Working With Refugees In Somalia Towards A Development Perspective

The Syrian refugee crisis has galvanized attention to one of the world’s foremost challenges: forced displacement. The total number of refugees and internally displaced persons, now at over 65 million, continues to grow as violent conflict spikes.This report, Forcibly Displaced: Toward a Development Approach Supporting Refugees, the Internally Displaced, and Their Hosts, produced in close partnership with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), attempts to sort fact from fiction to better understand the scope of the challenge and encourage new thinking from a socioeconomic perspective. The report depicts the reality of forced displacement as a developing world crisis with implications for sustainable growth: 95 percent of the displaced live in developing countries and over half are in displacement for more than four years. To help the displaced, the report suggests ways to rebuild their lives with dignity through development support, focusing on their vulnerabilities such as loss of assets and lack of legal rights and opportunities. It also examines how to help host communities that need to manage the sudden arrival of large numbers of displaced people and that are under pressure to expand services, create jobs, and address long-standing development issues. Critical to this response is collective action. As work on a new Global Compact on Responsibility Sharing for Refugees progresses, the report underscores the importance of humanitarian and development communities working together in complementary ways to support countries throughout the crisis†•from strengthening resilience and preparedness at the onset to creating lasting solutions.

As migration from poverty-stricken and conflict-affected countries continues to hit the headlines, this book focuses on an important counter-flow: the money that people send home. Despite considerable research on the impact of migration and remittances in countries of origin - increasingly viewed as a source of development capital - still little is known about refugees' remittances to conflict-affected countries because such funds are most often seen as a source of conflict finance. This book explores the dynamics, infrastructure, and far-reaching effects of remittances from the perspectives of people in the Somali regions and the diaspora. With conflict driving mass displacement, Somali society has become progressively transnational, its vigorous remittance economy reaching from the heart of the global North into wrecked cities, refugee camps, and remote rural areas. By 'following the money' the author opens a window on the everyday lives of people caught up in processes of conflict, migration, and development. The book demonstrates how, in the interstices of state disruption and globalisation, and in the shadow of violence and political uncertainty, life in the Somali regions goes on, subject to complex transnational forms of social, economic, and political innovation and change.

The “migration-displacement nexus” is a new concept intended to capture the complex and dynamic interactions between voluntary and forced migration, both internally and internationally. Besides elaborating a new concept, this volume has three main purposes: the first is to focus empirical attention on previously understudied topics, such as internal trafficking and the displacement of foreign nationals, using case studies including Afghanistan and Iraq; the second is to highlight new challenges, including urban displacement and the effects of climate change; and the third is to explore gaps in current policy responses and elaborate alternatives for the future.

How do people whose entire way of life has been destroyed and who witnessed horrible abuses against loved ones construct a new future? How do people who have survived the ravages of war and displacement rebuild their lives in a new country when their world has totally changed? In Making Refuge Catherine Besteman follows the trajectory of Somali Bantus from their homes in Somalia before the onset in 1991 of Somalia’s civil war, to their displacement to Kenyan refugee camps, to their relocation in cities across the United States, to their settlement in the struggling former mill town of Lewiston, Maine. Tracking their experiences as "secondary migrants" who grapple with the struggles of xenophobia, neoliberalism, and grief, Besteman asks what humanitarianism feels like to those who are its objects and what happens when refugees move in next door. As Lewiston's refugees and locals negotiate coresidence and find that assimilation goes both ways, their story demonstrates the efforts of diverse people to find ways to live together and create community. Besteman’s account illuminates the contemporary debates about economic and moral responsibility, security, and community that immigration provokes.

Entries in English and various other languages.

The first in-depth exploration of the persistence and pervasiveness of a dangerous legal fiction about people who cross borders: the binary distinction between migrant and refugee. Today, the concept of "the refugee" as distinct from other migrants looms large. Immigration laws have developed to reinforce a conceptual dichotomy between those viewed as voluntary, often economically motivated, migrants who can be legitimately excluded by potential host states, and those viewed as forced, often politically motivated, refugees who should be let in. In Crossing, Rebecca Hamlin argues against advocacy positions that cling to this distinction. Everything we know about people who decide to move suggests that border crossing is far more complicated than any binary, or even a continuum, can encompass. The decision to leave home is almost always multi-causal and often involves many stops and hazards along the way--a reality not captured by a system that categorizes a majority of border-crossers as undeserving, and the rare few as vulnerable and needy. Drawing on cases of various "border crises" across Europe, North America, South America, and the Middle East, Hamlin outlines major inconsistencies and faulty assumptions upon which the binary relies, and explains its endurance and appeal by tracing its origins to the birth of the modern state and the rise of colonial empire. The migrant/refugee binary is not just an innocuous shorthand, indeed its power stems from the way in which is it painted as objective, neutral, and apolitical. In truth, the binary is a dangerous legal fiction, politically constructed with the ultimate goal of making harsh border control measures more ethically palatable to the public. This book is a challenge to all those invested in the rights and study of migrants, to interrogate their own assumptions and move towards more equitable advocacy for all border crossers.