Torture prevention: recent and future events

Richard Carver writes:

Quakers against torture

Quaker Concern for the Abolition of Torture is holding a day conference in London this Saturday, 3 November. I will be speaking first, then listening to an array of really interesting presentations, including Professor Ray Bull on investigative interviewing, Dr Elizabeth Stubbins Bates on torture and conflict, and Anna Edmundson on the work of the UK’s National Preventive Mechanism. A £10 fee (£5 students) includes lunch. Friends House, Euston Road, London, 10.30-16.30. All welcome, but booking recommended (follow the link above).

Meetings in Copenhagen
It is more than two years since Lisa Handley and I published the findings of our research project: DoesTorture Prevention Work? It is extremely gratifying how much continued interest there is in our book. Over the summer, I was invited to advise DIGNITY, the Danish Institute Against Torture, on their future planning (and also gave a public lecture in Copenhagen). DIGNITY is a primarily medical organization caring for the survivors of torture, but also has a strong emphasis on prevention and detention monitoring.

German police against torture

I have just returned from a really interesting conference at the police university of Brandenburg in Germany. The focus was fair treatment of persons in police custody. I talked about torture prevention and there were a series of sessions on investigative interviewing, mobilizing police potential to realize human rights, and developing police capacities, among other issues.

The university is in Oranienburg, next to the Nazi Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Some of the college buildings are former SS barracks. To their credit, the university authorities do not shy away from the lessons and implications of this history.

Atlas of Torture
The Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Human Rights at the University of Vienna have long been an important actor in torture prevention and we were honoured to have them as partners in our research. Over the summer they have updated and relaunched their Atlas of Torture, which is an excellent online resource for anyone interested in the issue. Please go and take a look.

Review article on Does Torture Prevention Work?
Back in Copenhagen, Torture is a specialist journal focusing on the medical aspects on the subject. They have published a review article of our book by Dr Hans Draminsky Petersen, a former member of the UN Sub-committee for Prevention of Torture and a highly respected medical practitioner treating torture survivors. Dr Petersen is critical of our methodology and findings in ways that we don’t agree with – and the journal includes a short response on our part. However, we greatly appreciated his positive words about the contribution of our research to the existing scholarship on torture: “this book will represent a key source of knowledge in the field of torture prevention and be a valued handbook on torture prevention for many years to come.”

Words have consequences

This is not about torture prevention, but in light of recent events I had to refer back to something posted on the blog a few months ago. I wrote in March about the Hungarian government’s attacks on refugees and civil society activists, all justified by the claim that the billionaire George Soros is bankrolling Muslims to emigrate to Hungary and undermine its “Christian culture.” Soros being Jewish, the claim has more than a touch of the global anti-Semitic conspiracy theory.

Readers could be forgiven for thinking that I was exaggerating this nutty theory (although I did provide sources). In Hungary it worked, however, with the ruling Fidesz party re-elected in April and now pressing ahead with its anti-refugee, anti-human rights agenda.

This theme has now been taken up on the other side of the Atlantic. President Donald Trump and leading members of the Republican party blame Soros for funding protests against them and, in the latest version, for funding the “caravan” of Central American refugees now walking slowly through Mexico. Aside from the obvious point that the refugees, mainly Hondurans, are seeking to escape what the president would no doubt call a “shithole country,” it is unclear why Soros would fund this initiative unless he was seeking to help the xenophobic candidates in next week’s mid-term elections. Still, logic never got in the way of the Big Lie.

But people take this nonsense seriously. First, someone sent pipe bombs to George Soros and a number of prominent Democrats, including two ex-Presidents. The man arrested is a vocal Trump supporter. Secondly, a man gunned down 11 worshippers at a Pittsburgh synagogue, telling police he wanted to kill all the Jews. His motivation was alleged Jewish attempts to flood the country with immigrants and destroy white America.

Words are not merely words. They are actions, and they have consequences.

Hamdi Lecture: Syrian architect Marwa Al-Sabouni

The annual Nabeel Hamdi Lecture is in the honour of Emeritus Professor Nabeel Hamdi, who is the founder of the DEP Masters programme, past director of CENDEP, and one of the most distinguished academics in our field. He has a long career of inspiring people to bring out their potential in making changes. The annual lecture celebrates this spirit with discussions around humanitarian and development issues that are relevant to CENDEP.

