Forced Migration Online: Blog

There is just one week left to take part in the Forced Migration Online 2010 User Survey.

The information gathered in this survey will help us to better address user needs and will be taken into account when planning any future changes to the site.

Relevant comments will also be fed back to our funders, helping to ensure that the resources provided by Forced Migration Online will remain available in the future.

The survey has 24 questions and should take only 5-10 minutes of your time. Please take a few minutes to contribute your views.

This survey will close on Tuesday 31 August.

Monday 9 August marked the United Nations International Day of Indigenous Peoples.

“The world’s population of indigenous people now numbers some 350 million individuals representing over 5,000 languages and cultures in more than 70 countries on every continent. Many live on the fringes of society, in sometimes precarious and impoverished conditions. Their material, environmental and spiritual situations, together with their world-views and intimate relationship with the land and natural resources, are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of globalization. The resulting instability, aggravated by dispossession from their land and natural resources, has disrupted the handing down of their cultural heritage from one generation to the next.”

UNESCO, “International Decade of the World’s Indigenous People”

Forced Migration Online’s resource page on the subject highlights a number of key online information sources relating to indigenous peoples.

It also features a selection of full-text documents, web-based resources, and descriptions of relevant organizations available through FMO that focus on related issues.

• FMO Resource Summary: Indigenous Peoples

This podcast was recorded as part of the Oxfam Archive Oral History project.

It features an interview with Maurice Herson, Editor of Forced Migration Review and previously Deputy Humanitarian Director and Head of Humanitarian Programme Advisory Team at Oxfam.

‘Rwanda and the Great Lakes: A Personal View from the Oxfam Archive” is the second of a two-part series. In this recording, Maurice speaks about the Great Lakes emergency and the Rwanda genocide.

The first podcast focused on Maurice’s career in Sudan in the 1980s.

• Listen to the podcast
• Subscribe via iTunes

This podcast was recorded as part of the Oxfam Archive Oral History project.

It features an interview with Maurice Herson, Editor of Forced Migration Review and previously Deputy Humanitarian Director and Head of Humanitarian Programme Advisory Team at Oxfam.

‘Sudan in the 1980s’ is the first of a two-part series. In this recording, Maurice speaks about his career as a Relief Coordinator in Sudan.

The second podcast in this series will be released next week. It will focus on the Great Lakes refugee crisis of the mid-1990s.

• Listen to the podcast
• Subscribe via iTunes

The Forced Migration Discussion List (also known as the FMList) is an email-based community, moderated by staff at Forced Migration Online.

The List provides regular updates on major news, publications and events relating to forced migration.

We have recently printed a new batch of promotional cards (image above) to highlight this service. We would like to thank Cèsar Casellas, who was kind enough to let us use his striking photo of two Saharwi girls in Dakhla refugee camp in the Tindouf region of Algeria.

You can read more about the issues faced by refugees in Algeria in Forced Migration Online’s Algerian Resource Summary. You can also access a collection of photos focusing on the Saharwi people.

For more information about the Forced Migration Discussion List, or to subscribe, please visit Forced Migration Online.

• Cèsar Casellas’ Flickr page
• Forced Migration Discussion List
• Discussion List posting guidelines
• Resource Summary Algeria
• Photographs: Saharawi

A new podcast on the subject of ‘protection’ has been added to Forced Migration Online.

On 23rd July 2010 Dennis McNamara, gave the endnote lecture at the Refugee Studies Centre’s International Summer School in Forced Migration.

McNamara, who has several decades of humanitarian experience mainly with UNHCR and OCHA in Asia and Africa, spoke on the subject of protection.

Dennis McNamara is currently Humanitarian Adviser at the Centre for Humanitarian Dialogue, in Geneva.

• Listen to the podcast
• Subscribe via iTunes

A new community blog, launched in June 2010, highlights the voices of asylum seekers in Hong Kong.

“Seeking Refuge” is a community website where asylum seekers in Hong Kong can make their voices heard. All of the posts on Seeking Refuge are written by asylum seekers themselves. It is also a place where the general public can learn first-hand about the experiences and lives of asylum seekers residing in Hong Kong.

There are some 7,000 recognized asylum seekers in Hong Kong, mostly from South Asia or Africa. This website allows them to tell their stories.

• Seeking Refuge

A new collection of photographs, focusing on Karen and Karenni refugees in Thailand, is now available to view in the FMO photo gallery.

The Karen people reside primarily in southern and southeastern Myanmar (Burma), where they make up approximately 7 percent of the population. The Karenni people are a subgroup of the Karen people.

An estimated 400,000 Karen and Karenni refugees have fled to Thailand, in order to escape persecuting by Myanmar’s military government, many of them living in camps on the border. These photographs provide a rare glimpse into daily life in two camps along the Thai-Burma border: Mae La and Ban Mai Nai Soi.

The photographs were taken by Amity Malack, a graduate from the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

A full archive of FMO photo collections can be accessed through the FMO photo gallery.

• Photographs: Karen refugees in Thailand

‘Deportation, non-deportability and ideas of membership’ by Dr Emanuela Paoletti, the latest in the series of Refugee Studies Centre Working Papers, is now available online.

“The growing number of foreign nationals that find themselves in a legal limbo whereby they are not officially members of the host country, yet cannot be deported, raises a number of important questions. What explains the fact that the state is unable to deport a significant number of deportable people? How does this affect our understanding of the state’s social regulative function and capacity? What does this tell us about the rights and obligations that link the state and non-deportable people? How can the link between the state and non-deportability be conceptualised? These questions are the at the core of this paper whose starting assumption is that deportation and non-deportability can be treated as two distinct concepts which shed light on shifting notions and practices of membership.”

Read the paper:

• ‘Deportation, non-deportability and ideas of membership’ (PDF file 148 KB)
• Refugee Studies Centre Working Papers

Forced Migration Online has recently published a new resource summary, focusing on Angola.

The Republic of Angola is on the west coast of south-central Africa, and has an estimated population of around 13 million people. Wealthy in natural resources, it is now one of the fastest growing economies in Africa, fuelled mainly by its oil production.

Despite this apparent wealth however, the country faces enormous socio-economic problems. These are the product of a 27-year long civil war, which raged from 1975 to 2002 between the governing MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) and UNITA (National Union for the Total Independence of Angola). At the height of the civil war, it is estimated that over 4 million people were displaced.

All our summaries provide links to key resources, websites and documents exploring contemporary debate on on key issues, in forced migration as well as links to wider issues concerned with human rights and displacement.

Our full collection of resource summaries, focusing on specific regions and themes, can be accessed from the links below.

• Angola resource summary
• Regional Resource Summaries
• Thematic Resource Summaries