Nearly half of the world's eight million Palestinians are registered refugees, having faced partition and exile.Landscape of Hope and Despairexamines this refugee experience in Lebanon through the ...medium of spatial practices and identity, set against the backdrop of prolonged violence. Julie Peteet explores how Palestinians have dealt with their experience as refugees by focusing attention on how a distinctive Palestinian identity has emerged from and been informed by fifty years of refugee history. Concentrating ethnographic scrutiny on a site-specific experience allows the author to shed light on the mutually constitutive character of place and cultural identification. Palestinian refugee camps are contradictory places: sites of grim despair but also of hope and creativity. Within these cramped spaces, refugees have crafted new worlds of meaning and visions of the possible in politics. In the process, their historical predicament was a point of departure for social action and thus became radically transformed. Beginning with the calamity of 1948,Landscape of Hope and Despairtraces the dialectic of place and cultural identification through the initial despair of the 1950s and early 1960s to the tumultuous days of the resistance and the violence of the Lebanese civil war and its aftermath. Most significantly, this study invokes space, place, and identity to construct an alternative to the received national narratives of Palestinian society and history. The moving stories told here form a larger picture of these refugees as a people struggling to recreate their sense of place and identity and add meaning to their surroundings through the use of culture and memory.
This book presents experiences of women refugees in a variety of contexts across Asia and Africa and builds a framework to ensure robust and effective mechanisms to safeguard refugees' rights. It ...highlights the structural challenges that women who are forcibly displaced face and the inadequacies of the response of governments and other stakeholders, irrespective of the country of origin, ethnicity, and religion of the refugee community.
This volume:
Focuses on contemporary issues such as the Rohingya and the Syrian crisis.
Brings first-person accounts of women refugees from Asia and Africa.
Draws on an interdisciplinary approach to analyse a host of issues, including public policy, cultural norms, and economics of forced migration.
Bringing together first-hand accounts from women refugees and interventions by activists, academics, journalists, filmmakers, humanitarian workers, and international law experts, this book will be a must read for scholars and researchers of migration and diaspora studies, development studies, sociology and social anthropology, and politics and public policy. It will be of special interest to NGOs, policymakers, and think tanks.
Emma Haddad's historical study of refugees demonstrates that state responses to the refugee debate have always been qualitatively the same. She suggests that this is important in conceiving new ways ...to understand the refugee 'problem' and to formulate responses to it.
Access to Asylum Gammeltoft-Hansen, Thomas
03/2011, Volume:
v.Series Number 77
eBook, Book
Is there still a right to seek asylum in a globalised world? Migration control has increasingly moved to the high seas or the territory of transit and origin countries, and is now commonly outsourced ...to private actors. Under threat of financial penalties airlines today reject any passenger not in possession of a valid visa, and private contractors are used to run detention centres and man border crossings. In this volume Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen examines the impact of these new practices for refugees' access to asylum. A systematic analysis is provided of the reach and limits of international refugee law when migration control is carried out extraterritorially or by non-state actors. State practice from around the globe and case law from all the major human rights institutions is discussed. The arguments are further linked to wider debates in human rights, general international law and political science.
Hurricane Katrina forced the largest and most abrupt displacement in U.S. history. About 1.5 million people evacuated from the Gulf Coast preceding Katrina’s landfall. New Orleans, a city of 500,000, ...was nearly emptied of life after the hurricane and flooding. Katrina survivors eventually scattered across all fifty states, and tens of thousands still remain displaced. Some are desperate to return to the Gulf Coast but cannot find the means. Others have chosen to make their homes elsewhere. Still others found a way to return home but were unable to stay due to the limited availability of social services, educational opportunities, health care options, and affordable housing. The contributors to Displaced have been following the lives of Katrina evacuees since 2005. In this illuminating book, they offer the first comprehensive analysis of the experiences of the displaced. Drawing on research in thirteen communities in seven states across the country, the contributors describe the struggles that evacuees have faced in securing life-sustaining resources and rebuilding their lives. They also recount the impact that the displaced have had on communities that initially welcomed them and then later experienced “Katrina fatigue" as the ongoing needs of evacuees strained local resources. Displaced reveals that Katrina took a particularly heavy toll on households headed by low-income African American women who lost the support provided by local networks of family and friends. It also shows the resilience and resourcefulness of Katrina evacuees who have built new networks and partnered with community organizations and religious institutions to create new lives in the diaspora.
Eva and Otto Pfister, Tom; Pfister, Kathy; Pfister, Peter
11/2019
eBook
Open access
Eva and Otto is a true story about German opposition and resistance to Hitler as revealed through the early lives of Eva Lewinski Pfister (1910–1991) and Otto Pfister (1900–1985). It is an intimate ...and epic account of two Germans—Eva born Jewish, Otto born Catholic—who worked with a little-known German political group that resisted and fought against Hitler in Germany before 1933 and then in exile in Paris before the German invasion of France in May 1940. After their improbable escapes from separate internment and imprisonment in Europe, Eva obtained refuge in America in October 1940 where she worked to rescue other endangered political refugees, including Otto, with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt. As revealed in recently declassified records, Eva and Otto later engaged in different secret assignments with the US Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in support of the Allied war effort. Despite their vastly different backgrounds, Eva and Otto gave each other hope and strength as they acted upon what they understood to be an ethical duty to help others threatened by fascism. The book provides a sobering insight into the personal risks and costs of a commitment to that duty. Their unusually beautiful writing—directed to each other in diaries and correspondence during two long periods of wartime separation—also reveals an unlikely and inspiring love story.
Community-led, shared book reading programs may help improve refugee children’s reading abilities and attitudes towards reading. We Love Reading (WLR)—a light-touch, community-led, shared book ...reading program—was evaluated in a pre-registered, wait-listed, randomised controlled trial (AEARCTR-0006523). 322 Syrian refugee mother–child dyads (children: 4–8-year-olds, 50.0% female) in Jordan were tested at two timepoints, 15 weeks apart. WLR did not significantly affect child literacy or child-reported child attitudes toward reading (ps > 0.05). Mothers did report improved child attitudes toward reading from WLR (p = 0.046, η2 = 0.013). The intervention did not lead to improvements in family relationships (ps > 0.05). WLR may have promise in improving attitudes toward reading in forcibly displaced children but did not affect literacy or child-reported attitudes toward reading; these results provide insight into what changes are needed for effective shared book reading interventions in this population.
Despite the fact that there are up to 25 million internally displaced persons around the world, their plight is still little known. Like refugees, internally displaced persons have been forced to ...leave their homes because of war and human rights abuses, but they have not left their country. This has major consequences in terms of the protection available to them. This 2005 book aims to offer a clear and easily accessible overview of this important humanitarian and human rights challenge. In contrast with other books on the topic, it provides an objective evaluation of UN efforts to protect the internally displaced. It will be of interest to all those involved with the internally displaced, as well as anyone seeking to gain an overall understanding of this complex issue.
Europe has the most advanced regional protection regime in the world. The predicted impact of this body of norms, including the new Common European Asylum System, has been widely identified as one ...that will have a 'ripple effect' beyond the EU. However, very few studies have noted the fact that this regime has already influenced the law and practice of states around the world, for some time. The purpose of this book is to gather evidence that emulation is happening (if it is), to explore the extent and identify the processes through which it is happening, and to examine the implications of these findings. A review of seven case studies reveals all but one of these cases provides clear evidence of emulation at some point in time. The EU protection regime, which has been most influenced by the European Court of Human Rights, is 'naturally' evolving transnationally and spreading internationally.
