Trans migrations: Seeking refuge in “safe haven” Toronto

Trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people who make refugee claims in Canada negotiate a complex nexus of identity, belonging, and citizenship. Drawing on insights from TGNC refugees, immigration lawyers, and frontline workers, in this paper we examine the ways the state controls the trans body through the refugee claims process and in the process of integration into life in Canada, while also highlighting trans refugee methods of survival and resistance. What emerges is an understanding of the ways that refugees navigate the tension between gender, sexuality, and homecoming as both intimately felt and geopolitically managed. We convey TGNC refugee narratives to demonstrate how they both confirm and expand upon the existing literature on Canadian LGBTQ+ refugees. TGNC refugees' experiences at the Immigration and Refugee Board confirm insights from existing LGBTQ+ refugee studies. However, TGNC refugees' day-to-day lives differ significantly from LGB refugee lives as recounted in the literature. In TGNC refugees' attempts to access gender-affirming documentation, healthcare, housing, and income, they confront distinct systems of transgender exceptionalism, border imperialism, and racial and heteropatriarchal capitalism that limit their access to basic necessities and impact how they build home both conceptually and materially.     

1971年印巴危机期间美国的难民政策与美印在难民问题上的角力

1971年印巴危机是冷战时代一次具有重大国际影响的地区危机。危机期间,因受东巴内战与印巴冲突的双重影响,大量东巴居民逃往印度,沦为难民。东巴难民持续涌入印度不仅是东巴危机转变为印巴危机的主要诱因,同时也是导致南亚持续紧张、敌对氛围难以消解的重要根源。为妥善解决难民问题,美国积极谋划,投入大量人力、物力、财力,意图妥善解决难民问题,化解危机。但是美国采取的积极措施并未减缓危机冲突的不断升级。在处理难民问题的过程中,美巴政策协调趋于一致,而印度与美巴在难民问题上的政策倾向却渐行渐远。归根究底,是否应该在难民问题上附加最终促成东巴独立的政治条件是美巴与印度的根本分歧所在。而这一根本分歧的悬而未决最终成为引爆第三次印巴战争的导火索。     

The role of local immigration partnerships in Syrian refugee resettlement in Waterloo Region,Ontario

As of January 29, 2017 Canada had received 40,081 Syrian refugees. The scale and scope of this resettlement is historic, with the only comparable event being the arrival of 60,000 Indo‐Chinese refugees in the late 1970s. Since that time, much has changed in local resettlement policy. This research focuses on one component of these changes—the role of Local Immigration Partnerships (LIPs) in Syrian refugee resettlement—through a case study of an official refugee reception centre in the Waterloo Region of Ontario and a series of interviews with key informants from multiple sectors involved in resettlement. Results indicate Waterloo's LIP playing a sizable role, but not acting as the sole response body to refugee resettlement. Nevertheless, participants saw the LIP as a crucial part of Waterloo's resettlement efforts. Despite being a product of a tri‐level intergovernmental agreement, the LIP played a central role in shaping a local strategy by using local solutions. LIPs represent an example of place‐based policy that worked well during the Syrian Refugee Resettlement Initiative, but LIPs’ success may set a challenging precedent for future mass refugee resettlement events.     

Building intersectoral partnerships as place‐based strategy for immigrant and refugee (re)settlement: The Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership

This paper examines the role of the Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership in the Syrian refugee resettlement in Canada's national capital following the federal government's 2015–2016 resettlement plan. Based on the findings of qualitative data collection—including semi‐structured interviews with representatives from community organizations, settlement agencies, and the City of Ottawa—two main arguments are advanced. First, while the current literature tends to portray the Canadian settlement sector as a passive victim in the face of neoliberal restructuring and austerity measures, this paper offers a more nuanced perspective by reflecting on the sector's ability to exert agency by developing initiatives and devising strategies that are rooted in the local context. Second, the case of the Ottawa Local Immigration Partnership sheds light on the significance of intersectoral networks and partnerships that extend beyond the settlement sector to build a sound approach for welcoming refugees and newcomers more generally. These findings serve to demonstrate the potential of partnerships as a place‐based settlement model that is responsive to context‐specific needs and enhances local community strengths, thus providing important lessons that can inform future immigrant and refugee (re)settlement and integration in other Canadian cities and regions.     

