What can the history of refugee labour mobility tell us about who gets access to third-country resettlement pathways today?

In a new blog post publishes in , Dr. Rachel McNally examines the history of economic immigration as a pathway for refugees between 1951 and 2011, highlighting an often-overlooked dimension of this history: the exclusion of refugees with disabilities.

The post New Blog Post: Rethinking Labour Mobility and Refugee Resettlement appeared first on LERRN: The Local Engagement Refugee Research Network.

Please join us in congratulating LERRN researchers, Dr. Amanda Klassen and Dr. Rachel McNally, who were awarded Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degrees in Political Science at last week’s convocation ceremony.

Amanda’s dissertation, titled, “A Feminist Approach to the Study of Norm Implementation in the Global Refugee Regime”, uses a feminist geopolitical approach to examine the emergence and local implementation of global norms relating to the protection of refugee women and girls. Her work helps to explain power dynamics at different spaces, scales, and timeframes by drawing on non-Western perspectives and decentering the state.

Rachel’s dissertation, titled, “Advocating for Admission: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Diplomacy on Behalf of Refugees with Disabilities, 1951-2011”, draws on archival documents to examine how UNHCR strategically and persistently advocated for the resettlement of refugees with disabilities from 1951 to 2011. She was also awarded the Senate Medal for Outstanding Academic Achievement.

Both thesis projects were supervised by Dr. James Milner, Project Director of LERRN.

Beyond their academic achievements, Amanda and Rachel have both made invaluable contributions to LERRN. Over the years, they have supported numerous LERRN research, training and knowledge mobilization initiatives – the publication of ł˘ˇĄ¸é¸éąˇâ€™s Working Papers Series, conducted and published research studies, and taken on leadership roles in LERRN’s Cross-Cultural Fieldwork Training course. Their work has left an enduring impact on the project, and we look forward to following their continued contributions to research, policy, and practice in the years ahead.

Reflecting on their time with LERRN, Rachel and Amanda shared:

Rachel will be beginning a new position as the Research Coordinator for , a SSHRC-funded Partnership Grant at the University of Ottawa.

As they embark on new roles and opportunities, we wish them continued success in all their future endeavors.

Congratulations, Amanda and Rachel!

The post Congratulations to PhD Graduates Amanda Klassen and Rachel McNally! appeared first on LERRN: The Local Engagement Refugee Research Network.

We are excited to announce the release of a new publication titled: by Rachel McNally, Pascal Zigashane, Abdikadir Abikar, Arte Dagane, Mark Oyat Okello, and Ochan Leomoi, published in

This study delves into the complex dynamics of waiting for resettlement faced by refugees in Kenyan refugee camps, specifically focusing on the strategies individuals and communities develop as they navigate uncertain futures. By examining the psychological, social, and economic dimensions of waiting, the publication sheds light on the resilience and adaptability of refugees in the face of prolonged displacement and uncertainty of resettlement.

Abstract

This research was co-produced with equal participation of researchers with lived experiences of displacement, currently residing in Kakuma and Dadaab, Kenya. This work is essential for scholars, policymakers, and practitioners working in refugee studies, migration, and humanitarian aid.

We hope this research sparks meaningful conversations and contributes to advancing our understanding of displacement, waiting for resettlement, and resilience in refugee communities.

Related Publications

Policy Brief: Waiting for Resettlement Increasing Transparency in the Resettlement Process in Kenya

The post New Publication: “The ‘Not Yet’ and ‘Never’ Resettled: Individual and Communal Waiting Strategies Among Refugees in Kenyan Camps” appeared first on LERRN: The Local Engagement Refugee Research Network.

