This book presents the first comprehensive analysis of the human rights of refugees as set by the UN Refugee Convention. In an era where States are increasingly challenging the logic of simply ...assimilating refugees to their own citizens, questions are now being raised about whether refugees should be allowed to enjoy freedom of movement, to work, to access public welfare programs, or to be reunited with family members. Doubts have been expressed about the propriety of exempting refugees from visa and other immigration rules, and whether there is a duty to admit refugees at all. Hathaway links the standards of the UN Refugee Convention to key norms of international human rights law, and applies his analysis to the world's most difficult protection challenges. This is a critical resource for advocates, judges, and policymakers. It will also be a pioneering scholarly work for graduate students of international and human rights law.
Asylum has become a highly charged political issue across developed countries, raising a host of difficult ethical and political questions. What responsibilities do the world's richest countries have ...to refugees arriving at their borders? Are states justified in implementing measures to prevent the arrival of economic migrants if they also block entry for refugees? Is it legitimate to curtail the rights of asylum seekers to maximize the number of refugees receiving protection overall? This book draws upon political and ethical theory and an examination of the experiences of the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom and Australia to consider how to respond to the challenges of asylum. In addition to explaining why asylum has emerged as such a key political issue in recent years, it provides a compelling account of how states could move towards implementing morally defensible responses to refugees.
How do communities find protection in chaotic political economic settings? This book endeavors to show how normal people placed in extraordinarily difficult conditions created protections for their ...assets and buffered against outsider predation through property rights. The research project focuses on Palestinians living in seven refugee camps in Lebanon and Jordan. Using interviews with 200 Palestinian refugees, legal title documents, memoirs, and United Nations Relief Works Agency archives the author traces the evolution of property rights from informal understandings of ownership to formal legal claims of assets and resources to shed light on how communities thrive in challenging political economic spaces. Initially, Palestinians deployed bits and pieces of their pre-refugee life to craft property rights that met the challenges of living in refugee camps. Later, as the camps increased in complexity with expanding markets and new outsiders entering the political fray, then Palestinians strategically melded their informal institutional practices with the formal rules of political outsiders. Palestinian refugees, to varying degrees of success, managed to protect their assets and community from predation and state incorporation.
There is a tendency to consider all refugees as 'vulnerable victims': an attitude reinforced by the stream of images depicting refugees living in abject conditions. This groundbreaking study of ...Somalis in a Kenyan refugee camp reveals the inadequacy of such assumptions by describing the rich personal and social histories that refugees bring with them to the camps. The author focuses on the ways in which Somalis are able to adapt their 'nomadic' heritage in order to cope with camp life; a heritage that includes a high degree of mobility and strong social networks that reach beyond the confines of the camp as far as the U.S. and Europe.
The twentieth century has seen people displaced on an unprecedented scale and has brought concerns about refugees into sharp focus. There are forty million refugees in the world—1 in 130 inhabitants ...of this planet. In this first interdisciplinary study of the issue, fifteen scholars from diverse fields focus on the worldwide disruption of "trust" as a sentiment, a concept, and an experience.
Contributors provide a rich array of essays that maintain a delicate balance between providing specific details of the refugee experience and exploring corresponding theories of trust and mistrust. Their subjects range widely across the globe, and include Palestinians, Cambodians, Tamils, and Mayan Indians of Guatemala. By examining what individuals experience when removed from their own culture, these essays reflect on individual identity and culture as a whole.
How do communities grapple with the challenges of reconstruction after conflicts? In one of the first in-depth ethnographic accounts of refugee repatriation anywhere in the world, Laura C. Hammond ...follows the story of Ada Bai, a returnee settlement with a population of some 7,500 people. In the days when refugees first arrived, Ada Bai was an empty field along Ethiopia's northwest border, but it is now a viable—arguably thriving—community. For the former refugees who fled from northern Ethiopia to eastern Sudan to escape war and famine in 1984 and returned to their country of birth in 1993, coming home really meant creating a new home out of an empty space. Settling in a new area, establishing social and kin ties, and inventing social practices, returnees gradually invested their environment with meaning and began to consider their settlement home. Hammond outlines the roles that gender and generational differences played in this process and how the residents came to define the symbolic and geographical boundaries of Ada Bai. Drawing on her fieldwork from 1993 to 1995 and regular shorter periods since, Hammond describes the process by which a place is made meaningful through everyday practice and social interaction. This Place Will Become Home provides insight into how people cope with extreme economic hardship, food insecurity, and limited access to international humanitarian or development assistance in their struggle to attain economic self-sufficiency.
Rights in exile Guglielmo Verdirame, Barbara Harrell-Bond
2005., 20050430, 2005, 2005-04-30, 20050101, Letnik:
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eBook
Of the estimated 12 million refugees in the world, more than 7 million have been confined to camps, effectively "warehoused," in some cases, for 10 years or more. Holding refugees in camps was ...anathema to the founders of the refugee protection regime. Today, with most refugees encamped in the less developed parts of the world, the humanitarian apparatus has been transformed into a custodial regime for innocent people. Based on rich ethnographic data, Rights in Exile exposes the gap between human rights norms and the mandates of international organisations, on the one hand, and the reality on the ground, on the other. It will be of wide interest to social scientists, and to human rights and international law scholars. Policy makers, donor governments and humanitarian organizations, especially those adopting a "rights-based" approach, will also find it an invaluable resource. But it is the refugees themselves who could benefit the most if these actors absorb its lessons and apply them.
"No Path Homeis an extremely interesting, engaging, and well-written book. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn's fluid and clear prose paints a very evocative picture of life for internally displaced persons as ...well as presenting a clear theoretical account."-Laura Hammond, SOAS University of London, author ofThis Place Will Become Home
For more than 60 million displaced people around the world, humanitarian aid has become a chronic condition.No Path Homedescribes its symptoms in detail. Elizabeth Cullen Dunn shows how war creates a deeply damaged world in which the structures that allow people to occupy social roles, constitute economic value, preserve bodily integrity, and engage in meaningful daily practice have been blown apart.After the Georgian war with Russia in 2008, Dunn spent sixteen months immersed in the everyday lives of the 28,000 people placed in thirty-six resettlement camps by official and nongovernmental organizations acting in concert with the Georgian government. She reached the conclusion that the humanitarian condition poses a survival problem that is not only biological but also existential. InNo Path Home, she paints a moving picture of the ways in which humanitarianism leaves displaced people in limbo, neither in a state of emergency nor able to act as normal citizens in the country where they reside.
The literature on refugees’ experiences has been enriched in recent years as we witnessed a refugees’ crisis that has not been seen since WWII. Only the Syrian civil war displaced more than five ...million civilians, while, according to an UNCHR report published in June 2018, wars, violence and persecution uprooted a record number of 16.2 million people across the world in 2017. The book briefly reviewed here, Violent Borders. Refugees and the Right to Move, investigates the tumultuous times we live in, ones in which millions of people leave their homes in search of better opportunities, exposing themselves to dangers, encountering violence to the borders and new walls rising in their way. The author argues that building walls and securing borders does not stop migration, but makes it more dangerous: “…borders continue to kill. Even with the massive amount of attention paid to the issue and the vast funds expended to stop migration, people continue to move in 2016 and the year shattered the record of the number of border deaths, with over 7800 people losing their lives simply trying to go from one place to another”.