Refugees and racial capitalism: Meatpacking and the primitive accumulation of labor

When meatpacking plants in the United States lost a third of their undocumented Latinx workers to Federal immigration raids in the late 2000s, the industry began recruiting vulnerable, but “legal,” refugee workers to replace them. In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 threatened to halt meatpacking, two separate executive orders designated meatpacking production as essential to the United States food system and introduced new restrictions on refugee resettlement in the United States. Bridging Marxian literature on race, labor, and capitalism and critical refugee studies, this paper examines the paradox of refugees’ positioning as both “essential” sources of vulnerable labor and “prohibited” threats to the American nation-state. We argue that the placement of refugees in meatpacking jobs is actually the primitive accumulation of unfree labor. In the case of “essential” meatpacking work in the United States, racial capitalism articulates with conditions of statelessness and unequal citizenship rights to anchor “prohibited” refugees to meatpacking work.     

Uncertainty,exhaustion, and abandonment beyond South/North divides: Governing forced migration through strategic ambiguity

Forced migration studies struggles to counterbalance policy assumptions that the governance of displaced people is of a fundamentally different nature in the Global South and North. This paper contributes to a growing body of critical scholarship that questions the epistemic segregation and theoretical demarcation that reproduce such exceptionalism. It mobilizes the idea of strategic institutional ambiguity to innovatively interrogate routinely assumed differences between migration governance in the Global South and North. It juxtaposes in-depth empirical case-studies of refugee governance in Lebanon, the country with the world's highest per capita number of refugees, with a review of critical research on EUropean governance of forced and irregular migrants. This exploration demonstrates that the rationales and manifestations of the ‘politics of uncertainty’ that refugees are subjected to in Lebanon closely mirror those of the ‘politics of abandonment’ and ‘exhaustion’ that migrants face in EUrope. Under both regimes, strategic forms of ambiguity operate to spatially and temporally marginalize refugees and render them controllable, exploitable, and deportable.     

Governing Global Displacement in Austerity Urbanism: The Case of Berlin's Refugee Housing Crisis

A surge of forcibly displaced migrants into Europe in 2015 culminated in what has been referred to as the ‘refugee crisis’. As the continent's top destination country, Germany has been widely praised for its welcoming culture while heavily criticized for failures of integration. This is particularly true of Berlin — a city that has absorbed the highest number of war refugees in Europe, many of whom remain without stable accommodation. Despite its significance, the scholarship has largely neglected the housing question within the European refugee crisis. The aim of this article is to cast a critical light on the complexities and contradictions glossed over by the refugee crisis trope. Drawing on the Berlin case, the author argues that resettlement initiatives need to be understood against the backdrop of austerity urbanism, particularly its insistence that markets can meet housing demand. By focusing on three types of shelter provisioning for refugees, the article reveals the multifaceted and nuanced ways in which the Berlin government, refugees and grassroots organizations contest, produce and navigate the moving frames of austerity urbanism in search of stable housing.     

Britishness, asylum-seekers and the northern working class: 1851

The arrival of a small group of Polish-Hungarian refugees in Liverpool in 1851 reveals a lot about contemporary political views in the United Kingdom. The refugees were members of General Wysocki's Polish legion, which had fought Russia and Austria during the Hungarian revolution in 1848-49. While British liberals had hailed the nationalist cause from a distance, they were made uneasy by the presence of the refugee republicans with radical ideas. For that reason, British liberals worked with the government to try to send the Hungarian refugees to the United States. On the other hand, tradesmen and artisans in Liverpool - who were drawn to the social democratic ideas of liberty expressed by the revolutionaries of 1848 - organized a successful campaign to grant the refugees asylum.     

Performing refugeeness in the Czech Republic: gendered depoliticisation through NGO assistance

The article examines the gender micropolitics of non-governmental assistance to refugees in the Czech Republic – a post-socialist society which is becoming a country of immigration. It critically examines relations of power between refugees and local non-governmental organisations (NGOs). These NGOs act as mediators between refugees and the state, media, wider public and academic production of knowledge. It is argued that despite the important roles they play in securing refugees' access to rights, their assistance is often perceived as problematic by refugees. The article analyses these relations in a wider context of the institutions of the refugee system where the state has increasing power in defining the conditions under which NGO assistance to refugees is provided. The study is based on qualitative research among recognised refugees from the former Soviet Union living in the Czech Republic and local NGOs assisting them with integration into society. I demonstrate how particular forms of assistance and public representation depoliticise refugees in a sense of fostering rather than challenging unequal power relations that lock refugees in a position of clients lacking political means of influencing their place in a receiving society. This is done by conceptualising ‘a refugee’ as a performative identity that is being produced and enacted in feminised NGO spaces. The analysis highlights refugees' critical reflections on their position in the relations of assistance.     

