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Voices out of Conflict: Young People Affected by Forced Migration and Political Crisis
This document is a report from the conference 'Voices out of Conflict: Young People Affected by Forced Migration and Political Crisis' held at Cumberland Lodge in March 2004. The aim of the conference was to increase understanding about young people’s experiences of conflict and displacement, and to generate ideas for more effective models of protection. It was proposed that there is an urgent need to move protection policy and practice toward a framework that engages young people as active participants in their own protection. Indeed, young people’s participation in protection mechanisms is necessary in order to make them more relevant, effective and sustainable, and to improve young people’s chances of survival and well-being in situations of extreme adversity.
The Role of the Military in Humanitarian Emergencies
This document is the report of a conference hosted by the RSC (then RSP) entitled 'The Role of the Military in Humanitarian Emergencies', which was held from 29-31 October 1995.
Refugee studies at Oxford: 'some' history
Barbara Harrell-Bond, the first RSC Director, explains the history of Refugee Studies at Oxford University at the conference 'The growth of forced migration: new directions in research policy and practice' at wadham College, 25-27 May 1998.
Refugee Status Determination and Rights in Southern and East Africa
On 16 and 17 November 2010, Dr Alice Edwards of the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre convened a workshop discussion on the state of refugee status determination (RSD) and refugee rights in southern and east Africa. The event, which was held in Kampala, Uganda, was coordinated by Oxford research student Marina Sharpe, with the assistance of the Kampala-based International Refugee Rights Initiative (IRRI), and generously funded by the Commonwealth Foundation and the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development.
Faith-Based Humanitarianism: The Response of Faith Communities and Faith-Based Organisations in Contexts of Forced Migration
The RSC hosted a one-day workshop (22 September 2010) The response of faith-based communities and faith-based organisations in the context of forced migration. The event brought together over 60 scholars and practitioners from different faith perspectives and diverse disciplinary backgrounds to explore the motives and practices of faith communities and faith-based organisations in their response to forced displacement. The workshop also examined the role of faith, religious conviction and spirituality in the experiences, practices and behaviours of forced migrants themselves. A selected number of papers will be included in a special issue of the Journal of Refugee Studies to be published in late 2011.
Aceh under Martial Law: Conflict, Violence and Displacement
This report is an outcome of the workshop "Aceh under martial law: Conflict, violence and displacement", held at the RSC on 20 May 2004. Coinciding with the announcement of the cessation of martial law in Aceh on the 19 May 2004 the workshop brought together academics and practitioners to exchange perspectives and expertise to focus analysis and debate on recent developments in Aceh. Participants explored obstacles and opportunities for the long-term resolution of this protracted conflict. The workshop format allowed for the kind of analytical reflection and advocacy orientation that, it is hoped, policy makers might find especially useful.
The role of legal and normative frameworks for the protection of environmentally displaced people
Gradual and sudden environmental changes are resulting in substantial human movement and displacement, and the scale of such flows, both internal and cross-border, is expected to rise with unprecedented impacts on lives and livelihoods. Despite the potential challenge, there has been a lack of strategic thinking about this policy area partly due to a lack of data and empirical research on this topic. Adequately planning for and managing environmentallyinduced migration will be critical for human security. The papers in this volume were first presented at the Research Workshop on Migration and the Environment: Developing a Global Research Agenda held in Munich, Germany in April 2008. One of the key objectives on the Munich workshop was to address the need for more sound empirical research and identify priority areas of research for policy makers in the field of migration and the environment.
