Articles

‘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.

Activism and the Agency: The Palestinian refugees’ UNRWA campaigns

Palestinian refugees have continually demonstrated their agency by resisting the confines of their situation – with surprising degrees of success. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) provides an instructive case study.

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?

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.

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.

Dis/connected: Using refugee relationships and networks to rethink refugee agency

Refugee camp residents weave unique social networks across varied institutional spaces just as non-mobile individuals do; mapping these networks can provide insight into dynamic and intersecting cultures and systems.

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

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

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.

Making the Maritime Visible: Rethinking Humanitarianism at Sea

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 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.

Refugee-led Organisations: Collective action for collective assistance

When most people think of collective action, they likely think of citizens mobilising for various ends or states and other transnational actors addressing problems. But what do we see when we examine refugees as agents of collective action themselves?

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

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.

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.

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.

Rethinking Refugee Choices in the Dublin System

Refugee responsibility sharing has been an ongoing topic in debates on asylum in the EU, but consideration of the role that refugees as actors ought to play in it is neglected.

Rethinking Refugee Registration

Refugee registration is often perceived as a mundane and straightforward exercise but my research in Kenya shows this is not always the case. Instead, registration has important implications for state power.

Rethinking Refugee Women’s Power and Vulnerability

Public and humanitarian discourses on refugees in the Global South often present women as highly vulnerable. The logic of vulnerability behind such aid, however, prompts questions; its focus risks portraying women as passive - although they are not.

Rethinking the ‘European Refugee Crisis’

The trigger for the so-called European refugee crisis is not the arrival of an – albeit unprecedented – inflow of refugees into the EU. The causes in fact lie much deeper.

Rethinking the Common European Asylum System: Protection or containment?

The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) was set up to create a fair and efficient common asylum policy across the EU. However, my research suggests instead that the CEAS is premised upon containment policies

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?

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?