Front and Back Covers,Volume 28, Number 5. October 2012

Front and back cover caption, volume 28 issue 5 Front cover THE CRISIS IN MALI. Malian refugees are seen at the Mbera refugee camp in eastern Mauritanian, Mbera, Mauritania, 17 July 2012. At that point, roughly 92,000 refugees had arrived in the camp. Estimates are that nearly half a million Malians have been displaced from their homes this year with many refugees having also fled to Burkina Faso and Niger. Photo taken by award‐winning photographer, Lynsey Addario ( http://www.lynseyaddario.com ). Back cover TOURISM: WORK VS LEISURE A tourist from Hong Kong photographs a young Mursi woman with lip‐plate in her lower lip. Tourists queue up orderly for each to take their turn photographing the wonders of Mursi culture. The image demonstrates the complexity of tourist encounters, and the multifaceted aspects of leisure and work. The Mursi prepare for their visitors well ahead of touring cars arriving at their settlements. They make themselves up and imitate the kinds of working activities (e.g. grinding) they know from experience will fascinate and elicit a response from tourists. Tourists typically ask the Mursi for permission to photograph the process and, occasionally, join in themselves with the Mursi in their ‘work’. In this sense, the Mursi imitate ‘traditional’ sociality as they simulate their own working activities for tourists who supposedly spend their leisure time in Mursiland. As Tamàs Règi argues in this issue, instead of seeing leisure as a fixed human condition within one society, anthropologists might approach it, rather, as a process that evolves at the interface between different societies that meet. In this way, leisure is a constantly developing practice in cross‐cultural encounters.     

Lost boys,invisible girls: stories of Sudanese marriages across borders

Forced migration challenges and changes gender relations. The transnational activities of refugees resettled in the West create gender asymmetries among those who stay behind. This article explores the transnational marriages of young southern Sudanese women (‘invisible girls’), who either stayed in Sudan or remained in refugee camps in Kenya, to Sudanese men who were resettled to America, Canada or Australia (‘lost boys’). Incorporating gender as a relational category into the analysis of transnational practices that migrants and refugees engage in is important. The article argues that there is a need to put feminist analysis at the centre of transnational processes resulting from (forced) migration. It looks at the connections between different geographical locations, the impacts of the migration of young refugee men on bridewealth and marriage negotiations and the gender consequences for young women, men and their families. It is argued that transnational activities, such as marriage, contest, reconfigure and reinforce the culturally inscribed gender norms and practices in and across places. Transnational marriage results in ambiguous benefits for women (and men) in accessing greater freedoms. Anthropological analyses of marriage need a geographical focus on the transnational fields in which they occur. The article seeks to deepen understanding of the nuanced gendered consequences of transnationalism. It shows how gender analysis of actions taken across different locations can contribute to the theorisation of transnational studies of refugees and migrants.     

Refugees in the Arab Middle East: Academic and Policy Perspectives

The field of Refugee Studies is relatively unfamiliar to Middle East area specialists despite the significance of refugees in the region. The strong policy orientation of much of the work in the field has often shaped the way refugee issues are framed by scholars as well as practitioners. Concerns and discourses about refugee‐producing regions in general, and the Arab Middle East in particular, have tended to reflect Western notions of belonging, citizenship, and the state; and in recent years, have been seen through a lens of securitization in the region. This article addresses the development of the field, the subject of displacement and dispossession in the Arab Middle East from a Western perspective, the significant role that Arab cities play as sites for hosting refugees, and the challenges presented by the continued existence of Palestinian refugees.     

State policy and urban employment of refugees: The Greek case (1923–30)

The case of the Greek-Orthodox refugees transferred to Greece after 1923 is unique: it was the first obligatory exchange of populations in world history. Whereas the overwhelming majority of studies published on this issue deal with its political, rural or economic aspects, this paper attempts to explore the field of urban refugee employment. The primary question investigated is how a poor, war-weary country with a population barely over 5,000,000 managed to provide urban employment for 1,221,489 refugees, without its social fabric falling apart.     

The militarization of islands and migration: Tracing human mobility through US bases in the Caribbean and the Pacific

In this paper, we argue that the confinement of people on island military bases, whether narrated as humanitarian rescue, migration management, refugee resettlement, or militarized border enforcement, is an imperial process of ruination that impairs human possibility and erodes access to rights. Furthermore, the government's categorization of mobile people – as refugees, displaced, detainees, or migrants – informs the naming of these spaces, the bureaucratic and legal processes that they are subjected to, and their treatment (by local communities, federal authorities, the media, and the law). Empirical material is drawn from qualitative research conducted on US migration control in the Caribbean and Pacific. We identify spatial patterns of militarization operating across these sites, wherein migration is intertwined with enforcement, confinement, and militarization.     

