All in Refugees Today

On the Franco-British border: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?

On the Franco-British border: plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose?

Juliette Frontier
Refugees Today

On 27 November 2021, twenty-seven lives were abandoned to the English Channel by the French and British states, as fifteen calls in distress went unanswered. A year later, Le Monde exposed the exchanges between those on board the small boat and the regional maritime rescue and surveillance centre in the Pas-de-Calais, exchanges which the French state initially denied had taken place. ‘Tu seras pas sauvé…  je t’ai pas demandé de partir’, rang the voice of one operator to the call of distress at sea: ‘You will not be saved… I did not ask you to leave [France]’.

This loss of life at sea, while the worst incident in thirty years in the Channel, in fact fits within a historical continuity of the last twenty years of violent and reactive Franco-British border politics. In this history, the agency of those who have decided to make this perilous journey is deeply constrained: what does choice look like when there is simply ‘no other option’?

Who is counting the refugees? Displacement data, its limitations, and potential for misuse

Who is counting the refugees? Displacement data, its limitations, and potential for misuse

Jeff Crisp
Refugees Today

It is impossible to think about refugees, write about refugees, advocate on behalf of refugees or provide refugees with practical support without the use of statistics. And yet scholars and practitioners working on the refugee issue were surprisingly slow to examine the complexities associated with the collection, analysis and dissemination of quantitative data. As I pointed out in a paper published in 1999, “while all of the standard works on refugees are replete with numbers, few even begin to question the source or accuracy of those statistics.” The issue of refugee and displacement statistics is now taken a great deal more seriously than was the case two decades ago. Even so, the issue of displacement data remains problematic.

Border-crossing: History Dialogues between camp and campus

Border-crossing: History Dialogues between camp and campus

Marcia C. Schenck & Kate Reed
Refugees Today

Refugees living in camps are often not perceived as historians for ‘historically explicable reasons’, to borrow Bonnie Smith’s phrase. They do not do the things historians do because they cannot: they cannot consult archives, they cannot access university libraries (or, often, libraries at all), they cannot depend on reliable internet and computer access, let alone the funding, research support, training, social networks, and material resources that underpin the research and writing of academic history. It is as though encamped refugee and historian have been defined as mutually exclusive identities. A person residing in a refugee camp cannot be a historian because a historian, quite simply, cannot be a person residing in a refugee camp.

What if we were to disrupt this tautology? To redefine what being a historian means?

Hopehood across the frontier: permanent transience at Kakuma refugee camp

Hopehood across the frontier: permanent transience at Kakuma refugee camp

Gerawork Teferra
Refugees Today

Kenya has received more than half a million refugees since 1991. However, except for two instances of group resettlement, very few refugees received resettlement opportunities. During the last decade, for instance, only 37,522 people have been officially resettled, despite many more arriving. Kakuma camp, however, has become known as a ‘resettlement hub’ and, as I show in this post, the lives of residents are affected by such perceptions. I discuss how refugees move from the hope of surviving to a new, dream-like lifestyle which the term “hopehood” encapsulates. In doing so, I argue that though hope has served as an instrument to enable people to endure prolonged encampment in an enclosed place, unrealistic hope has separated residents from reality, so that chasing a rare chance of resettlement becomes itself a mode of life.

Call for submissions, autumn 2021

Call for submissions, autumn 2021

Refugee History
Refugees Today

As we enter the 2021-22 academic year, we are considering ways in which Refugee History can respond usefully to what has been a summer peppered with sensationalist media headlines about refugee movement.

With this in mind, we are calling for submissions for autumn 2021 on the theme of criminality and criminalisation, for which we have identified two main branches: the criminalisation of asylum seeking, and the criminalisation of non-state actors assisting people seeking asylum.

