Despite rising numbers of internally displaced persons (IDPs) driven by conflict, climate change, and natural disasters, the issue continues to receive limited and inconsistent policy attention. As global media and political focus tends to center on refugees, and humanitarian resources are stretched thin—particularly in the wake of severe funding cuts by the current U.S. administration—millions of IDPs risk being further marginalized.

The authors call for renewed and sustained commitment from international actors, governments, and civil society to prevent internal displacement from “falling back into the shadows.” Their piece emphasizes the need to prioritize IDPs on global agendas and promote inclusive, durable solutions that uphold the rights and dignity of displaced populations. Central to this is empowering displaced individuals to actively participate in decisions and shape localized responses that shape their futures.

Read the full article here:

Available in English, French, Spanish, and Ukrainian.

Meet the IDP leaders by viewing the videos .

By Sarah Nandi, Oroub El_Abed, Megan Bradley, and Hamzah Qardan

Published: March 21, 2025 in Ethnic and Racial Studies

This timely and insightful research explores how refugees in Jordan, particularly Somali, Sudanese, Syrian, and Iraqi communities, navigate resettlement – both in pursuit and in refusal – through an intersectional lens. Drawing on in-depth fieldwork, this study reveals how gender, race, nationality, and power dynamics shape both aspirations and resistance to resettlement. The article challenges dominant narratives that frame resettlement as a universally desired solution and calls for an intersectional approach to understanding refugee agency, particularly in Global South contexts.

Key highlights:

• Unpacks how “resettlement-mindedness” and “deservedness” manifests through vocational and language training efforts in pursuit of self-reliance objectives .
• Challenges the assumption that resettlement is a universally desired solution.
• Offers a nuanced understanding of refugee agency in the Global South.

We invite scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and community members to engage with this important work.

Read the full article

There has been increased scholarly and policy attention to “localized” responses to displacement, in the hope that further empowering local actors may unlock new means of protecting refugees’ rights and addressing their needs. However, these efforts have often oversimplified power relations within localization processes, bringing some players into focus while occluding others, and devoting insufficient attention to how localization processes and the power dynamics surrounding them have evolved over time. In response, this article draws on theories of subalternity and subaltern agency from the field of postcolonial studies to develop a more nuanced conceptualization of power in localization processes in the refugee regime. We contend that subalternity is best understood as a fluid, relational position that changes over time, such that particular refugees and displaced groups may oscillate between dominant and marginalized, subaltern subject positions, within intersecting systems of power. We probe refugees’ subaltern agency in terms of resistance and persistence, and deepen this account through analysis of localized responses to Burundian refugees in Tanzania, focusing on the localization of efforts to secure durable solutions for refugees. We argue that localization scholarship, particularly in the context of the refugee regime, needs to move beyond homogenized, dehistoricized, and romanticized notions of grassroots, refugee-led responses and focus on complex and fluid power configurations among diverse local actors.

Sarah Nandi, Department of Political Science, McGill University

Oroub El Abed, International Migration and Refugee Studies, Birzeit University

Megan Bradley, Department of Political Science, McGill University

Hamzah Qardan, USAID, Jordan

Executive Summary

The three durable solutions, namely resettlement to a third country, local integration, and voluntary repatriation, aim to resolve refugeehood. However, these traditional pathways are no longer feasible for the majority of refugees. How different refugees access or think about solutions for their situation, including their perceptions and pursuit of the traditional and alternative pathways, are shaped by intersecting factors such as gender, race, nationality, and class. In order to better understand how different displaced communities navigate this “meantime” period of liminality, this study draws upon interviews with refugees and humanitarian staff in Amman, Jordan to examine the paths that refugees make for themselves even under enormous risk and constraints. To do so, we propose the concept of “para-solutions”, which can be understood as the parallel pathways that refugees create for themselves to access some of the benefits associated with residency rights or limited forms of establishing a life outside of Jordan. Para-solutions include both the tangible practices that refugees use in solutions-making in the present as well as the future hope attached to the different strategies. We examine para-solutions through two sub-categories: para-residency and para-mobility. Para-residency includes solutions that are localized in the Jordanian setting, deal mainly in the temporal present, and include practices such as pursuing education, vocational training, and volunteering opportunities.

Para-mobility is often focused on the future by including a hopefulness for what may become possible outside of Jordan and operates through higher education scholarships, short-term labour contracts in other countries or online, or travel through family relationships and marriage. Together, these para-solutions offer a more complete and intersectional representation of what “solutions” look like from the perspectives of refugees and show how the traditional pathways are always situated within a much broader solutions spectrum that challenges preconceived notions of belonging while also speaking to the critical role of hope.