Marwa Al-Sabouni will be talking on “Reflections from Syria: The role of architecture in conflict” at the annual Nabeel Hamdi Lecture that will take place on 30 October. The lecture will be followed by book signing and reception. The event is free and booking is essential.

Where: The Main Lecture Theatre, John Henry Brookes Building, Headington campus, Oxford Brookes University

When: 30 October (Tuesday) 18.30

Further details:

http://cendep.blogspot.com/2018/10/meet-our-speaker-for-this-years-annual.html

https://www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/events/ols-18-19---reflections-from-syria--the-role-of-architecture-in-conflict/

Booking details:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/marwa-al-sabouni-role-of-architecture-in-conflict-reflections-from-syria-tickets-47942957677

Refugee resettlement in South America - WiP seminar

This week's Work in Progress seminar will be given by Dr Marcia Vera Espinosa. She is a Lecturer in Human Geography at Queen Mary University of London. She is also Associate Researcher in the project 'Prospects for International Migration Governance' (MIGPROSP). Her research interests are in refugee and migrant integration, international and regional migration governance, forced migration and immigration policies in Latin America. Marcia has recently published in Global Policy, Forced Migration Review and Development Policy Review. She is currently working in the co-edited book ‘The Dynamics of Regional Migration Governance’ to be published by Edward Elgar Publishing.

Her talk will explore how the negotiations and power relationships between resettled refugees and actors involved in the resettlement programme in Chile and Brazil affected refugees’ experience. Drawing in data collected in two extended fieldwork visits in Chile and Brazil, Marcia will trace the encounters and unfulfilled expectations held by Colombian and Palestinian resettled refugees and the resettlement programmes in each country. She argues that the tensions that emerged between the programme organisers and refugees, shaped the experience as one of ‘unsettlement’ by which refugees’ radical uncertainties created by displacement, extended and normalised into third country resettlement.

The seminar will be held in the student hub on the third floor of the Abercrombie building (Headington campus). Please see here for further details and for a list of the entire seminar series.

Refugees as citymakers

Cathrine Brun writes:

I had the great honour of being invited to participated in a panel debate at the American University of Beirut (AUB) on 10 September 2018 to launch a new report titled Refugees as City-Makers, edited by Mona Fawaz, Ahmad Gharbieh, Mona Harb and Dounia Salamé at AUB:

The innovative report approaches forced migration through the lens of individual and collective agency and focusing on the transformative impact that refugees have on urban space as home-makers, city navigators, political subjects and urban producers, largely but no solely in Beirut. The ways in which individual experiences, agency, resilience and humanity are explored in the report and the innovative and creative methods that have been developed and adopted for the study of forced migrants in the city stand out as a significant contribution.

I very much enjoyed reading the report. The report is written with an energy that inspires, and with insights that challenge the reader in multiple ways. Many reflections and ideas came up in the course of reading the report and my short commentary presented in the debate is summarised below in three points. 

First, the report contributes to addressing the urban itself. The humanitarian community and forced migration researchers are still to come to terms with the urban. We need new ways of creating knowledge about the urban: and forced migrants as a constitutive part of the city, and there are many examples in the report of how we can further these insights. The interesting inclusions in the report of refugees’ material and immaterial practices in refugee camps and so-called informal tented settlements bring out the perspective of the urban in very particular ways. The often open spaces transformed by building and dwelling in camps stand in stark contrast to the already built up, dense material environment of the urban neighbourhood where people learn, but also changes, the landscape. Emphasising both mobility and neighbourhoods – the interaction between flows and stillness – is a particularly important way to analyse the city and refugees as city makers. I think this point is excellently portrayed in multiple ways and one example is the poem on page 122: The sleeper, the waiter, the wanderer and the bystander.

The way the urban is approached also then very much connects with my second point: which is the rich ways in which several authors point out the paradoxes of forced migration in the city. In particular these paradoxes come out in the discussion of the legal status: how challenging it is to be without a status and how creatively many refugees without status manoeuvre and negotiate the city and how networks are relied upon in that process. We also learn about the profound implications and uncertainty that the lack of status produce. Simultaneously, different contributions show so well the changing dynamics of legal status and how, even with status, refugees are often leading very precarious lives.

