Refugee Studies Centre

Parallel session: Humanitarian Innovation and the Military 18 July 2015, 11:00-12:30, 1st Panel Room. Nathaniel Raymond, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative, James Ryan, University of London. Chair: Josiah Kaplan, Humanitarian Innovation Project. Military and humanitarian actors increasingly interact across a range of contexts, from natural disaster response to complex emergencies. To date, however, sensitive but important questions surrounding knowledge creation, diffusion, and exchange between both communities remain under-explored, both in debates on humanitarian innovation and humanitarian civil-military coordination. This panel seeks to prompt critical discussion around a sensitive topic by examining how innovative forms of knowledge are created, diffused, and exchanged between military and humanitarian space. How do aid workers learn, adapt, and 'rebrand' military innovations for civilian use? To what degree are military actors adapting humanitarian concepts and practices for their own use? What sensitivities and dilemmas do such interactions pose for both humanitarian practice and principles? This discussion will be grounded in concrete case studies drawn from medical humanitarianism and emerging approaches to networked technologies such as remote sensing and mapping.

Parallel session: Understanding Humanitarian Innovation in Resettlement Contexts, 18 July 2015, 11:0--12:30, 2nd Panel Room. Gavin Ackerly, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre Innovation Hub: ‘Innovative ways of creating resource rich networks to support successful refugee resettlement’, Faith Nibbs, Southern Methodist University: ‘Innovative Strategies: How refugees have career-laddered in the US’, Eleanor Ott, Oxfam GB: ‘‘Forced’ innovation: A case study of US refugee resettlement’, Carrie Perkins, Southern Methodist University: ‘The Road to Resettlement: Transitions from the Thai-Burma border to Dallas, Texas’. Chair: Naohiko Omata, Humanitarian Innovation Project This panel will consider how the concept of humanitarian innovation can apply to refugees who have been resettled to third countries. The first presentation will introduce a purpose-built e-mentoring and networking project which connects refugees to industry professionals, small business mentors and peer groups in order to give refugees the opportunity to connect deep within mainstream networks, reducing reliance on service agencies and increasing opportunities for prosperity. The second presentation will address how refugees career-ladder when their skills don’t easily transfer to the country of resettlement, presenting some of the innovative strategies refugees have used over the past 30 years in the US gathered through ethnographic interviews of the refugee communities of Dallas, TX area. The third presentation will explore how resettled refugees use and build their own networks to relocate, acquire employment, and find economic and social support, presenting qualitative and quantitative data on resettled refugee livelihood adaptation from findings of research with resettled refugees, practitioners, and policymakers. The fourth presentation will use qualitative interviews from refugees both preparing for resettlement and those who have already made the transition to life in the U.S to explore the many challenges, struggles and successes encountered along the way.

Parallel session: Facilitating Bottom-Up Innovation, 18 July 2015, 13:34-15:15, 2nd Panel Room Gavin Ackerly, Asylum Seeker Resource Centre Innovation Hub, Robert Hakiza, Young African Refugees for Integral Development (YARID) Uganda, Avila Kilmurray, Global Fund for Community Foundations, Olivia O’Sullivan, Innovation Hub, DFID, Amplify Project. Chair: Louise Bloom, Humanitarian Innovation Project. This session centres on the fact that the humanitarian sector still has a lot to learn about fully engaging with crisis-affected communities in innovation practice. However several initiatives have started to support communities’ skills and ideas for new humanitarian solutions. Through a lively conversation with the panel members, this session will introduce the exciting work that has created hubs, funds and other platforms to support community-led innovation around the world. We will learn what some of the successes and challenges have been in facilitating grassroots initiatives, and ask what the future is for more direct involvement of crisis-affected communities in providing innovative solutions to humanitarian challenges. With a panel representing a range of global perspectives we hope to unpack some of the key lessons to good innovation facilitation.

Parallel session: Ethics for Technology and Big Data in Humanitarian Innovation 17 July 2015, 14:00-15:30, 1st Panel Room. Nathaniel Raymond, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative’s Signal Program: ‘Applying Humanitarian Principles to the Collection and Use of Digital Data in order to Identify and Mitigate Potential Risks to Vulnerable Populations’, Stefan Voigt, DLR Center for Satellite Based Crisis Information, and Josh Lyons, Human Rights Watch: ‘Between transparency and sensitivity: considerations on the use of very high resolution satellite mapping technologies for humanitarian operations and human rights investigations’ Chair: Anaïs Rességuier, Sciences Po Paris. This panel will discuss ethical issues and risks specific to the application of new and existing technologies and the collection of ‘big data’ for humanitarian purposes. The first presentation will identify potential risk vectors and models of prospective harm that may stem from current data collection practices through digital platforms, which is increasingly for humanitarian practice, and will provide examples of scenarios where this harm may occur and applying commonly accepted sources of humanitarian principles. The second presentation will give an insight in the current and up‐coming state‐of‐the‐art of satellite technology and will stimulate a discussion on how the geospatial community can navigate future policy debates in a balanced and informed way.

