Nicholas Van Hear writes:
The UN is currently steering the international community
towards global ‘compacts’ on migration and refugees, due to be agreed by the
end of 2018. While the aims of the
compacts are worthy, many lack confidence that they hold promise of real
progress, nor that the three traditional ‘durable solutions’ (local
integration, resettlement and return) can address the challenge on the scale
needed – addressing the often ‘protracted displacement’ of some 65 million
people worldwide.
This contribution takes as a starting point recent proposals
that depart from the usual three ‘durable solutions’ and the current international
migration architecture, and that think about alternatives. One set of proposals explores the idea of new
nations or polities for refugees and migrants – suggestions that have been
dismissed as fantasies by many commentators. But perhaps such seemingly
outlandish proposals should not be rejected out of hand. The presentation
will explore the possibility not of a new ‘refugee nation’ on an island or other bounded territory, but
rather a new kind of transnational polity – Refugia.
We
envisage this as a linked set of
territories and spaces connecting refugee and other migrant communities that would
be governed by refugees and migrants themselves. The key feature of
Refugia is that its different parts are connected, with mobility between them,
and that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
It will be suggested that such a transnational polity is already
imperfectly prefigured in many of the transnational practices that refugees and
migrants deploy and the environments in which they find themselves today -- in both
the ‘global south’ and the ‘global north’.
Camps and communities in countries neighbouring conflicts,
neighbourhoods in global cities, transnational political practices and money
transfers, emergent communities in disparate locations en route: all are fragments that taken separately do not seem to
promise much. But cumulatively they could add up to Refugia, imperfectly
prefigured. Consolidating them into a common polity might prove to be a
way out of the current impasse.
The seminar is on Thursday 1 March, 16.30-18.00, in the Student Hub, White Space, on the 3rd floor of the Abercrombie building. All welcome. For the whole seminar series programme, check: http://cendep.blo
The presentation will develop
ideas set out in Cohen and Van Hear 2017 ‘Visions of Refugia: territorial and transnational solutions to
mass displacement‘, in Planning
Theory & Practice.
See also Imagining Refugia:
Could a New Transnational Polity Help Solve the Refugee Crisis? | Foreign Affairs online | Nicholas Van Hear | 17/10/2017
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