With all this richness it really touched me to read Dima El-Khoury’s statement on page 99 when she says: “it is virtually impossible for Syrians today to develop a healthy, comfortable situation in Lebanon”. 

Much more research must go into understanding the implication of status and we need that urgently, because it is not sufficiently problematized in the current global policies for refugees and migrants.

This brings me to my third point: the ways in which forced migrants use, resent and relate to the humanitarian category of ‘refugees’: It differs so much from situation to situation and also within one group of forced migrants. The report shows the need for always understanding the contextualised meaning of these labels and categories that are at the same time universal but extremely localised. A strong testament is the Syrian men in their 20s and 30s living in Getawi who rejects the label refugee and use the urban context to enable reclassification based on the geopolitical landscape that emerge in the city through flags, banners and other symbols. Through these stories we can understand the role of the refugee label in the city and its changing character produced in the dynamics between the refugees and the city. The presentation of banners about refugees in the urban landscape is overwhelming and the analysis of those banners on page 87 is telling when it shows that the word ‘displaced’ only appears twice on those banners.

Here is also the place where I would like to introduce the dimension that I missed: I get a clear sense of the ways that the refugees are city-makers. That they create an alternative image of Beirut portrayed in the maps presented, but I would have loved to see how that alternative image is more actively encountered, engaged with and negotiated by others who are adjusting to these alternative maps. These may the unheard voices in the report: and we can argue that they often get enough space, and that it is not the purpose with this publication to provide those voices. However, more insights into the interaction between different groups of city makers – like more established groups in the city – could contribute to further understand the way the refugee label is used in the production of the city. While it is a big task, it could potentially help to develop this enormously rich material and to theorise beyond Beirut and back into a general understanding of the urban, which was my first point.

There is much more to say, and I am sure the report will continue to create debate and inspiration for further study. So I leave it with the conclusion that this is certainly a publication that I will be using in teaching and research and I hope that the research results will be analysed further, synthesised further and that more comes out of it.

The whole launch of the report can be watched here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=CyOH7RsBQDc

On localisation and local knowledge in humanitarian action: working on the ground in the Central African Republic

Brigitte Piquard introduces her Work in Progress seminar, which is on Thursday 18 October at 4.00pm. (Please note the earlier time this week.)

For the last year, I have been working with Caritas Centrafrique, a national Central African NGO, on different capacity building projects.  The Central African Republic is currently facing one of the worst humanitarian situations as 54% of the population is in need of emergency relief and more than 25% is displaced.  From this experience national staff have developed a wealth of operational humanitarian knowledge that is invisible and undervalued by the international humanitarian community and sometimes underestimated by the national staff themselves.

We decided then to reflect on this and to re-organise our work, building on this knowledge rather than replacing it.  We also decided to start a reflection on the specificity and the ambitions of national NGOs in the humanitarian system and the importance of tacit local humanitarian knowledge in the debate on localisation.  Ongoing discussions are taking place in the field and a workshop was organised in Oxford in June 2018 with representatives of international organisations that have adopted the localisation agenda.

During the work in progress discussion, we will present the state of art of this ongoing reflection and we will question why local knowledge is missing from the localisation debate.  

The seminar will be in Abercrombie, third floor, Student Hub/White Space. Please click here for details of the whole series.

United for freedom: support Refugee Youth Service on 16 October

CENDEP has a particular connection to Refugee Youth Service, which was set up by DEP alumni Jonny Willis and Ben Teuten in 2015. Please support RYS's 24-hour fundraising appeal.

Refugee Youth Service and Velos Youth are grassroots organisations providing in partnership, since 2015, safe sanctuaries and opportunities for wellbeing and growth to young people on the move, in France, Greece and Italy.

While the “refugee crisis” fades away from public eye, thousands of young people, many of them unaccompanied minors, are struggling their way to a more humane future, away from conflict and deprivation.

Refugee Youth Service & Velos Youth are places for first - arrivals and second chances, serving the most marginalised ones with persistent attention, aid and hope.

On October 16th at 6am GMT/8am EET, Refugee Youth Service and Velos Youth will be holding a 24-hour campaign to raise £10,000 to support their work. Your partnership in this campaign will provide the critical resources needed to track, monitor and support vulnerable unaccompanied minors and young people across Europe, keeping them away from traffickers and exploitative persons, and into new lives and towards brighter futures! 

