Blog
Introducing … Cardboard Camp!
We’ve made a graphic novel, yay!
Based on the research that we’ve done in the REF-ARAB project, we spent much of the past year writing, illustrating, translating and designing Cardboard Camp: Stories of Sudanese Refugees in Lebanon. This was my first time being involved in research-based visual storytelling and the learning curve has certainly been quite steep. Everything started with Yazan al-Saadi and I working mostly over Zoom and sometimes together in Beirut to write the actual script of the comic. To a large extent we used dialogue that emerged from my interviews or from other material such as video recordings made by my informants themselves.
Mobilising for rights in the MENA region
The REF-ARAB project has partnered with Forced Migration Review on a special issue exploring the role of mobilization in supporting the rights of forced migrants in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA).
The 2022 Saudi census: what it tells us about refugees and Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is often accused of not hosting any refugees. Nevertheless, within the borders of the Saudi state there are a large number of people are likely to be de-facto refugees, despite not being recognized as such by Saudi authorities. The publicly available results of the 2022 census – for the first time including population statistics on nationality – shed new light on the number of potential refugees in Saudi Arabia, and by extension on Saudi refugee policies.
Refugees welcome? The Saudi approach to the Sudanese fleeing from war
Saudi Arabia is seemingly taking a leading role in the global response to the outbreak of war in Sudan. But is it all for show?
Lebanon’s branding as ‘no country of asylum’ is historically misleading
Lebanon seeks to position itself as “no country of asylum.” The phrase has in recent years been repeated in many political and humanitarian settings relating to refugees, most notably in the joint UN-Lebanon response to the country’s Syrian refugee presence. But a closer historical examination reveals a Lebanese approach to asylum that is surprisingly progressive, inclusive and rights-focused.
The right to asylum in International Law and Islamic Law: Some Reflections
After decades of a Euro-centric, Refugee Convention-driven approach to asylum, recent years have witnessed greater acknowledgement of the role played in asylum norm development by regional instruments and states that are either not party to the Convention or have undeveloped refugee determination systems. They are consequently reliant upon non-governmental or international organisations, such as the UNHCR, to assist with refugee protection. An important dimension of such norm development is the right to asylum in accordance with Islamic principles, and this discussion highlights scholarly contributions alongside regional and national legal instruments that address asylum and refuge. It concludes with some brief reflections on the current state of play.
Call for article proposals: Mobilising for rights in the MENA region
The REF-ARAB project welcomes contributions to a Forced Migration Review workshop/special feature on mobilisation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).
Technology and refugee legal aid in Iraqi Kurdistan
Maryam – a pseudonym used for a Syrian woman we spoke to in one of the refugee camps in the Erbil governorate – reflects on the online awareness sessions provided by humanitarian organisations in response to the COVID-19 lockdown in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). ‘For the organisations, maybe it was good. They continued their work. But for us, it was not good.’
The organisation whose awareness sessions she attended provided participants with headphones and told them to keep their personal information to themselves, but the living conditions in refugee camp housing during lockdown made participation difficult.
Moreover, there was a mismatch between the technologies used by refugees and those preferred by organisations. Maryam critiques: ‘We usually use WhatsApp, Viber. Not Zoom like the organisations wanted us to use.’ These communicational problems were also present in other aspects of life in the camps. Efforts to move to online education for refugee children were halted after two weeks, because there were too few devices available.
Refugees and racial hierarchies in Lebanon: How refugee protection policies in the country ignore the prevalent problem of racism
There’s no denying that Lebanon has a race problem. Accounts of racially charged physical and verbal abuse of, and discrimination towards, black- and brown-skinned refugees and migrants are common. Civil society organisations such as the Anti-Racism Movement (ARM) have documented widespread racist and exploitative practices. Even the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) has repeatedly pointed to Lebanon’s lack of anti-discrimination legislation and recommended that the country should ensure that all manifestations of racial discrimination are prohibited and punished.
From the 1951 Convention to the 1967 Protocol: how the refugee regime was globalized
How should we understand the globalization of the international refugee regime? A conventional understanding is that the 1951 Refugee Convention, although it put in place a universal definition of ‘refugee’ for the first time, remained limited to European refugees. The text refers to refugees displaced as a result of ‘events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951’, because it was intended to deal with Europeans still displaced after the second world war. This was understood to be a finite task, and the mandate of UNHCR, the agency set up to assist states in implementing the convention, was due to last only eight years. Two new refugee crises in the 1950s changed this.
UNHCR and the Middle East: A shifting dynamic?
In February 2011, Michael Kagan produced his now famous Research Paper for UNHCR entitled ‘“We live in a country of UNHCR” The UN surrogate state and refugee policy in the Middle East’. In many ways, this ground-breaking piece provided much needed clarity on the relationship between the UNHCR and countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), and the approach to refugee protection for non-Palestinian refugees. While the focus over decades, in the region, had turned understandably to the role of UNRWA and its mandate in relation to Palestinian refugees (see for overview, Akram, 2021), the UNHCR had arguably escaped equivalent scrutiny – until this publication.
The datafication of refugee protection in and beyond the Middle East: a case for digital refugee lawyering
In February and March 2021, I organised a two-part workshop in which academics, activists, lawyers and NGO-workers were invited to (re)think how digital technologies interact with refugee protection, specifically in the Middle East. Refugee protection - the right to be protected from persecution and the right to make claims to these rights in another country - is increasingly data-driven protection.
How eurocentric is the 1951 UN Refugee Convention—and why does it matter?
Is the 1951 UN Refugee Convention eurocentric? There are plenty of reasons to think so. Drafted at a time when membership of the UN was heavily skewed towards the global north, and much of the global south remained under European colonial rule, the convention was preoccupied with assisting Europeans displaced during the second world war.
Refugee legal aid in humanitarian operations
How do humanitarian organisations provide legal aid to refugees in countries that do not have any refugee-specific legislation and where rule of law is largely absent? I spent most of 2020 examining this question closer in my MA thesis focusing on the legal aid program of one international humanitarian organisation in Lebanon.
A recent history of refugees in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia is not a party to the main global refugee protection instrument, the 1951 Refugee Convention, nor does it have any specific domestic legal framework pertaining to refugee issues. Thirty-five percent of Saudi-Arabia’s roughly 30 million inhabitants are not citizens – and many come from important refugee-producing countries.
Summer writing on refugee collective action in Beirut
My writing project for this summer, and really, for most of this year, draws on my research with Sudanese refugees and other migrants living in Beirut. It is no secret that this refugee group faces appalling levels of racial discrimination and marginalization, and that their concerns – when compared with larger refugee arrivals – are often sidelined in humanitarian and state responses.
Non-signatory States and the international refugee regime - a FMR mini-feature
In February 2021 and in February 2023, the BEYOND and REF-ARAB projects will each publish a mini-feature in Forced Migration Review, the most widely read publication on forced migration.
Talk of an ‘unprecedented’ number of refugees is wrong – and dangerous
“The number of refugees worldwide,” Richard Branson said last week, “has reached unprecedented proportions.” The British businessman was speaking at an event hosted by the International Rescue Committee. On the same day, the BBC reported that more people are displaced than ever before: 70.8 million, or one in every 110 people in the world.