Sedimentary logics and the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh

This paper adopts a geosocial approach to sociopolitical research by thinking with sediment as a forceful mode of terraqueous mobility driven by interactions between dynamic earth systems inflected by social processes. It demonstrates that sediment is an active and vital state of matter, with the potential to erupt into and disrupt human politics. Unpacking sediment as a form of movement challenges assumptions of the earth as a stable platform on which socio-political processes play out. The paper develops its argument through analyses of the Rohingya refugee camps in southeast Bangladesh and a char (sediment) island in the Meghna Estuary to which Bangladesh proposes to relocate the refugees. In the first situation, the sedimentary logics of anticline geology, deforestation and monsoon rains push back against political agendas directed towards constraining refugee movement. In the second, fluvial and oceanic sedimentary dynamics and the post-Holocene volatility of the monsoon throw into doubt the engineering solution proposed by Bangladesh to the political problems the refugee presence poses. Through these examples, the paper adds to literature on how states of matter inflect, exceed, undercut or in other ways interfere with matters of state through their unique, dynamic environmental properties.     

Subcontracting Academia: Alienation,Exploitation and Disillusionment in the UK Overseas Syrian Refugee Research Industry

As the political economy of social science research has shifted, subcontracted research assistants have taken over an ever growing part of the research process. In this article, we report on a case study of the experiences of local research assistants employed on UK‐directed research projects on Syrian refugees in Lebanon. While refugee research is framed in the UK as a noble project of helping the world's most vulnerable, these assistants speak critically of their sense of alienation, exploitation and disillusionment with the research they work on. Such problems arise, we argue, not just from subcontracted labour relations in the workplace itself, but also the broader political economy of how overseas social science research is currently produced. Addressing these problems requires giving better recognition to the work, interests and concerns of research assistants, but also rethinking and restructuring the global production of social science research more generally.     

Hybrid governmentality in practice: Territoriality and biopolitics in the Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh

This article discusses how the Rohingyas – a forcibly displaced community transformed the everyday lives and the territory of Cox's Bazar, Bangladesh. Since August 2017, Cox's Bazar, a borderland of Bangladesh is hosting more than a million of non-citizens within 32 camps in its two subdistricts. Based on mobile ethnographic research, I argue – a. borderlands are sites where politics of territory intersects politics of identity. The Rohingyas' statelessness and perpetuated marginalization are the outcome of this politics between identity and territory of the nation-states. b. The state prioritizes the security of its citizens from the refugees. Consequentially, the state enacts combined mechanisms of biopolitical and territorial practices that physically demarcate the refugee camps and socially segregate the refugees. I introduce this combination of mechanisms as hybrid governmentality. In Cox's Bazar, the key mechanisms of hybrid governmentality include - labelling refugees based on political rationale and providing them with identification cards, enacting street level surveillance to ensure confinement of the refugees, and maintaining everyday separation between refugees and the citizens.     

Negotiating Authority between UNHCR and ‘The People’

Refugee camps are exceptional places that are left to the benevolent governing of international humanitarian agencies, and offer unique opportunities to explore the making and un‐making of public authority. This article examines how certain groups of young men in a refugee camp in Tanzania manage to establish public authority by relating to ideas of a Burundian moral order, while at the same time relating to the ‘development‐speak’ of international relief operations. The refugees' attempts to establish public authority are highly contested and highly politicized, clashing with the relief agencies' vision of the camp as non‐political. Ironically, the young men who engage in politics in the camp are also closely linked to these relief agencies in their role as brokers between the agencies and the ‘small people’. Public authority is partly produced by the powers that are delegated to them by the agencies and partly formed in the ‘gaps' in the agencies’ system. Similarly, authority rests in part on the respect that these brokers gain from other refugees — a respect that is earned in numerous ways, including outwitting the international organizations — and in part on the recognition that they get from the very same organizations. In other words, public authority rests on complex relations between legitimacy and recognition and between sovereignty and governmentality.     

The role of housing and neighbourhood in the re-settlement process: a case study of refugee households in Winnipeg

Access to adequate, affordable housing is an essential first step in the re-settlement process for immigrants and refugees. It is the basis from which newcomers look for jobs, language training and other services. Without such housing, newcomers may have limited security of tenure, compromised health, jeopardized education and employment opportunities and impaired social and family life. Refugees generally face the greatest challenges of all newcomers and find their housing choices constrained by many factors. This article presents the results of a study of refugee housing circumstances in Winnipeg. Key socio-economic, housing and neighbourhood characteristics important to successful re-settlement are documented and analyzed. The longitudinal nature of the study facilitates exploration of trajectories in a variety of indicators over time. The picture that emerges is one of the improving trajectories in many key indicators but also of very difficult circumstances that negatively affect the re-settlement process and the effective integration of refugee households. The article ends with suggestions for policy and program changes that would improve the housing circumstances of newly arrived refugee households.