Shifting the focus from sensationalist rhetoric about mass migration to the North, The Politics of Refugee Policy in the Global South provides a comparative analysis of Lebanon’s and Jordan’s responses to the Syrian refugee movement, one of the largest displacements in modern history.

This publication is available as an open-access publication and can also be purchased on the as part of the MQUP Refugee and Forced Migration Studies Series.

Moderated by James Milner, Project Director of LERRN, and accompanied by esteemed panelists Jasmin Lilian Diab and Gerasimos Tsourapas, El-Taliawi presented her research study examining the complexities of refugee policymaking in the Global South. Emphasizing the need to understand refugee policymaking processes in the Global South as distinct from those in the Global North, she articulated how her inquiry was shaped around three questions:

• How do we analyze and understand how governments in the Global South respond to mass refugee movements?
• How have the governments of Jordan and Lebanon responded to Syrian mass displacement over time, and what has influenced their policy decisions?
• What explains variations in policy outputs between them, despite similarities (in contexts & displacement features?

Reflecting on the results of this study, El-Taliawi shared how the book follows Jordan and Lebanon’s evolving responses to Syrian displacement over 11 years. Her analysis revealed that both countries moved from non-restrictive policies (2011-2013) to semi-restrictive approaches (2014-2022), shifting focus from refugee assistance to host resilience. While Jordan and Lebanon converged on policies regarding entry, exit, and prohibiting local integration, they diverged on policies related to stay (registration suspension) and livelihoods (encampment). Drawing from these trends, El-Taliawi was able to categorize variation in host government behavior through four distinct strategies: Contain, Capitalize, Accommodate, and Politicize—each reflecting varying levels of constraints and government involvement.

Panelists later shared their praise for the publication, with Gerasimos Tsourapas noting how El-Taliawi’s robust methodological approach contributes to the book’s depth of empirical knowledge. Calling it a “timely, sophisticated intervention”, Tsourapas also emphasized the unique manner in which El-Taliawi foregrounds the agency of Global South states by treating refugee policymaking in the Global South as a distinct arena, rather than as a deviation from Northern norms. He offered thoughtful remarks on the subject, stating that “the book reminds us that the global south is not marginal to all of this, it is the main stage of this story of global displacement”.

Jasmin Lilian Diab characterized the book as “a much-needed corrective to the euro-centric bias” in refugee studies, and commended El-Taliawi’s expertise in evidence collection and the contribution that her works make to methodological conversations about policy creation and analysis. Diab highlighted how the book forces us to rethink these foundational assumptions that position the Global South as passive recipients of displacement, and stressed the importance of framing when shifting the gaze to the Global South and examining it on its terms.

In her closing remarks, El-Taliawi called upon scholars, activists, and humanitarians to move forward by engaging with humility, correcting historical injustices, and welcoming new inputs. Given the current critical moment in global refugee governance, this publication highlights the importance of utilizing previously overlooked public policy analytical tools to examine refugee issues and confront today’s realities.

To listen to the full webinar, follow the link below.

This report was prepared by Lilly Neang, LERRN Knowledge Mobilization Officer.

IOM Unbound? Obligations and Accountability of the International Organization for Migration in an Era of Expansion (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:

LERRN is pleased to share the following Call for Papers for an upcoming Edited Volume on behalf of the editors:

Exiled Scholars in Western Academia: Refugees or Intellectuals?

Editors

Alfred Babo Ph.D. (Fairfield University) ababo@fairfield.edu
Sayed Hassan Akhlaq Ph.D. (Coppin State University) shussaini@coppin.edu

Potential Publishers

Editors are in contact with potential publishers, including Routledge, Palgrave MacMillan, University of Wisconsin Press, and Liverpool University Press (Migrations and Identities series).

Book description and conceptual frame

This book aims to engage exiled scholars in an intellectual examination of the nexus of personal and professional experiences in Western universities. Contributors will share their own unique experiences in order to reflect on the changing nature of knowledge production, transfer, and exchange in a world increasingly defined by forced migration. Such reflections are not new. In her 1943 essay “We Refugees,” the exiled academic Hannah Arendt called on refugees to rethink and affirm their legal and social status in the face of the pull to forget trauma and assimilate quickly. In the process, she made the concept of refugee into a key term for modern scholarship and thought. Today, in the globalized context where the concept of “refugee” increasingly attracts both empathy and rejection, refugee scholars housed in Western universities cannot help but question the fluidity of their identity. Are they refugees or intellectuals? Can they be recognized as both refugees and scholars? This duality of identity creates
new opportunities for rethinking concepts such as humanitarianism, indigenization, asylum, diversity, scholar activism, and the transnational production of knowledge in the universities of the twenty-first century. Assembling scholars from around the world who are working in the fields of political science, international studies, anthropology, law, philosophy, and the humanities, this volume addresses both the geopolitical predicaments and the intellectual contributions of exiled academics in our troubled times.