Here is a link to our campaign page, and here’s how you can get involved:

• Share! Send texts, emails, messages, WhatsApp blasts and more to your contacts to let them know we are having a campaign and need their support.
• Give! Whether it’s £18, £180 or £1,800, your gift creates a powerful impact in the lives of vulnerable unaccompanied minors and youth across Europe. The 1^st £1000 will be doubled by our match funder!

Many thanks for reading, now please spread the word!

Jonny, James, Hayley, Stavros, Mustafa, Faridoon, Raia, Faz, Denia, Dana and all of the RYS team

xxx

Meet our speaker for this year’s annual Nabeel Hamdi Lecture: Marwa al-Sabouni

Aparna Maladkar writes:

The annual Nabeel Hamdi Lecture this year will feature the Syrian architect Marwa Al-Sabouni,  the author of the famous book The Battle for Home: The Memoir of a Syrian Architect. The book has been widely covered by the international media, and in 2016, was selected by the Guardian as one of the best architectural books.

Marwa has a PhD in Islamic Architecture and co-runs a private architectural studio in her hometown, Homs in Syria. When the civil war broke out in 2011 in Syria, Marwa made the difficult choice of staying in her city, Homs, which saw some of the most ferocious fighting. Despite danger, Marwa with her husband and two children stayed in Homs throughout the three-year siege of the city in which she was born and raised.

In 2014, Marwa opened a bookshop and co-founded world’s first and only Arabic-speaking architectural news website, Arch-News.net. Arch-News is dedicated to the empowerment of the Arabic speaking people by encouraging architectural dialogue. Arch-News was the winner in 2010 of the Royal Kuwaiti award for best media project in the Arab World. Marwa believes that the architecture in Homs has helped facilitate conflict and the role of architecture in creating peace and identity, stating, “…architecture…can either create the conditions to help end a conflict or enhance it. It’s the arena and the channel for such social dynamics.”

Marwa Al-Sabouni has been invited and has participated in number of United Nations organised conferences and workshops, and has also done a TED Talk for the TED Summit 2016, which has been viewed online over 900K times since its release. In 2014, Marwa won the first place at national level for the UN-Habitat Competition for her design proposal to rebuild Baba Amr, Homs, that encourages rehabilitation of mass housing. Marwa also teaches architectural design in a private university in Hama, Syria.

The annual Nabeel Hamdi Lecture is in the honour of Emeritus Professor Nabeel Hamdi, who is the founder of the DEP Masters programme, past director of CENDEP, and one of the most distinguished academics in our field. He has a long career of inspiring people to bring out their potential in making changes. The annual lecture celebrates this spirit with discussions around humanitarian and development issues that are relevant to CENDEP.

Marwa Al-Sabouni will be talking on “Reflections from Syria: The role of architecture in Conflict” at the annual Nabeel Hamdi Lecture that will take place on 30 October. The lecture will be followed by book signing and reception. The event is free and booking is essential.

Where: The Main Lecture Theatre, John Henry Brookes Building, Headington campus, Oxford Brookes University

When: 30 October (Tuesday) 18.30

Further details:
https://www.brookes.ac.uk/about-brookes/events/ols-18-19---reflections-from-syria--the-role-of-architecture-in-conflict/

Booking details:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/marwa-al-sabouni-role-of-architecture-in-conflict-reflections-from-syria-tickets-47942957677

References:
www.arch-news.net

http://skoll.org/contributor/marwa-al-sabouni/

https://www.archdaily.com/500053/un-habitat-announces-winners-of-mass-housing-competition

https://architectureau.com/articles/architecture-is-the-arena-and-the-channel-for-social-dynamic-says-syrian-architect-marwa-al-sabouni/

https://www.australiandesignreview.com/architecture/syrian-architect-marwa-al-sabouni-architectures-role-preserving-peace/

https://thamesandhudson.com/authors/marwa-al-sabouni-63009

Can peacebuilders end the war with Boko Haram?

The first Work in Progress seminar this semester is on Thursday at 4.30. Hazel Healy from New Internationalist writes about her presentation: 

I travelled to IDP camps in North East Nigeria to find out what local people are doing to build peace in the midst of extreme violence of the war between Boko Haram and the government. In my talk I'll share the perspectives of local leaders who are trying to dampen down conflict in the camps, young men who formed civilian militias to stay alive and women who were kidnapped, navigated escapes and are challenging the violence of stigma on their return to their communities.

