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:

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

The panelists expressed their gratitude for the opportunity to engage in this interdisciplinary conversation, especially when the current volume of scholarly work related to forced migration makes it difficult to sustain conversations across disciplines.

The panelists first reflected on what the phrase “messy politics” means. Although “messy” does not necessarily equal “bad,” the phrase “messy politics” does acknowledge the complex and rapidly changing responses to migration.

Shauna Labman explained, “What feels messy now is a lack of clarity, blurring of classifications, and a complete absence of transparency on what the politics of migration mean for people on the move.”

She acknowledged that each of the major humanitarian movements to Canada in recent years has involved messy components: the challenge of achieving ambitious government promises in the Syrian initiative, the definition of family for Yazidi family reunification, the difficulty of getting people out of Afghanistan, and the temporary status for Ukrainians. Although migration has always been political, it is currently highly politicized in Canada, with migration coming up in election campaigns and debates between politicians at all levels. Part of Sarah Zell’s work involves showing how managed migration that is labelled as “legal, safe, and orderly” is quite messy on the ground. For example, the work of admission may be happening in a rural village in Mexico, where temporary labour migrants are recruited, long before a person arrives at the official Canadian border.

Megan Bradley emphasized that political scientists see politics and power everywhere. For her, much of the current “messiness” relates to shifting power, which can unsettle long-standing patterns of exclusion. For example, in the early years of refugee studies, there was little reflection on the predominance of privileged Western academics among authors in journals in the field. Now, the messy work is ongoing to diversify journal authorship. Another challenge with messy politics today is the strong social demand for moral clarity, with the desire to put people on one side or another of each debate. However, in reality, political issues are messy and complex. It is unrealistic to reduce migration issues and other political issues to black and white debates.

The panelists also reflected on the ethical and practical challenges of engaging in policy debates as migration scholars. Although scholars often hope to provide evidence to guide policy in directions that are less exclusionary for migrants, in practice policy decisions often ignore research. Shauna Labman spoke about the difficulty of condensing her work into a 5-minute presentation for a politician or parliamentary committee. She often writes op-eds to make her work more accessible to readers beyond the academic community. Sarah Zell considered how the research process itself can be transformative, especially as a settler researcher engaging with the local Indigenous community.

Finally, audience members resonated with the calls to engage across disciplines, consider the end users of research, acknowledge the complexity of immigration, and recognize the opportunities and dangers of “crisis” language and “crisis” moments.

Written by Rachel McNally, LERRN Project Editor-in-Chief

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. Drawing 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.

Merve Erdilmen, PhD Student, Department of Political Science, McGill University

Executive Summary

This paper provides a brief review of the literature on the link between humanitarian and development approaches to durable solutions for refugees. By shedding light on the meaning, scope, and timing of durable solutions; strengths and shortcomings of traditional durable solutions; the emergence of alternative solutions; intersectional approaches to durable solutions; and the roles of international organizations, non-governmental organizations, as well as refugees themselves in the pursuit of durable solutions as they relate to the humanitarian-development nexus, the paper aims at examining the gaps in the literature and avenues for future studies and policies. The paper has three main findings. First, while the literature on the humanitarian-development nexus as it relates to durable solutions has received remarkable interest from scholars and policymakers, the links between the humanitarian approach to emergencies, durable solutions for refugees, and development lenses on the solutions are not always clearly examined in the literature. Second, the extensive literature on the durable solutions to displacement appears to focus mostly on experiences of flight and displacement and remains limited in exploring the struggle for solutions. Finally, most of the work on durable solutions studies solutions in the Global North, which is the destination only for a small proportion of refugee populations, rendering the focus on the pursuit of solutions within the Global South limited. There is a need for a deeper understanding of which “solutions” work in which contexts, recognizing the difficulty of reaching general conclusions about processes that are shaped by context-specific histories, cultures, socioeconomic conditions and experiences. It is also important to articulate the gap between refugees’ everyday practices and the policies of international organizations that contribute to solutions, the meaning of achieving a solution, and the perspectives that guide the conversation on the humanitarian-development nexus as it relates to durable solutions for refugees. The fundamental questions like solutions for who, by whom, how, and when deserve more attention, especially within the context of the Global South.

View the full LERRN Working Paper Series here:

DOI

Citation

Erdilmen, M. (2019). Durable Solutions and the Humanitarian-Development Nexus: A Literature Review. Local Engagement Refugee Research Network (LERRN).

The resolution of displacement and the conflicts that force refugees from their homes is often explained as a top-down process led and controlled by governments and international organizations. This book takes a different approach. Through contributions from scholars working in politics, anthropology, law, sociology and philosophy, and a wide range of case studies, it explores the diverse ways in which refugees themselves interpret, create and pursue solutions to their plight.

Special thanks to the panelists:

• Prof. Megan Bradley – Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, Institute for the Study of International Development, McGill University
• Mustafa Alio – Managing Director/ Co-Founder, Network for Refugee Voices; Managing & Development Director/ Co-Founder, Jumpstart – Refugee Talent
• Muzna Dureid – Syrian Refugee and Founder of Women Refugees Not Captives
• Prof. Christina Clark-Kazak – Associate Professor, School of Public and International Affairs, University of Ottawa
• Prof. James Milner – Associate Professor, Department of Political Science, ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University

Your contributions are helping make refugees active partners in research and practice.

to view Refugees’ Roles in Resolving Displacement and Building Peace on the Georgetown University Press website.