states must be balanced against the legitimate interests of refugees in their destination country and the duty of states to ensure they are settled in places where they are likely to flourish.
A critical approach to the production of academic knowledge on refugee integration in the global North
As migration from the global South to increasingly multi-ethnic global North countries has accelerated in recent decades, questions of how belonging shapes social outcomes have permeated discussions of asylum policies, service provision, national security and other topics touching upon the relationship between birthplace and rights. Categorised most frequently as issues of integration, these debates generally assume the binary nature of belonging: one is either a member or an outsider. The narrower body of academic literature on refugee integration in global North resettlement countries is similarly beset by problems rooted in a false distinction between those with and without refugee status. In reviewing a set of self-selected case studies to explore the role this literature plays, this paper argues that the selection of the refugee as the subject of research on resettlement problems is in fact based on the researcher’s subjective determination of what is most important in shaping a refugee’s experiences: refugee status. The assumptions underlying this decision foster the conceptual ambiguity that marks these studies’ diverse and often inchoate understandings of the term 'integration', which in turn render a set of claims about refugee integration that is prohibitively complex and fails to contribute to a better understanding of resettlement. Since such work may in fact reinforce the problems that it seeks to understand, this paper advocates for a more reflexive exploration of how assumptions about belonging shape research on global North resettlement and on refugees more broadly.