Parallel session: Community-based Food Production in Humanitarian Contexts 18 July 2015, 13:45-15:15. Panellists; Mikey Tomkins, CitizenD: ‘Refugee communities in Dallas: Develop community based urban agriculture in Vickery Meadow’ This panel will consider the role of community-based initiatives and innovations for food production as a way of addressing food security issues in refugee and other humanitarian situations. This presentation focuses on the ongoing work of Citizen-D in Dallas, Texas, a project which is in its first year, and aims to create, support and promote urban food growing projects within the refugee communities in Dallas.

Parallel session: Humanitarian Innovation: How to balance short-term results with long-term vision? 17 July 2015, 14:00-15:30. Panellists Kim Scriven, Humanitarian Innovation Fund, Pascal Daudin, ICRC, Johan Karlsson, Better Shelter. Chair: Marpe Tanaka, MSF Sweden Innovation Unit. For emergency-oriented organisations in the humanitarian sector, responding quickly to rapidly emerging crisis situations is absolutely crucial. However, a major challenge facing humanitarian organizations is how to maintain a balance between addressing short-term needs and building an innovation capability to meet long-term challenges. The emergency-oriented mind-set often leads to prioritization of short-term problem solving and neglects the exploration of long-term challenges and opportunities for innovation. This panel brings together representatives from MSF Sweden Innovation Unit, the Humanitarian Innovation Fund, the ICRC and Better Shelter to discuss how to successfully achieve a balance between the short-term and the long-term, and to explore the role of patience and trust in creating a sustained innovation capability in humanitarian organizations.

A panel discuss the deal between the EU and Turkey regarding immigration

Peter Gatrell gives a talk for the Refugee Studies Centre podcast series.

Guy Goodwin-Gill gives a talk for the Refugee Studies Centre podcast series. In 1977, as national refugee status determination procedures were gaining new life, State members of UNHCR’s Executive Committee asked the Office to provide guidance on the interpretation and application of the 1951 Convention/1967 Protocol. The outcome was the 1979 UNHCR Handbook, still widely cited in courts around the world, but substantially unchanged notwithstanding successive ‘re-issues’. Following adoption of its Agenda for Protection in 2000, UNHCR sought to keep up with jurisprudential developments and emergent issues by publishing supplementary guidelines, for example, on exclusion, gender, social group, and children; these were mostly drafted in-house, like the original Handbook, and without any formal input from States or other stakeholders. Following criticism of its 2013 guidelines on military service, however, UNHCR began to consider how external input could be usefully and effectively managed, for example, through the circulation of drafts for comment. Authoritative and influential guidelines will need a solid methodology when it comes to synthesizing best practice and pointing the way ahead, and UNHCR cannot just rely on its statutory and treaty role in ‘supervising the application’ of the 1951 Convention. In some respects, its task is analogous to that of the International Law Commission, incorporating both codification (identifying where States now see the law) and progressive development (showing how the law should develop consistently, if protection is to keep in step with need). So, what are the issues on which further guidance is needed today? What, if any, are the limits to interpretation, and when are new texts required? In drafting guidelines, who should be consulted? And how should others’ views and analysis be taken into account?

Dr James Milner gives a talk for the Refugee Studies Centre seminar series. Despite the attention paid to new examples of ‘global refugee policy’, we know surprisingly little about the process by which it is made and implemented. Building on the December 2014 special issue of the Journal of Refugee Studies, this seminar introduces the concept of ‘global refugee policy’ and argues for a more critical and systematic examination of the interests and actors that shape the process of making and implementing policy. Drawing on efforts to implement global policy with respect to protracted refugee situations in the context of Tanzania, the seminar considers the range of national and local factors that limited efforts to realise naturalisation for Burundian refugees, and outlines an approach to the future study of global refugee policy.

Dr Jeff Crisp and MaryBeth Morand give a talk for the Refugee Studies Centre podcast series.

Dr Phil Orchard gives a talk for the Refugee Studies Centre podcast series. In the past two decades, global policy on internal displacement has become a discernible area of activity for the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and a range of other international and non-government organizations. It is an area of policy which operates in parallel with global refugee policy, alongside but separate as it is neither as strongly legally or institutional anchored. Its development has been far more ad hoc, incremental, and divided than refugee policy. And yet global policy on internal displacement as both process and product is clearly identifiable. This is reflected in legal developments including the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement and the African Union’s Convention for the Protection and Assistance of Internally Displaced Persons in Africa (the Kampala Convention). But it is also reflected in practice within the United Nations, including the development of the cluster approach to provide protection and assistance to the internally displaced, and in the basic working processes not only of UNHCR, but also of the Security Council and the General Assembly. This suggests that incremental processes can have long term effects on global policy generally.