View the full LERRN Working Paper Series here:

DOI

Citation

Nandi, S., El Abed, O., Bradley, M., Qardan, H. (2024). In The Meantime: Gender, Race, Nationality, and “Para- Solutions” for Refugees in Amman, Jordan. Local Engagement Refugee Research Network (LERRN).Ěý

IOM Unbound? Obligations and Accountability of the International Organization for Migration in an Era of ExpansionĚý(Cambridge University Press, 2023)

It is an era of expansion for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), an increasingly influential actor in the global governance of migration. Bringing together leading experts in international law and international relations, this collection examines the dynamics and implications of IOM’s expansion in a new way. Analyzing IOM as an international organization (IO), the book illuminates the practices, obligations and accountability of this powerful but controversial actor, advancing understanding of IOM itself and broader struggles for IO accountability. The contributions explore key, yet often under-researched, IOM activities including its role in humanitarian emergencies, internal displacement, data collection, ethical labour recruitment, and migrant detention. Offering recommendations for reforms rooted in empirical evidence and careful normative analysis, this is a vital resource for all those interested in the obligations and accountability of international organizations, and in the field of migration.

A full PDF of the book is available from Cambridge University Press:

Megan Bradley, Lead of LERRN’s Solutions Working Group, has published Colonial continuities and colonial unknowing in international migration management: the International Organization for Migration reconsidered in the Journal of Ethnic and Migrations Studies (JEMS). The full article is available online from JEMS:

Megan Bradley, Lead of LERRN’s Solutions Working Group, has published Realising the Right of Return: Refugees’ Roles in Localising Norms and Socialising UNHCR in Geopolitics.ĚýDrawing on extensive material from the UNHCR archives on repatriation movements from Honduras to El Salvador in the 1980s, this article examines how refugees themselves have influenced the governance of return by serving as norm entrepreneurs, localising the right of return and socialising UNHCR to rethink and support broader interpretations of this principle.

Reinforcing and expanding on recent studies of how refugees actively shape aid efforts, peacebuilding and the resolution of displacement, this study highlights the significance of subaltern power in the refugee regime, showing how it can reverberate across different sites and scales to definitively influence not only the execution of the regime’s core functions but also the interpretation of the normative commitments underpinning it.

This series will explore the future of refugee protection in a global community. It will frame those discussions within the current ‘blueprint’ of the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR). Bringing together a range of speakers from academic, policy and lived experience, the series will present varied perspectives on the development of refugee protection and promote the visibility of, and engagement with, the GCR within UK academic and public audiences.
All seminars are free and open to the public. Registration is available through this website:

More on the Next Event

Title: Is Return the Preferred Solution for Refugees?
Speaker: Megan Bradley, Associate Professor, McGill University
When: 4 December 2019, 6pm | Room 34, Senate House

Voluntary return is often hailed as the preferred solution to displacement. The Global Compact on Refugees, for example, states that “Voluntary repatriation in conditions of safety and dignity remains the preferred solution in the majority of refugee situations.” However, reasons for “preferring” return are rarely examined in detail, and given that returnees regularly face violence and impoverishment, many are understandably sceptical of this claim.

Focusing on the right of return – the key principle underpinning repatriation movements – this talk identifies key obstacles to refugee repatriation. It then explores four interlinked senses in which return may be morally valuable and in some cases even normatively preferable as a durable solution for refugees: first, that the right of return may serve as a means of upholding housing, land and property rights; second, that it may affirm and advance the equal rights of all citizens; third, that it embodies opposition to ethnic cleansing; and fourth, that it may be an important form of redress for refugees. This suggests that under the right circumstances return can advance morally valuable outcomes that other approaches to resolving displacement do not. While some persuasive arguments may be made for promoting return as the preferred solution to displacement, this should not translate into restrictions on the claims of individual refugees to pursue other solutions, such as local integration in host countries.

Even if refugees access other solutions, they retain a legitimate claim to return to their countries of origin. In this sense the possibility of return is essential to the resolution of refugee situations, even if it is not uniformly preferable.

More on Megan Bradley

Megan Bradley is an Associate Professor in Political Science and International Development Studies at McGill University. Her research focuses on refugees and internal displacement, humanitarianism, human rights, and efforts to redress massive injustices. Her books include Refugee Repatriation: Justice, Responsibility and Redress (Cambridge University Press, 2013), and Forced Migration, Reconciliation and Justice (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015).

Alongside her research and teaching, Dr Bradley has worked with a range of organizations concerned with development, human rights and humanitarianism. From 2012-2014, she was a Fellow in the Foreign Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. She has also worked with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), and served as the Cadieux-LĂŠger Fellow at Global Affairs Canada.