Forced Displacement

This book presents effective long-term solutions for displacement and migration against the background of the current debates. It offers insights on practical suggestions for dealing with displacement and migration due to violence, examines ideas for the management of global migration movements and looks into the integration of refugees and migrants. Throughout the chapters, experts from science, politics and practice shed light on the causes of global migration and the consequences of migration on a political, economic and social level. The focus of the discussion is not the avoidance of migratory movements, but above all the use of positive effects in countries of origin, transit and destination. The book is a must-read for researchers, policy-makers and politicians, interested in international cooperation and in a better understanding of causes, consequences and solutions of displacement and forced migration.

People in danger have received protection in communities beyond their own from the earliest times of recorded history. The causes — war, conflict, violence, persecution, natural disasters, and climate change — are as familiar to readers of the news as to students of the past. It is 70 years since nations in the wake of World War II drew up the landmark 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. People Forced to Flee marks this milestone. It is the latest in a long line of publications, stretching back to 1993, that were previously entitled The State of the World's Refugees. The book traces the historic path that led to the 1951 Convention, showing how history was made, by taking the centuries-old ideals of safety and solutions for refugees, to global practice. It maps its progress during which international protection has reached a much broader group of people than initially envisaged. It examines international responses to forced displacement within borders as well as beyond them, and the protection principles that apply to both. It reviews where they have been used with consistency and success, and where they have not. At times, the strength and resolve of the international community seems strong, yet solutions and meaningful solidarity are often elusive. Taking stock today - at this important anniversary – is all the more crucial as the world faces increasing forced displacement. Most is experienced in low- and middle-income countries and persists for generations. People forced to flee face barriers to improving their lives, contributing to the communities in which they live and realizing solutions. Everywhere, an effective response depends on the commitment to international cooperation set down in the 1951 Convention: a vision often compromised by efforts to minimize responsibilities. There is growing recognition that doing better is a global imperative. Humanitarian and development action has the potential to be transformational, especially when grounded in the local context. People Forced to Flee examines how and where increased development investments in education, health and economic inclusion are helping to improve socioeconomic opportunities both for forcibly displaced persons and their hosts. In 2018, the international community reached a Global Compact on Refugees for more equitable and sustainable responses. It is receiving deeper support. People Forced to Flee looks at whether that is enough for what could – and should – help define the next 70 years.

Displacement in the twenty-first century is urbanized. The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), the world’s largest humanitarian organization and the main body charged with assisting displaced people globally, estimates that over 60 per cent of refugees now live in urban areas, a proportion that only increases in the case of internally displaced people and asylum seekers. Though cities and local authorities have become essential participants in the protection of refugees, only three decades ago they were considered to sit firmly beyond UNHCR’s remit, with urban refugees typically characterized as aberrations. In The Urbanization of Forced Displacement Neil James Wilson Crawford examines the organization’s response to the growing number of refugees migrating to urban areas. Introducing a broader study of policy-making in international organizations, Crawford addresses how and why UNHCR changed its policy and practice in response to shifting trends in displacement. Citing over 400 primary UN documents, Crawford provides an in-depth study of the internal and external pressures faced by UNHCR – pressures from above, below, and within – that explain why it has radically transformed its position from the 1990s onward. UNHCR and global refugee policies have come to play an increasingly important role in the governance of global displacement. The Urbanization of Forced Displacement sheds new light on how the organization works and how it conceives its role in global politics today.

Legal precarity, mobility, and the criminalization of migrants complicate the study of forced migration and exile. Traditional methodologies can obscure both the agency of displaced people and hierarchies of power between researchers and research participants. This project critically assesses the ways in which knowledge is co-created and reproduced through narratives in spaces of displacement, advancing a creative, collective, and interdisciplinary approach. Documenting Displacement explores the ethics and methods of research in diverse forced migration contexts and proposes new ways of thinking about and documenting displacement. Each chapter delves into specific ethical and methodological challenges, with particular attention to unequal power relations in the co-creation of knowledge, questions about representation and ownership, and the adaptation of methodological approaches to contexts of mobility. Contributors reflect honestly on what has worked and what has not, providing useful points of discussion for future research by both established and emerging researchers. Innovative in its use of arts-based methods, Documenting Displacement invites researchers to explore new avenues guided not only by the procedural ethics imposed by academic institutions, but also by a relational ethics that more fully considers the position of the researcher and the interests of those who have been displaced.

This book is a philosophical analysis of the ethical treatment of refugees and stateless people, a group of people who, though extremely important politically, have been greatly under theorized philosophically. The limited philosophical discussion of refugees by philosophers focuses narrowly on the question of whether or not we, as members of Western states, have moral obligations to admit refugees into our countries. This book reframes this debate and shows why it is important to think ethically about people who will never be resettled and who live for prolonged periods outside of all political communities. Parekh shows why philosophers ought to be concerned with ethical norms that will help stateless people mitigate the harms of statelessness even while they remain formally excluded from states. The Open Access version of this book, available at https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315883854, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

The Syrian refugee crisis has galvanized attention to one of the world’s foremost challenges: forced displacement. The total number of refugees and internally displaced persons, now at over 65 million, continues to grow as violent conflict spikes.This report, Forcibly Displaced: Toward a Development Approach Supporting Refugees, the Internally Displaced, and Their Hosts, produced in close partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), attempts to sort fact from fiction to better understand the scope of the challenge and encourage new thinking from a socioeconomic perspective. The report depicts the reality of forced displacement as a developing world crisis with implications for sustainable growth: 95 percent of the displaced live in developing countries and over half are in displacement for more than four years. To help the displaced, the report suggests ways to rebuild their lives with dignity through development support, focusing on their vulnerabilities such as loss of assets and lack of legal rights and opportunities. It also examines how to help host communities that need to manage the sudden arrival of large numbers of displaced people and that are under pressure to expand services, create jobs, and address long-standing development issues. Critical to this response is collective action. As work on a new Global Compact on Responsibility Sharing for Refugees progresses, the report underscores the importance of humanitarian and development communities working together in complementary ways to support countries throughout the crisis†•from strengthening resilience and preparedness at the onset to creating lasting solutions.

At the turn of the new millenium, war, political oppression, desperate poverty, environmental degradation and disasters, and economic underdevelopment are sharply increasing the ranks of the world's twenty million forced migrants. In this volume, eighteen scholars provide a wide-ranging, interdisciplinary look beyond the statistics at the experiences of the women, men, girls, and boys who comprise this global flow, and at the highly gendered forces that frame and affect them. In theorizing gender and forced migration, these authors present a set of descriptively rich, gendered case studies drawn from around the world on topics ranging from international human rights, to the culture of aid, to the complex ways in which women and men envision displacement and resettlement.

Wildlife conservation and other environmental protection projects can have tremendous impact on the lives and livelihoods of the often mobile, difficult-to-reach, and marginal peoples who inhabit the same territory. The contributors to this collection of case studies, social scientists as well as natural scientists, are concerned with this human element in biodiversity. They examine the interface between conservation and indigenous communities forced to move or to settle elsewhere in order to accommodate environmental policies and biodiversity concerns. The case studies investigate successful and not so successful community-managed, as well as local participatory, conservation projects in Africa, the Middle East, South and South Eastern Asia, Australia and Latin America. There are lessons to be learned from recent efforts in community managed conservation and this volume significantly contributes to that discussion.