Professor Jane McAdam focuses here on the relocation of the Banaban population from Ocean Island (previously one of the Gilbert & Ellice Islands, now Kiribati) to Rabi Island in Fiji after the Second World War. Professor McAdam is Scientia Professor of Law and the Director of the Andrew & Renata Kaldor Centre for International Refugee Law at the University of New South Wales. She holds an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship, and is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC and a Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre.

Seminar given on 18 February 2015 by Dr Benjamin Gray (University of Edinburgh), part of the RSC Hilary term 2015 Public Seminar Series This seminar addresses the place of exiles and refugees in the Greek polis (city-state), with a focus on the later Classical and Hellenistic periods (c. 400-100 BC). It addresses the different forms of protection and aid granted by Greek poleis and their citizens to Greeks displaced through war and civil strife. It also analyses the range of arguments advanced by ancient Greeks for protecting or helping exiles and refugees, including the self-presentation of displaced Greeks themselves. For example, refugees and their hosts could present aid to displaced groups as inspired by justice, law, freedom and shared Greek identity. Alternatively, in a move which became increasingly prominent in the period considered here, they could present help to the displaced as a matter of humane sympathy or even charity. This seminar argues that the diverse range of relevant Greek practices and values both reflected and helped to shape complex and shifting ancient Greek ideas about the city, citizenship, democracy, justice, freedom, virtue and gender. Throughout its argument, connections and contrasts are drawn between ancient Greek and modern practices and ideology, and their underpinnings in broader ethical and political ideals. Modern practices and values concerning aid to refugees draw on, and combine, different ancient Greek approaches and traditions, as well as departing from them. Dr Gray is the author of a forthcoming book on exile, refugees and the city in ancient Greece: 'Stasis and Stability: Exile, the Polis, and Political Thought, c. 404-146 BC' (OUP, forthcoming in summer 2015).

Launch of 'Migrants at Work: Immigration and Vulnerability in Labour Law' (Oxford University Press 2014), held on 13 February 2015. The volume is edited by Professor Cathryn Costello (RSC) and Emeritus Professor Mark Freedland Event programme: 1) Welcome from the Editors and the Dean of the Faculty of Law Professor Hugh Collins; 2) Migration Law on the Labour Law Curriculum: Professor ACL Davies (University of Oxford); 3) ‘Modern Slavery’ and Migrant Workers: Panacea or Panopticon?: Professor Julia O’Connell-Davison (University of Nottingham), Dr Virginia Mantouvalou (UCL), Professor Bernard Ryan (University of Leicester), Professor Bridget Anderson (COMPAS); 4) Illegality after Hounga: On Firewalls and other Fantasies?: Professor Cathryn Costello (RSC), Professor Alan Bogg (University of Oxford); 5) Developing the Migrants at Work Research Agenda.

Seminar given on 28 January 2015 by Professor Dawn Chatty (RSC), part of the RSC Hilary term 2015 Public Seminar Series Refugee studies rarely address historical matters; yet understanding ideas about sanctuary, refuge and asylum have long roots in both Western and Eastern history and philosophy. Occasionally the Nansen era of the 1920s is examined or the opening years of, say, the Palestinian refugee crisis are addressed. But by and large the circumstances, experiences and influences of refugees and exiles in modern history are ignored. This seminar attempts to contribute to an exploration of the past and to examine the responses of one State – the late Ottoman Empire – to the forced migration of millions of largely Muslim refugees and exiles from its contested borderland shared with Tsarist Russia into its southern provinces. The seminar focuses on one particular meta-ethnic group, the Circassians, and explores the humanitarian response to their movement both nationally and locally as well as their concerted drive for assisted self-settlement. The Circassians are one of many groups that were on the move at the end of the 19th century and their reception and eventual integration without assimilation in the region provide important lessons for contemporary humanitarianism.

Seminar given on 21 January 2015 by Professor Peter Heather (King's College London), part of the RSC Hilary term 2015 Public Seminar Series Up to the mid-fourth century AD, the language of refuge regularly appears in Roman sources in the context of frontier management. It is employed both of high status individuals, but also – more strikingly – of very much larger groups: certainly several tens of thousands of individuals, and sometimes apparently a hundred thousand plus-strong. The basic political economy of the Empire – powered by unmechanised agricultural production in a world of low overall population densities – meant that there was always a demand for labour, and, in the right circumstances, refugees could expect reasonable treatment. Provided that their arrival posed no military or political threat to imperial integrity, refugees would receive not only lands to cultivate on reasonable terms, but might also be settled in concentrations large enough to preserve structures of broader familial and even cultural identity. In other circumstances, however, imperial control was enforced by direct military action and survivors were sold into slavery and might themselves redistributed as individuals in adverse socio-economic conditions over very wide geographical areas. In the late fourth and early fifth centuries, a distinct change becomes apparent in imperial policy. Some very large refugee groups – particularly those that were Gothic – were granted lands within the Empire on terms which broke with long-established Roman norms. These groups were so large and retained so much autonomy that they posed a distinct threat to the continued integrity of imperial rule over the particular regions in which they were settled. Over time, some of the settlements eventually became the basis of independent successor kingdoms as the power of the west Roman centre unravelled. This transition poses an obvious question. Why did traditional Roman policy towards refugees change so markedly in the late imperial period?