Assessing the impacts and costs of forced displacement: a mixed methods approach (volume I)
Globally, over 40 million people have been forced to leave or flee their homes due to conflict, violence, and human rights violations either as refugees outside their country of origin or Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). A substantial number live in protracted displacement where return has not been possible.Forced displacement is a humanitarian crisis: but it also produces developmental impacts - short and longer term, negative and positive - affecting human and social capital, economic growth, poverty reduction efforts, environmental sustainability and societal fragility. A prevailing view is that refugees are a burden on the development aspirations of host countries and populations and that negative socio-economic and environmental impacts and costs outweigh the positive contributions (actual or potential) that forcibly displaced people might make. The losses incurred by the displaced populations themselves reinforce perceptions of vulnerability and dependency and thus assumptions of the burden they might impose. This study provides such a methodology. The development and drafting of the methodology and the state of the art literature review was conducted by the refugee studies centre, with valuable and constructive inputs from the partner organizations.
‘Future citizens of the world’? The contested futures of independent young migrants in Europe
Irrespective of their points of entry, for most young people subject to immigration control in Europe, turning 18 marks a significant repositioning of their relationship with the state and a diminution of rights and entitlements; they change from rights holders as ‘children’, for whom states must consider the ‘best interests’, to young people subjected to a varied array of classifications who are hard to position in the ‘national order of things’ (Malkki 1995). Young people frequently end up in limbo, uncertain of whether or not they will be able to remain in the country of immigration/asylum and for how long. This paper at once outlines and critically analyses the dissonance between how European policies formulate and impose a set of future options for independent migrant young people who are subject to immigration control as they transition to ‘adulthood’, and what is known about young people’s own conceptualisations of their futures and how they intend to realise them.
Civitas, polis, and urbs: reimagining the refugee camp as the city
The refugee camp, positioned between formality and informality, mobility and immobility, permanence and impermanence, is a space of paradox. In the process of contextualizing this paradox, the academic literature often juxtaposes the “camp (as exception) and the city (as norm) in contradiction with one another” (Sanyal 2010:879). As these tent cities develop into urban environments, there is a need to evaluate the urbanity of the camp space by considering the ways in which refugee spaces come to take on a hybrid nature where “refugeeness and agency have worked simultaneously to create ‘spaces of exception’ that are able to transgress the boundaries of place and non-place” (880). Drawing on a Lefebvrian conceptualization of space, I establish an analytical approach to the refugee camp “in which the city [is] a political space for claiming rights for social groups” (Isin 2000:13). I argue that reimagining the refugee camp as an urban space allows for the possibility of thinking of it as a space in which particular rights, namely the right to the city, can be conceived and realized.
The Bedouin in contemporary Syria: the persistence of tribal authority and control
Little information is available regarding contemporary relations between Bedouin tribes and the Syrian state apparatus. These ties are mainly expressed through relationships of patronage and clientism between tribal leaders and state operatives. The Bedouin tribes of Syria continue to function as groups tied in networks of real and fictive kinship; these bonds provide the tribal members with a solidarity and cohesiveness which the state has not been able to suppress despite decades of effort.
Rituals of royalty and the elaboration of ceremony in Oman: view from the edge
Ceremony and elaborate protocols are commonly associated with kingship, authority, and power. The pageantry associated with the British monarchy in its public ceremonials, for example, is imbued with a sense of an ancient past. Yet, these traditions are recent inventions derived from the late Victorian period. Traditions, particularly Western practices, are often made up, choreographed, and then formally instituted in a matter of a few years, rapidly gaining a sense of permanence. Sometimes entirely new symbols and devices are invented to confirm gravitas and substance and to serve as rallying points for the new entity (e.g., Marianne, John Bull, or Uncle Sam).
'Ideal' refugee women and gender equality mainstreaming: 'good practice' for whom?
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Executive Committee and the Refugee Women and Gender Equality Unit within the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees have both asserted that the Algerian-based National Union of Sahrawi Women is an “ideal” partner by virtue of its success in mainstreaming gender equality and empowering Sahrawi refugee women. In this article, I examine the nature and implications of this idealization of the protracted Sahrawi refugee camps, arguing that international celebrations of the National Union of Sahrawi Women and the refugee women it purports to represent have directly influenced the development of projects in the camps that marginalize the needs and priorities of “non-ideal” women and girls with grave effects. As such, I suggest that while refugees and their political representatives may formally adopt donors’ rhetoric and preferences vis-à-vis gender equality mainstreaming, such strategies may facilitate and solidify processes of exclusion and marginalization in different contexts of displacement. Concurrently, this leads us to ask who benefits from assertions and categorizations of “good” and “bad” practice, and whose interests are advanced by discourses surrounding “gender equality”.
