Forced Migration Online: Blog

The Forced Migration Discussion List (also known as the FMList) is an email-based community, moderated by staff at Forced Migration Online. It provides regular updates on major news, publications and events relating to forced migration.

Posts to the Forced Migration Discussion List will often include information about relevant funding opportunities, job vacancies and new research projects. Subscribers to the List also have access to an invaluable community of experts in the field of forced migration, and may occasionally use the List to request specific information on issues relevant to forced migration.

Messages sent to the Forced Migration Discussion List are moderated and so we have recently published a set of posting guidelines to help users who wish to post a message to the List. Users who regularly post messages to the List may wish to take a moment to read through them.

For more information, or to subscribe, please visit the FMList page on Forced Migration Online.

• Forced Migration Discussion List
• Post guidelines

The Refugees Studies Centre at Oxford University has recently published a strategic overview of current policy trends and future directions in the forced migration field. The following seven interconnected themes were identified as being of key research interest and of immediate and future relevance to policymakers:

• state fragility and forced migration;
• the economics of forced migration;
• environmental displacement;
• displaced groups with specific needs;
• durable solutions;
• humanitarian space and spaces of protection;
• realising protection: legal and institutional challenges.

The document also identifies areas likely to demand attention in the future.

Prepared by Dr Katy Long, a researcher at the RSC, the document also benefited from inputs by senior RSC staff and researchers and some external policy partners of the RSC.

It is hoped that this overview will be instrumental in informing the research agenda, policy priorities and institutional practices of the wider academic community and policy stakeholders, helping improve international humanitarian action and conflict prevention, and addressing the rights and needs of forced migrants.

The RSC would welcome receiving your feedback on the relevance and usefulness of this document. We also encourage you to contact the RSC should you wish to discuss a specific topic further, share information on a particular area, or support our research. Kindly direct your feedback or queries to the RSC’s Policy Programme Officer, Ms Héloïse Ruaudel, at rscpolicy@qeh.ox.ac.uk.

• Forced migration: Current policy trends and future directions

The Refugee Studies Centre, (at the Oxford Department of International Development, University of Oxford) is pleased to announce that Professor Saskia Sassen will give the Annual Elizabeth Colson Lecture on 26 May 2010.

Saskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Member, The Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University. Her latest books are “Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global” “Assemblages” (Princeton University Press 2008) and “A Sociology of Globalization” (Norton 2007). She has recently completed a five-year project for UNESCO on sustainable human settlement, the results of which have been published as one of the volumes of the “Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems” (Oxford: EOLSS Publishers).

The lecture will be entitled “The complexity of Powerlessness: What makes human rights law perform?” Saskia Sassen will speak about the limits of power and the complexities of powerlessness – the direct or mediated resistances that the powerless can deploy knowingly or not.

Immigration and human rights help to explore these more abstract issues – especially in powerful countries vis-à-vis undocumented workers, who are among the most vulnerable subjects in those same countries. And yet, under certain conditions, the powerless can make history, even if they do not gain power in this process. She will discuss two institutional domains where powerlessness can become complex and the powerless have made history.

The lecture will take place at the Bernard Sunley Lecture Theatre, St Catherine’s College, Manor Road, Oxford (0X1 3UJ). The event will start at 5pm and will be followed by a drinks reception.

For more information or to reserve a seat, please contact Wouter te Kloeze: wouter.tekloeze@qeh.ox.ac.uk, +44(0)1865 281726

• The complexity of Powerlessness: What makes human rights law perform?

Back issues of many working papers and policy briefings published by the Humanitarian Policy Group are now available from the Forced  Migration Online digital library.

Published between 2000 and 2009 by the Humanitarian Policy Group, part of the Overseas Development Institute, these documents focus on topics such as: aid coordination, cooperation with affected governments, security, terrorism, HIV/AIDS and land use .

The Humanitarian Policy Group is dedicated to improving humanitarian policy and practice through a combination of high-quality analysis, dialogue and debate.

• Browse documents from the Humanitarian Policy Group

Hidden Voices: Urban Refugees in Nairobi, Kenya from International Rescue Committee on Vimeo.

Issue 34 of Forced Migration Review (FMR) is now available in the digital library. This issue focuses on the topic of “Urban Displacement”.

Articles explore the complexity of the challenges faced by those displaced into urban areas and by those seeking to protect and assist them, and argue for the need for a radical rethinking of approaches by the international community.