By Lilly Neang, Rachel McNally, and Nadeea Rahim

Introduction

In 2019, the editors of the journal embarked on a self-reflection process about the geography of submissions to the journal, resulting in a blog post asking the critical question: They concluded that the “vast majority of migration research seems to be originating in high-income countries.” Inspired by this blog post and the reality that today , LERRN began to investigate the authorship and content of some of the most recognized academic journals in the field of refugee and forced migration studies. LERRN published the original version of this analysis of the in March 2020. Since then, LERRN has published an analysis of Refugee Survey Quarterly and an analysis of Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees. LERRN also hosted a webinar involving the editors of these two journals to reflect on the results of the analyses and questions of access and representation in academic publishing. In 2021, “to work towards further diversifying the journal in terms of themes and approaches, as well as in terms of attracting more publications by emerging researchers and scholars from the Global South.” As academic journals in the field of forced migration studies consider various initiatives to reduce barriers for authors based in the global South and authors with lived experience of displacement, we hope that these analyses can continue to inform the conversation.

In the spirit of continuing this conversation, this blog post presents a revised version of ł˘ˇĄ¸é¸éąˇâ€™s analysis of the , considering the geographic focus and authorship of the published articles and book reviews. Compared to the original version, it broadens the scope to include the 305 articles and 141 book reviews that were published over the 10-year period between 2010 and 2019 (the same time period as ł˘ˇĄ¸é¸éąˇâ€™s Refugee Survey Quarterly analysis). The celebrated its 30^th anniversary in 2018 and is arguably the leading journal in the field. The journal is clearly aware of some of the issues surrounding global imbalances in knowledge production, publishing several related articles in the last decade.[1] There have also been several changes at the journal since 2019 when the time period of this analysis ends, including a . The Book Reviews section of the journal was that welcomes reviews of other material in addition to academic books (such as autobiographies and creative literature), texts published in any language, and historical texts.

Methodology

Using the  (“developed regions” as global North and “developing regions” as global South), we analyze global North and global South participation through categorizing the articles based on the authors’ institutional affiliations at the time of publication and the countries where these institutions are located.  A limitation of this approach is that it relies on the information about authors that is published along with the articles/book reviews and does not consider other forms of geographic identification, such as nationality data or connections to the region, which were not available for this research. Instead, this analysis considers the question of whether scholars from the global South require either a co-author from the global North or an institutional affiliation in the global North to be published in some of the most-cited journals in the field. The North/South classification is a vast simplification that obscures significant differences within these categories, but it is a useful shorthand to examine questions of geographic representation and to represent some of the dynamics involved in the political economy of knowledge production (such as access to research funding). For the book reviews, authorship refers to the person who wrote the review, not the author(s) of the book. This analysis only considers the articles and book reviews that were selected for publication, so the results may be different looking at all the articles and book reviews submitted to the journal. However, this information was not available to the researchers. All the refugee and displaced persons population figures in the rest of this blog post come from  and reflect the numbers of forcibly displaced persons at the end of 2019 (in line with the time period of the analysis). Within this time period, the number of forcibly displaced people worldwide nearly doubled: from 41.1 million at the end of 2010 to 79.5 million at the end of 2019.

Results

Global South vs. Global North Authorship

As countries in the global South host the majority of refugees and other displaced persons, it is important to consider the representation of global South voices in the academic literature on forced migration. Of the 305 articles, 15 (5%) were written by single author based in the global South and an additional 26 (9%) included global South authors through co-authorship (Figure 1). A similar trend was noted in book reviews, with only 5 (4%) of the 141 reviews written by global South authors (Figure 2).

Collaboration and Co-Authorship

Nearly half of the articles (47%) in the Journal of Refugee Studies are co-authored, where collaboration between different countries is common. Although these partnerships are primarily between authors based in the global North, 15 (10%) articles involve North-South partnerships, and 11 (8%) of co-authored articles only include authors based in the global South (Figure 3).

Authors by Country

The JRS authors are based in many different countries. In the articles, 45 different countries were represented, including 23 countries in the global North and 22 countries in the global South. However, 17 of these 45 countries only have one article each. In addition, authors based in countries in the global South produced less articles per country overall, with an average of two articles per country, compared to an average of 14 articles per country for countries in the global North. These statistics are nearly identical for book reviews, with averages of 1.1 articles per country in the global South and 13 articles per country in the global North.