Education, migration and internationalism: situating Muslim Middle Eastern and North African students in Cuba
Since the 1970s, thousands of Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) students have been amongst the 40,000 recipients of a free education at universities and other further education institutions in Cuba. Drawing on interviews conducted with Muslim MENA university students in Cuba, including both citizens and refugees, I suggest that their legal statuses played central roles during their time in the Caribbean island, as well as structuring their expectations for the future. This article examines both Muslim youth experiences of, and Cuban motivations behind, an internationalist education programme that has been marginalised by both academics and policy-makers alike. Further, it explores and contextualises these students' perceptions of life in Cuba throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and of the conditions in their places of origin, which in many cases are refugee camps or hosting countries. In addition to offering these individuals a further education with an aim of enhancing self-sustainability in their ‘home’ countries/spaces, I propose that this programme is a clear alternative, and even a challenge, to the way in which the education of foreign students is structured and managed elsewhere by states and institutions driven by different socio-economic and political priorities.
Muslim asylum-seekers and refugees: negotiating politics, religion and identity in the UK
In the current geopolitical context, religion, nationality and country of origin have increasingly become intertwined and politicized in relation to asylum, both as policy and as personal experience. Based on interviews conducted in the UK with a range of Middle Eastern Muslim asylum-seekers and refugees, this article proposes that regional and religious identity markers have grown to dictate interactions, be they real or imagined, with the host community. Throughout the article we explore the nature of changes in religious identity, identification and practice since interviewees applied for asylum in the UK. We also highlight the significance of a range of gendered factors and experiences, including childhood and growing up in the UK, effective masculinity and un/productive parenthood, in negotiating transformative political and legal realities. More broadly, our research suggests that UK-based Muslim asylum-seekers from the Middle East find themselves exposed to three intersecting vulnerabilities: firstly, their uncertain legal status; secondly, their voluntary or imposed religious identification as ‘Muslims’; and lastly, their exclusion from established Muslim communities in the UK.
Representing Sahrawi refugees’ ‘educational displacement’ to Cuba: self-sufficient agents or manipulated victims in conflict?
Mainstream accounts of refugee women and children have habitually portrayed their objects of study as ‘generic’ passive victims of war and/or famine. In stark contrast, however, since the early 1980s Sahrawi refugee women and children have been invoked as active agents constructing and maintaining their camps. In the first part of this article I explore the nature of a selection of mutually-reinforcing images produced by the Polisario Front (the Sahrawi refugees’ ‘representatives’ and camp managers) for a European audience. Their distinctive content could appear to be diametrically opposed, and perhaps designed to offer a corrective to the ‘universalizing representational practice’ identified by Malkki (1995: 11). In the remainder of the article, however, I argue that these and other portrayals of Sahrawi refugee women and children are in essence motivated by the same political and politicized priorities as those of ‘generic’, passive and victimized ‘womenandchildren’ (Enloe 1990, 1991). Examining three apparently paradoxical accounts of one context of Sahrawi displacement (Sahrawi refugee youth’s ‘educational displacement’ to Cuba), I highlight the extent to which Sahrawi women and children are consistently, if differently, mobilized by Morocco, Polisario and members of Spanish civil society to secure support from a range of state and non-state actors. Moving away from the external projection of these images, I conclude the article by highlighting how the Cuban scholarship programme has been conceptualized and negotiated within the camps, with reference to tensions between Cuban-educated women, their families, and Polisario veterans.