The issue also includes a spotlight on Haiti and the use of standards to shape response and recovery after the earthquake in January, plus a selection of articles on subjects such as Mauritania, South Africa, Timor-Leste, Colombia, Pakistan, the new Kampala Convention, family separation in the UK, cross-border mobility of Iraqi refugees, and maternal mortality among conflict-affected populations.

FMR is also published in French, Spanish and Arabic.

Forced Migration Online’s latest resource summary, which complements FMR 34, is also available to view online. It provides links to key resources, websites and documents exploring contemporary debate on these issues, as well as links to wider issues concerned with human rights and displacement.

Full Issue

• FMR 2010, No. 34:  Urban Displacement
  

Resource Summary

• Urban Displacement

Individual Articles

• Adapting to urban displacement
• Meeting humanitarian challenges in urban areas
• Protection challenges for persons of concern in urban settings
• Urban displacement and migration in Colombia
• Invisibility of urban IDPs in Europe
• Profiling urban IDPs
• Improving living conditions in Bossaso, Somalia
• The poor and the displaced in Khartoum
• The journey towards social exclusion in Colombia
• Desperate lives: urban refugee women in Malaysia and Egypt
• Urban refugee health: meeting the challenges
• Support systems among urban IDPs in Georgia
• Education and self-reliance in Egypt
• Urban shelter and the limits of humanitarian action
• Refugees and space in urban areas in Malaysia
• Urban IDPs in Uganda: victims of institutional convenience
• Transition, connection and uncertainty: IDPs in Kampala
• Urban Somali refugees in Yemen
• Displacement within the city: Colombia
• The role of municipal authorities
• Surviving in the city
• ATM cash assistance: does it work?
• Cities of Solidarity: local integration in Latin America
• City of Sanctuary – a UK initiative for hospitality
• Hosting ‘the enemy’
• “Legitimate” protection spaces: UNHCR’s 2009 policy
• Using standards to shape response and recovery in Haiti
• Beyond good intentions: implementing the Kampala Convention
• Norwegian Refugee Council: Shade netting: simple design – effective relief
• RAISE Initiative: The blind spot of the Millennium Development Goals
• International Displacement Monitoring Centre: Displacement in urban areas: implications for humanitarian action
• Cross-border mobility of Iraqi refugees
• Non-nationals displaced in South Africa
• Social mobilisation in IDP camps in Pakistan
• Flexible mandate for protection
• IDP camp closure and gender inequality in Timor-Leste
• Family breakdown in Bogotá
• Living death: separation in the UK
• Voluntary repatriation and the participation of Mauritanian refugees

The research guide to Forced Migration Periodicals has been updated and now includes sections on periodicals that address not only forced migration generally but also health, law, humanitarian assistance, emergency relief and the larger issue of international migration.

This guide lists journals, substantive newsletters and other regularly produced publications that are relevant in the field of forced migration studies. The emphasis has been placed on periodicals that are currently being published and whose online contents are up-to-date.

The collection of links is housed in the Delicious social bookmarking service and will automatically be updated when new titles are added or when existing links are edited.

• Research Guide

Applications are invited for this year’s International Summer School in Forced Migration, to be held at Wadham College, Oxford. Apply by 1 March (bursary applicants), 1 May (self-/employer-funded applicants).

Now in its 21st year, the course offers an intensive, interdisciplinary and participative approach to the study of forced migration. It aims to enable people working with refugees and other forced migrants to reflect critically on the forces and institutions that dominate the world of the displaced.

• International Summer School in Forced Migration

‘Iraq’s refugees – beyond tolerance’ by Dr Philip Marfleet and Dr Dawn Chatty, the latest in the series of Refugee Studies Centre Forced Migration Policy Briefings, is now available online.

This policy brief considers the situation of displaced populations within Iraq’s national borders and of communities of Iraqis living under difficult circumstances in a number of Middle Eastern states.

The paper suggests that despite military and policy discourses of renewed stability in Iraq, the crisis is far from over and that mass return is unlikely as long as security remains a key concern. It presents some key principles for consideration by policy makers in government, in migration agencies and in the humanitarian networks and recommends that further research should be conducted on the scale, circumstances and patterns of movement of Iraqis within and beyond the Middle East.

• Policy brief

This podcast was recorded at the Refugee Studies Centre’s Annual Harrell-Bond Lecture which was on Wednesday 18th November 2009 at the Museum of Natural History, University of Oxford. The Harrell-Bond Lecture is held annually in honour of Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond, founding former director of the Centre and of the academic field of refugee studies or forced migration studies. Jan Egeland, former UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator and currently director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs gave the 2009 lecture on the subject of political deals and durable solutions for the displaced.

• Podcast
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