This podcast was recorded at the Annual Harrell-Bond Lecture which was on Wednesday 21 November 2007 at the University of Oxford’s Museum of Natural History. In celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the Refugee Studies Centre, HRH Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan gave the lecture and spoke on the subject of human rights and refugees.
Issue 29 of Forced Migration Review with its feature section on ‘Humanitarian reform: fulfilling its promise?’ is now in the digital library (FMR is one of five journals available).
As with any reform, says UN Emergency Relief Coordinator John Holmes in his article in this issue, “you have the believers, the sceptics and the opponents”. The perspectives of all three camps are reflected in the 25 articles that make up this issue’s feature section on humanitarian reform - which we hope will contribute to a constructive and fruitful debate around the world. FMR 29, which will be published in English, Arabic, Spanish and French, also includes 16 other articles on a wide range of subjects.
In this podcast Professor Elizabeth Colson is in conversation with Dr Anna Schmidt. Elizabeth Florence Colson is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. Her work in anthropology addresses politics, religion, social organisation, social change, migration, anthropological history, and theory and the ethnography of Africa and North America. Colson is best know for her field work with the Gwembe Tonga of Zambia which began in 1956, through the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute as a control study of the social change caused by forced resettlement. All of Colson’s work is solidly anchored in ethnography and through it she has made theoretical contributions to the subdisciplines of applied development and political anthropology. Colson was also one of a group of academics that played an important role in consolidating the Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford in its early years, working closely with the former director, Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond and the development officer at the time, Belinda Allan. Dr Anna Schmidt is a political scientist who gained her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.
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.
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.