Contributors to this volume should integrate personal life difficulties and/or successes, mixed with emotional distress and cultural adjustments, into a scholarly analysis of academia in exile. The volume consists of three parts structured around the following questions:

1. Transnational Knowledge Production and Academic Identity
   • How do exiled scholars understand the hybridization and indigenization of research and teaching?
   • How do the host social and work environments serve or not serve the production of transnational knowledge? How do they understand the interdisciplinarity and globalization of knowledge?
2. Immobility within Academic Mobility
   • How has asylum status for a “Safe Haven” impaired scholars’ mobility and banned their global activism? How do such stories reframe academic understandings of asylum, sanctuary, and refuge, considered
     historically, legally, and culturally?
   • How has establishing a career in the host country motivated scholars to re-invent and re-localize research topics and fields in a new institutional context? Has this happened easily and voluntarily or under duress? What are the intellectual fruits of such reinvention?
3. At-Risk Scholars Navigating the Academic Career
   • How has the journey to a tenure-track position implied the social vulnerability or success of refugee scholars? How did it differ from the professional trajectory of a non-refugee scholar
   • How do displaced scholars describe the impact of factors like identity, race, ethnicity, and refugee status in their job search and their academic success/failure, and how do these reflections challenge or transform current practices of diversity, equity, and inclusion? How do refugee scholars reflect on the dynamic evolution of their social and intellectual identities?

Submission procedure

Abstract — Please submit your abstract of no more than 500 words, by April 30, 2023,* and a brief bio to the editors (ababo@fairfield.edu and shussaini@coppin.edu). Authors must mention the questions of interest to them and describe the methodology/kinds of data that will be used and how they will combine their personal reflections with the scholarly responses to the questions.

*Deadline extension TBD; submissions will be accepted after this date.

In our first-ever podcast episode, LERRN host İrem Karabağ talks with book editors Professor Marcia C. Schenck and Kate Reed, and book contributor Ismail Alkhateeb of the anthology , published in 2023 with McGill-Queen’s University Press in their forced migration studies series.

While our guests reflect on how this thought-provoking book came to fruition, they also expand the meaning of “the right to research” and delve into the limits of traditional historical research. The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee and Global South Researchers invites its readers to a global conversation in the field of forced migration studies and historical research methodologies.

You can hear more about this influential anthology from its contributors and editors during the book launch hosted by LERRN on April 24th.

Ismail Alkhateeb is a Syrian translator and women’s rights activist. He helped coordinate the I Am She network, a network of community-based women’s groups or “peace circles” led by Syrian women working to reinforce effective political, economic, social, and cultural participation of women to realize peace, freedom, justice, representation, and transparency for all Syrians. 

Kate Reed is a PhD student in Latin American history at the University of Chicago. She holds an MPhil in economic and social history from the University of Oxford and an A.B. in history from Princeton University, where she began working for the Global History Lab in 2017. Before beginning graduate study, she was a teaching fellow for Global History Dialogues in its first two iterations. Her research considers questions of labour, gender, and structural economic change in twentieth-century Mexico, and her work has appeared in Public Books, Nacla Report on the Americas, and A Contracorriente. She is co-editor of The Right to Research.

Marcia C. Schenck is professor of global history at the University of Potsdam, Germany (). She holds a PhD in history from Princeton University, where she first became involved with the project that developed into this anthology. She created the Global History Dialogues course as part of the Global History Lab run by Jeremy Adelman at Princeton. Currently at the IAS Historische Kolleg in Munich, she is working on a book project about the Organization of African Unity’s refugee management during the decolonization era. Her research interests include global history, African history, oral history, migration history, and the history of international organizations. She has published in academic journals such as Africa Today, Africa, African Economic History, and Labor History, and her latest books are the open-access monograph Remembering Labor Migration to the Second World: Socialist Mobilities between Angola, Mozambique, and East Germany  (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and the co-edited anthology The Right to Research: Historical Narratives by Refugee & Global South Researchers (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023). She is also the founder of the Global History Dialogues Project, and the co-founder of the H-Net Refugees in African History network .