Forced Migration Online: Blog

A special issue of Forced Migration Review: Iraq’s displacement crisis: the search for solutions is now in the digital library (FMR is one of five journals available).

The countries of the Middle East are now host to the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world. Violence has displaced two million inside Iraq and over two million have crossed its borders. Most refugees are in Syria and Jordan – which host the largest number of refugees per capita of any country on earth. The vast majority are surviving with little or no assistance from the international community. Few, if any, enjoy their rights as refugees.

This special issue of FMR presents 26 articles from governments, UN agencies and civil society examining the extent of the displacement crisis and the search for solutions. The Editors have worked in close consultation with
UNHCR’s Iraq Unit and are grateful for funding support from the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation, the International Organization for Migration, Islamic Relief Worldwide and the Brookings-Bern Project on Internal Displacement.

• Iraq’s displacement crisis: the search for solutions

When Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond came in to be interviewed for the first FMO podcast, she very kindly brought us some interesting documents from the Southern Refugees Legal Advocates Conference, which was held last January in Nairobi.

The conference’s tasks were to establish a code of ethics for refugee legal aid practitioners who work through NGOs and law clinics and to consider creating a ‘southern’ network to address common concerns and to advocate more effectively on behalf of refugees as a collective.

The resulting three documents, the Nairobi Code, the SRLAN Charter and the conference report are now in the digital library.

• The Nairobi code: model rules of ethics for legal advisors in refugee cases
• Charter Southern Refugee Legal Advocacy Network (SRLAN)
• Report: Southern Refugee Legal Advocates Conference

In this podcast Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond and Prof Roger Zetter discuss the evolution of the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) and of the academic field of refugee studies or forced migration studies. As the founding former director of the RSC and the current director respectively, and with a long shared history of collaboration since the centre was established, Harrell-Bond and Zetter are well placed to discuss its early years and the changes it has undergone. In this conversation, they also talk about the current state of refugee protection and the asylum process, and examine the responses of the international community, particularly UNHCR.

• Podcast

As part of its expanding collection of multimedia resources, the FMO team have launched a series of podcasts. These audio resources comprise a series of discussions between experts on forced migration issues from the academia, practitioner organizations and international agencies. In the near future, the team plan to add interviews and life histories of refugees and other displaced people.

In commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) at Oxford (which hosts FMO), we are beginning this series of podcasts with a collection of conversations with prominent academics, in which they discuss the evolution the field of refugee and forced migration studies. The first of these is with the founder and former Director of the RSC, Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond.

The podcasts are in MP3 audio format. They can be listened to in-page by clicking on the provided Flash player or via iTunes through the link provided. They can also be downloaded for later listening or for transferring to a portable MP3 compatible device device such as an iPod.

• Podcast series

One of the other web projects that Forced Migration Online are currently involved with is Mursi Online. The website officially went live today and was developed by the FMO team at the Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford, and funded by the Christensen Fund of Palo Alto, California. The website has many features including video clips and an image gallery. Mursi Online is intended to be a source of information and news about the Mursi, and a place where the pressures and challenges facing them today can be described and discussed, increasingly, it is hoped, by Mursi themselves.

• Mursi Online