Authors based in the United Kingdom lead with the most publications, as 74 (24%) articles and 73 (52%) book reviews include at least one author based in the UK (Figure 4). All of the top 10 countries for both articles and book reviews are in the global North. However, countries are not necessarily directly comparable because of vastly different populations, economies, and size of the postsecondary sector or number of scholars studying forced displacement. Considering some of these differences, another way to look at the data is to consider articles by country population. When the figures are adjusted to the number of articles per capita, the top 10 are still all from the global North, but there are slight changes in which countries lead in publications. In this case, Norway has substantially more articles than any other country with 41 articles per 10 million people. However, the book reviews show a different pattern, as Jordan and the United Arab Emirates, both countries located in the global South, make it in the top 10 for book reviews per capita.

Geographic Focus

The articles published cover issues related to forced migrants hosted in every region of the world. However, refugees and other forced migrants are distributed unevenly around the world. Despite hosting a lower percentage of the world’s refugees and forced migrants, some countries and regions are the focus of a high percentage of the articles published in JRS. Of the 305 articles, 48 (16%) focus on globally relevant topics such as international refugee law, forced migration history, and multilateral humanitarianism. The remaining 257 were then sorted into 12 different country/regional categories. Australia, Canada, the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe (excluding Germany) are over-represented as the geographic focus in the journal. Collectively, these countries in the global North hosted only 12% of the world’s refugee population at the end of 2019 but more than half (54%) of the articles focus on displaced persons in these countries. In contrast, Sub-Saharan Africa hosted 31% of the world’s refugees and 39% of UNHCR’s population of concern at the end of 2019, but only 42 (16%) of the articles discussed forced migrants in Sub-Saharan Africa (Figure 5).

Among the book reviews, 72 (51%) do not have a country/regional focus and discuss global topics such as climate-related migration. The book reviews that do focus on a particular country or region generally show similar patterns to the articles, with one major exception. Unlike the journal’s articles, the Middle East and North Africa region (excluding Turkey and Lebanon) is also overrepresented in addition to those previously mentioned from the global North (Figure 6).

Type of Displacement

Each article and book review was coded according to the group or groups of forced migrants it discussed: refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced persons (IDPs), stateless persons, or “other” to capture groups of (forced) migrants who fall outside UNHCR’s population of concern. For both articles and book reviews, refugees were the primary focus, with 182 (60%) articles and 75 (53%) book reviews talking specifically about refugees. Since the founding of the Journal of Refugee Studies, the field of refugee studies has expanded to consider forced migration more broadly and to consider the experiences of those people who may not have the legal status of ‘refugee’. Asylum seekers or asylum systems were discussed in 43 (14%) articles and 16 (11%) book reviews. It is that scholars have paid limited attention to Internally Displaced Persons. This gap is reflected in the journal, as only 19 (6%) articles and 3 (2%) book reviews discuss Internally Displaced Persons. Very few articles or book reviews (less than 1%) discussed issues related to stateless persons.

Public Accessibility

JRS is a subscription-based journal. Among the articles published from 2010 to 2019, access to nearly all of them (98%) is restricted. Only 5 of the 305 (2%) articles are open to the public. Since the time period of the analysis, there has been an increasing number of articles published open access or available for free (14 articles in 2020 and 33 articles in 2021).

Conclusions and Future Directions

Like ł˘ˇĄ¸é¸éąˇâ€™s previous analyses of other journals in the field, the results show a significant imbalance between where refugees and other displaced persons are located versus where journal authors are located. There is a similar imbalance in the geographic focus of the articles and book reviews, which more often discuss the much smaller number of refugees and asylum seekers who have reached the global North. In the broader international context, these results reflect structural imbalances in access to refugee-related research funding, an issue that and in a recent LERRN webinar. There are also some unique challenges for refugee researchers in certain countries, such as a political context that makes it difficult to criticize government policy.

This analysis lends further support to ongoing conversations at forced migration journals about ways to reduce barriers for potential authors based in the global South and authors with lived experience of displacement. Journals in the field may consider initiatives such as mentorship programs offering one-on-one support to potential authors, writing workshops for potential authors, and additional editing or other supports within the publication process. Other initiatives beyond the journals, such as direct funding for local institutions and researchers, may also be helpful in addressing some of these barriers.

