Forced Migration Online: Blog

The Forced Migration Online team is seeking to recruit an Information Manager, in a diverse and challenging role. FMO hosts a large and expanding collection of resources – including documents, journals, videos, podcasts, photos – related to forced migration issues worldwide. It is hosted by the Refugee Studies Centre (Oxford Department of International Development), which is a world-leading centre for research, teaching and dissemination. The position is 50% time for 12 months, with the possibility of extension.

The Information Manager will play a key role in gathering and managing content for the website, as well as commissioning and editing original material. The position will also involve managing copyright and cataloguing issues and contributing towards fund raising activities.

Ideally, applicants should have a degree or equivalent in a social science discipline, excellent writing and editing skills in English, an understanding of key forced migration issues, and some knowledge and/or experience of academic research and publications.

Further particulars are available in the attached Job Description (PDF file), or from the Administrator, Oxford Department of International Development, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford, OX1 3TB (tel: +44 (0)1865 281805, email: recruitment@qeh.ox.ac.uk), to whom applications should be made, quoting reference no.VG-08-018 and enclosing a letter addressing the selection criteria, a curriculum vitae, and the names of two referees. There is no application form. The closing date for applications is noon on Friday 31 October 2008.

Increasingly, there is widespread recognition that the environment, people’s lives and livelihoods are being transformed as a result of climate change. This has been linked to increased levels of environmental and weather-related disasters and higher levels of displacement. The RSC has produced a set of resources which debate the issues - including numbers, definitions and modalities - and the tension between the need for research and the need to act. Prepared to complement Forced Migration Review 31 and the FMO Research Guide on Climate Change and Displacement, FMO also hosts a new Resource Summary on the topic which provides links to many key resources, websites and documents related to climate change, environmental change, disasters and forced migration.

• Resource Summary
• Research Guide
• Forced Migration Review 31

‘The State, Nation, Citizen: rethinking repatriation’ by Katy Long, the latest in the series of Refugee Studies Centre Working Papers, is now available online.

This paper offers a recontextualisation of the problems posed by the idea of repatriation within the structures of the liberal-democratic international community by providing a historical contextualisation for the political concepts underpinning repatriation. This demonstrates that the essential difficulty in understanding refugee repatriation as a “solution” to displacement is a result of the fundamental problems of attempting to reconcile a political philosophy of universal human rights with the principle of nation-state sovereignty. The paper then argues that post-1985 attempts to reconceptualise repatriation were fundamentally flawed not only because they were largely prompted by a narrowing of the political space for asylum and the need to find alternative practical solutions rather than any foundational approach, but because in reducing theory to practice, repatriation was depoliticised into “return”, reducing the likelihood of durable solutions based on citizenship and the remaking of state-citizen bonds which required an explicitly political context. Examining empirical evidence, in particular from the case of Guatemalan “organised and collective” return from January 1993, the paper makes clear that refugee groups are often highly-organised political communities, whose decision-making abilities have long-been recognised (particularly in studies of unassisted repatriation)8 but rarely encompassed within official pathways to return. It argues that as demonstrated in Guatemala, recognition of this more direct and politicised refugee engagement in displacement resolution offers an opportunity to strengthen both concepts of refugee dignity and the durability of return.

• State, Nation, Citizen: rethinking repatriation (PDF file 328 KB)
• Refugee Studies Centre Working Papers

The photographic exhibition Guatemalan forced migration: the politics of care in representing refugees explores the mechanisms of representation used for forced migrants that stage appropriate refugee identities to justify the need for humanitarian care. The exhibition explores these issues through photo-documentary work with indigenous Guatemalan forced migrants living in the former refugee camp of La Gloria in the state of Chiapas in Mexico. The project is a collaboration between photographer, Manuel Gil, and doctoral research student in Sociology, Óscar F. Gil-García.

The photos and descriptions are now available to view on Forced Migration Online. The photos are complemented with a podcast in which Óscar F. Gil-García is interviewed about his work on the project.

• Photos and descriptions
• Podcast

This podcast was recorded at a lecture organised by the Refugee Studies Centre and sponsored by Clifford Chance, the event was held on Wednesday 18th June 2008 at the offices of Clifford Chance, London. Lord Malloch-Brown, Minister of State for Africa, Asia and the UN gave the lecture which was entitled ‘Reputational Hazard: Rescuing Refugees in the Era of Illegal Immigration and Terrorism’.

• Podcast
• Subscribe via iTunes

This podcast was recorded at the Refugee Studies Centre’s Annual Elizabeth Colson Lecture which was on Wednesday 21st May 2008 at Somerville College, University of Oxford. The Elizabeth Colson Lecture is held annually in honour of Professor Elizabeth Colson, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor James C. Scott, Sterling Professor of Political Science, Yale University gave this years lecture on the subject of Zomia.

“Zomia is a shorthand reference to the huge, massif of mainland Southeast Asia, running from the Central Highlands of Vietnam westward all the way to northeastern India and including the southwest Chinese provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, and western Guangxi.”

• Podcast
• Subscribe via iTunes

This podcast was recorded by Radio Netherlands Worldwide at the first of The Hague Debates on Thursday, 22 May 2008 in the Peace Palace and is entitled ‘When home gets too hot: Human Displacement and Climate Change in International Law’. The debate features Professor Roger Zetter, Director of the Refugee Studies Centre.

• Podcast
• Subscribe via iTunes

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