This event marked the launch of the RSC Policy Briefing 'Protection in Europe for refugees from Syria' and Forced Migration Review issue 47 on 'The Syria crisis, displacement and protection' There are currently more than 2.8 million registered refugees from Syria. Ninety-six percent of these refugees are hosted by neighbouring countries – Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. With the exception of Germany and a few other limited initiatives, the primary aim of the European response has been to contain the crisis in the Syrian region and to reinforce Europe’s borders. This event marked the launch of a new RSC Policy Briefing, ‘Protection in Europe for refugees from Syria’. Report authors, Cynthia Orchard and Andrew Miller, provided an overview of the European reaction generally, as well as brief summaries of selected countries’ responses. They argued that containment of the refugee crisis to the Syrian region is unsustainable and advocate for European countries to open their doors to refugees from the region and to expand safe and legal routes of entry. Also launched at this event was issue 47 of Forced Migration Review on ‘The Syria crisis, displacement and protection’. Professor Roger Zetter, co-author (with Héloïse Ruaudel) of a major article in the issue entitled ‘Development and protection challenges of the Syrian refugee crisis’, looked at early recovery and social cohesion interventions and the transition from assistance to development-led interventions in Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan. FMR47 was funded by the Regional Development and Protection Programme, a Denmark-led initiative with contributions from the EU, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, UK and Czech Republic, for whose inception report Professor Zetter was the lead author. Download the publications at www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/syrialaunch

This event marked the launch of the RSC Policy Briefing 'Protection in Europe for refugees from Syria' and Forced Migration Review issue 47 on 'The Syria crisis, displacement and protection' There are currently more than 2.8 million registered refugees from Syria. Ninety-six percent of these refugees are hosted by neighbouring countries – Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. With the exception of Germany and a few other limited initiatives, the primary aim of the European response has been to contain the crisis in the Syrian region and to reinforce Europe’s borders. This event marked the launch of a new RSC Policy Briefing, ‘Protection in Europe for refugees from Syria’. Report authors, Cynthia Orchard and Andrew Miller, provided an overview of the European reaction generally, as well as brief summaries of selected countries’ responses. They argued that containment of the refugee crisis to the Syrian region is unsustainable and advocate for European countries to open their doors to refugees from the region and to expand safe and legal routes of entry. Also launched at this event was issue 47 of Forced Migration Review on ‘The Syria crisis, displacement and protection’. Professor Roger Zetter, co-author (with Héloïse Ruaudel) of a major article in the issue entitled ‘Development and protection challenges of the Syrian refugee crisis’, looked at early recovery and social cohesion interventions and the transition from assistance to development-led interventions in Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan. FMR47 was funded by the Regional Development and Protection Programme, a Denmark-led initiative with contributions from the EU, Denmark, Ireland, Netherlands, UK and Czech Republic, for whose inception report Professor Zetter was the lead author. Download the publications at www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/syrialaunch

Launch of the Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies. Seminar given on 15 October 2014 as part of the RSC Michaelmas term 2014 Public Seminar Series Refugee and Forced Migration Studies has grown from being a concern of a relatively small number of scholars and policy researchers in the 1980s to a global field of interest with thousands of students worldwide studying displacement either from traditional disciplinary perspectives or as a core component of newer programmes across the Humanities and Social and Political Sciences. Today the field encompasses both rigorous academic research which may or may not ultimately inform policy and practice, as well as action-research focused on advocating in favour of refugees' needs and rights. This authoritative Handbook critically evaluates the birth and development of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, and analyses the key contemporary and future challenges faced by academics and practitioners working with and for forcibly displaced populations around the world. In this talk, Dr Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Professor Gil Loescher, two of the Handbook's editors, discuss how the book provides a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the key intellectual, political, social and institutional challenges arising from mass displacement in the world today. Laying out the thinking behind the Handbook, they examine how it addresses these challenges and attempts to unify a diverse, evolving and crucial field. Professor Loescher and Dr Fiddian-Qasmiyeh are joined by a number of the Handbook's authors, who reflect on their own contributions to the volume and highlight some of cutting-edge approaches and challenges emerging in their respective areas of expertise. Read more about the Handbook: www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/news/oxford-hand…es-now-available