Given the very limited number of articles that are available to the public without a subscription, JRS could consider increasing open access content to make its articles more accessible for readers, particularly those readers from practitioner communities, people with displacement experience, or readers in the Global South who do not have access to institutional journal subscriptions. As noted above, in the last two years many more articles have been available open access than during the time period of the analysis.

The new approach to the Reviews section of the journal, as mentioned above and , aims to diversify both what gets reviewed and who writes reviews. However, as the Review Editor also notes, writing a review is primarily a service to the field overall. It may not be fair to expect academics in the global South or people with a lived experience of displacement to do the time-consuming work of writing reviews without compensation and with limited benefit to their own careers. In this context, the JRS Review Editor has suggested that established scholars based in the global North can play an important role in writing reviews that bring attention to the work of refugees and of scholars in the global South.

For over 30 years, the Journal of Refugee Studies has published high-quality research on issues related to forced displacement and has made a significant contribution to the development of the field of refugee and forced migration studies. Going forward, the journal can play an equally significant role in facilitating a truly global academic conversation and in publishing articles and reviews that together show a representative picture of forced displacement around the world.

[1] Including “” by Loren Landau (2012), “” by Richa Shivakoti and James Milner (2021), and “” by Maha Shuayb and Cathrine Brun (2021).

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By Rachel McNally, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University

On 3 October 2019, the Local Engagement Refugee Research Network (LERRN) organized a panel discussion with partners from research, policy and practice to discuss how partnered research could engage with Canada’s role in the global refugee regime. The panel was part of the two-day conference “Informing Migration Policy Through International Experience and Evidence”, organized by ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University’s Migration Policy Research Group (MPRG). The panel was chaired by James Milner, LERRN Project Director, and featured the perspectives of Jessie Thomson from CARE Canada, Chris Gregory from IRCC, Christina Clark-Kazak from University of Ottawa, and Nathan Benson from the Refugee Hub.

The panel examined the role of academic research on Canada’s engagement with the global refugee regime and its contribution to policy and practice at the global level and in the global South. Historically, Canadians have been leaders in refugee research, such as through the Refugee Research Network (RRN) IRCC’s own research efforts, SSHRC-funded research on Syrian refugees in Canada, and engagement by the Refugee Hub and others with the global compacts on refugees and migration. Building on these experiences, panelists agreed that academic research is valuable for informing policy and practice, and that there is a moral obligation to contribute to policy in the context of forced migration

But there are also barriers to bringing academic research into policy discussions. First, the panel highlighted the importance of knowledge translation, suggesting that academic research has the potential to shape policy and practice, but only when it is presented in a usable form for policymakers and practitioners. The traditional academic article is not very accessible given academic jargon and length, so researchers need to invest in knowledge translation and consider alternative formats such as policy briefs. However, knowledge translation is a distinct skillset and academics are not typically trained in this area. In addition, policy engagement is not rewarded within academia the same way as traditional academic work. While researchers in the Global South hold important knowledge, it does not often travel into international conversations, something that LERRN is trying to address. The slow pace of academic research is also a challenge given rapidly changing policy environments, which makes it difficult to influence policy in real-time.

In doing research, academics need to recognize the constraints of both NGO partners and the government. For NGOs, operational realities – including limited funding, staff turnover and workload – make it difficult to commit time to a long-term partnership and to build the necessary foundation of trust. It was suggested that coordination between researchers could help lessen the burden on NGOs and avoid duplication. For example, it is onerous for a settlement agency to speak to twenty researchers separately, but speaking to one researcher or a group of researchers is feasible. For the government, operational realities also impact policy and practice, so researchers should be cautious about making assumptions without a good understanding of the context.

Finally, the panel suggested some approaches and ideas for future research. New projects and partnerships should aim to institutionalize refugee participation in all aspects of the research, or in the words of the Network for Refugee Voices “nothing about us without us.” Comparative approaches, case studies, and cohort-based studies all offer useful insights about the impacts of different policies. Research within Canada has concentrated on resettled refugees, so the panel suggested expanding research on asylum seekers in Canada. Future projects could also break down the siloes between research focused within Canada and research focused overseas, such as by examining the impact of pre-arrival experiences on in-Canada integration.

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