I will also share the perspectives of Nigerian journalists, civil society leaders and humanitarians who are working to address the root causes of conflict and tackle rights abuses.

Beyond sharing ideas and opinions from the ground and in line with the work-in-progress framing of the seminar, I will also explore some of the  questions that came up in the course of my research - such as (i) the continuum between victim and perpetrator (ii) how do you balance justice with forgiveness in peacebuilding? A theme that links to (iii) when and how should you broach feminism and female empowerment in war that relentlessly targets women? and (iv) reflections on journalistic practise  - the practical experience of telling a story like this one, getting there, crafting the story while considering ethics, representation and balance.

Hazel Healy is a co-editor at the New Internationalist magazine. She specializes in writing stories that explore human rights and development. Recent themes include humanitarianism, peacebuilding and migration with direct reporting from places such as Nigeria, Lesvos and Bangladesh. Her reports have also been published in other outlets such as the LA Times, The Guardian and De Correspondent.

The seminar will be held in the student hub on the third floor of the Abercrombie building (Headington campus). Please see here for further details and for a list of the entire seminar series.

Charles Parrack presents shelter research at Global Shelter Cluster

At the Global Shelter Cluster annual conference in Geneva on 3-4 October Charles Parrack presented the chapter he co-authored with Professor Ian Davis on ‘The Long View of Shelter’, reviewing progress and changes in the shelter sector over the past 40 years. The chapter also discusses how lessons can be learned from disaster response from as long ago as the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, as well as more recent disasters such as the Haiti earthquake of 2010. The chapter is part of the inaugural publication of the State of Humanitarian Shelter and Settlements.

One of the main findings when reviewing shelter responses was that a separation continues to exist between emergency shelter response and permanent housing development. This reflects the division between the humanitarian sector, which focuses on short-term disaster relief, and the development sector, which works towards long-term recovery. Although efforts are under way to close this well-recognized gap, through initiatives such as the World Humanitarian Summit ‘Humanitarian - Development Nexus’ and the rise in prominence of the concept of resilience, progress remains slow.

Few humanitarian agencies possess an in-house technical capacity to create dwellings, or desire to become involved in permanent shelter and settlement, due largely to their restricted operational mandate, and time and financial constraints. For surviving households, the sheltering process from immediate protection to permanent housing is a continuous one. But for supporting agencies the process is usually fragmented into discrete phases (relief, recovery, reconstruction) due to budgets, capacities and timeframes. This fragmentation ultimately undermines longer-term recovery.

The consequences of shelter assistance are long lasting: settlements become housing, camps become temporary cities. The responses to some of the most significant disasters in history not only determined subsequent development patterns for the cities affected, but led to changes and developments that continue to influence housing and city design around the globe today. The 1666 Great Fire of London led to the first building regulations, while the 1755 Lisbon earthquake resulted in the world’s first urban plan designed to reduce the risks posed by earthquakes, tsunamis and urban fires.

Despite a wealth of evaluations, there has been little long term assessment of the harms and benefits of more recent shelter responses. The chapter calls for more initiatives in this area.

Work in Progress seminars for the new semester

The blog has awoken from its midsummer slumber and our first task is to tell you about the new series of Work in Progress seminars that will start next week.

For those who are new to CENDEP, this seminar series is pretty much what the name suggests. Researchers from both within CENDEP and outside introduce their work, which often includes ideas that are still in the course of being researched and developed. The range of topics is wide, reflecting the multidisciplinary character of our centre and the range of research interests. This semester almost that full range is on view: conflict, humanitarianism, architecture and shelter, refugees, and human rights.

The seminars are held in the student hub on the third floor of the Abercrombie building (Headington campus). The exception is the third annual Nabeel Hamdi lecture, held in honour of CENDEP's founder, which is in the main lecture theatre of the John Henry Brookes building on 30 October. This year's lecturer is the Syrian architect Marwa Al-Sabouni. More details about that fascinating event nearer the time.

Seminars are at 4.30 on Thursday afternoons (except from the Hamdi lecture, which is at 6.30 on a Tuesday). All are very welcome.