Mayday: histories of maritime rescue and repulsion

Mayday: histories of maritime rescue and repulsion

Juliette Frontier
Refugees Today, Then & Now

The internationally recognised radio distress signal, ‘Mayday’, came into the English language in 1923 in response to increased air and naval traffic over the Channel. Replacing the S.O.S call, Mayday, the phonetic pronunciation of M’aidez, French for ‘Help me’, is recognised by seafarers today. ‘Mayday’ captures the moral and legal duty of ships to rescue a person or persons in danger at sea. Such obligations are enshrined in the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea and the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea. Yet despite this duty and language of rescue, the response to the RNLI rescue operations in the Channel last week, namely the accusation that the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI) was in some way assisting people trafficking, reveals how this international obligation has been vilified by politicians and tabloids, as well as defended and upheld. The RNLI has entered the spotlight because of a change in the legal language of the UK government's new Nationality and Borders Bill: a minor change which is set to have major consequences for search and rescue operations in the Channel. In short, the phrase 'for gain' has been removed from the stipulation that a criminal offence occurs when a person 'knowingly (and for gain) facilitates the arrival or attempted arrival in, or the entry or attempted entry into, the United Kingdom' of a potential asylum seeker. This leaves organisations such as the RNLI, who save the lives of people in the Channel 'knowingly' but not 'for gain', vulnerable to charges of facilitating 'illegal' entry into the UK—a crime which is set to carry a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. In this post, I highlight four past blogposts which engage with the politics of maritime rescue and repulsion.

Selective memory? How history figures in social sciences research on forced displacement to Germany

Selective memory? How history figures in social sciences research on forced displacement to Germany

Paladia Ziss
Refugees Today

How is history mobilised in current social sciences research on responses to the large-scale refugee arrival in Germany since 2015? Some research seems to pay little or no attention to historical factors that might influence how newly arriving refugees are received by local residents. A second strand of research explores the dynamics of how specific communities of migrants who came to Germany in the past have responded to the arrival of Syrian and other refugees in 2015 and 2016. And a third strand of literature has started to analyse refugee reception through more local and contextualised case studies. In social science research, excluding past forced migrations from present understandings may contribute to reifying fixed boundaries—and that might prevent us imagining what a collective future could look like.

The historical connections of search and rescue at sea

The historical connections of search and rescue at sea

Imogen Dobie
Refugees Today, Then & Now

Europe has recently witnessed an explosion of humanitarian efforts to assist stranded migrants in the Mediterranean and Aegean. The work of these search-and-rescue organisations was quickly propelled into the political limelight, and presented as a ‘pull factor’ encouraging migrant journeys. Rescue at sea has been swept up into a highly politicised crisis narrative one dominated by present-day anxieties surrounding ‘uncontrolled’ or ‘illegal’ migration. Aid workers at sea contest such an extraction of history by comparing their work to the past, referencing histories of migration and relief to dial down political rhetoric and legitimise their work. The historical experiences of seeking safety and of offering shelter have, as a result, become a central reference point for maritime rescuers.

‘Particular social group’ in historical focus: cultural knowledge in witchcraft-based asylum cases

‘Particular social group’ in historical focus: cultural knowledge in witchcraft-based asylum cases

Katherine Luongo
Refugees Today

In 2010, a Nigerian woman living in the UK sought refugee status on the ground that her abusive husband had publicly and vociferously labeled her a witch. Since the early 2000s, increasing numbers of African asylum seekers coming from across the continent to the global north have made witchcraft-based asylum claims. They argue that being accused of witchcraft renders them ‘members of a particular social group’ (PSG) and thus eligible for refugee protection under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. Cases like Uwaifo provide a fruitful terrain to consider how cultural understandings or misunderstandings complicate the process of determining who counts as a refugee.

A recent history of camps in French migration policy, part 1: Making camps

A recent history of camps in French migration policy, part 1: Making camps

Karen Akoka & Aubépine Dahan
Aid Advocacy Activism, Refugees Today

On Monday 23 November 2020, around 7pm, several hundred exilés pitched 200 tents on place de la République, Paris. The square was violently emptied by police that same night. This operation was far from unusual: since June 2015 there have been 66 such operations in and around the French capital. What does this latest episode reveal? That camps are a deliberate policy choice.

Load More