CENDEP webinar on durable solutions

 

Never-ending displacement has become the norm and the so-called durable solutions of return, local integration and resettlement are out of reach for most forced migrants. Yet, most refugee hosting governments and international organisations are still using the language of ‘solutions’ while people all over the world are stuck in displacement without a solution in sight. At the same time, people living with displacement continue to get on with their lives and develop their own solutions albeit with limitations on access to rights and resources. Durable solutions must always be understood in the particular context of where displacement takes place and in this webinar we situated the discourse of durable solutions in four different situations of displacement.

 

The upcoming webinar is one of a series on durable solutions organised by CENDEP. It is FREE and registration will be required via Eventbrite to access Zoom meeting link

 

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/durable-solutions-webinar-tickets-140271089605

Refugia: a durable solution?

 

Nick Van Hear writes:

This blog is based on a contribution to the webinar hosted by CENDEP on ‘Rethinking solutions in never ending displacement: what are the alternatives?’  held on 1 December 2020.

I want to approach the question through an experiment in social science fiction that I have been engaged in with my colleague Robin Cohen over the past few years.  We have tried to imagine a new kind of transnational entity, called Refugia, that has tentatively established itself by the year 2030, against the background of continuing global turmoil and mass displacement.  Refugia is essentially the outcome of a socio-political movement of refugees and supporters which takes off in the early 2020s in the face of the failure of the durable solutions and the wider refugee regime to provide solutions to mass displacement on the scale needed. The transnational entity has been built up incrementally from the transnational practices of refugees and other people on the move. 

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.

Imagining Refugia: thinking beyond the current migration impasse - work in progress seminar

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.blogspot.co.uk/2018/01/work-in-progress-seminars-all-welcome.html.

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