Refuge in a Moving World (2025)

Review of Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (ed), Refuge in a Moving World: Tracing Refugee and Migrant Journeys across Disciplines (UCL Press 2020) (Reviewed by I. Tuzi in Refuge)

Refuge, 2021

In Refuge in a Moving World, Elena FiddianQasmiyeh brings together over thirty authors from different disciplines to discuss the idea of refuge. Originating from the academic network called Refuge in a Moving World at University College London, this edited volume challenges the monolithic representations of refugees and displacement and proposes a more nuanced understanding of the history, causes, experiences, and responses to refugeehood. Set against the notion of “crisis”, this book challenges representations that have dominated the public humanitarian narrative in the past decades. Indeed, to counteract widespread xenophobic responses to migrants and refugees around the world, humanitarian actors have often created “pro-refugee” narratives that have “securitized” displaced people (p. 2) and limited their agency. They have portrayed refugees as victims and passive recipients of aid, as “ideal refugees” “worthy” of humanitarian assistance, or placed them into categories of exceptionalism—such as what Fiddian-Qasmiyeh calls the “super refugee”. These narratives generate inclusion and exclusion and keep displaced people “in their place” within a framework of epistemic violence (p. 3). To challenge these representations, this volume presents displacement and forced migration not as something that people simply experience, but as experiences to which people respond.

Review of Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh (ed), Refuge in a Moving World: Tracing Refugee and Migrant Journeys across Disciplines (UCL Press 2020) (Reviewed by C. Brun in IJRL)

International Journal of Refugee Law, 2019

Refuge in a Moving World, edited by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, is an open access book that can be read in several different ways. One important reading is the book’s display of the diversity and interdisciplinarity in the field of forced migration studies. The book is also a testament to the exciting development of innovative methods and approaches demonstrating a potential to move our field forward by expanding how knowledge is produced, particularly through creative methods and approaches. With this diversity and innovation, a third reading is that the book’s contributions form a more nuanced way of representing the experience of displacement away from the stereotyped and dichotomized figures of victim or hero (the ‘super-refugee’) (see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh’s introduction, pp 1–19). Finally, an important lens through which to read the book is that it illustrates the need for always contextualizing the knowledge of displacement away from homogenizing and reductive descriptions. As contributor Nerea Amorós Elorduy writes: ‘I argue that detailed, specific information adds complexity and nuance to refugee-encampment studies, depicting a more realistic image of the varied situations of encamped refugees and underscoring the powerful agency of refugees and their direct local hosts’ (p 364).

Introduction to Special Issue: Displaced Syrians

Journal of Refugee Studies, 2021

The articles presented here in this special issue on Displaced Syria emerged from a workshop held at The Institute of New York University in Abu Dhabi in March 2019. Its aims were to encourage an examination of the perceptions and aspiration of displaced Syrians and practitioners in hosting countries in the Levant, the Gulf, and in Europe with special attention to the voices of the displaced, their reimagining of home and homeland, and the emerging transnational sense of identity and belonging.

Book Review: Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World

Caucasus International, 2017

The book Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World is written by Alexander Betts. Betts is the Leopold W. Muller Professor of Forced Migration and International Affairs at the University of Oxford, where he is also director of the Refugee Studies Centre and Paul Collier is professor of economics at St. Antony’s College, Oxford. The book opens with an explanation of how one economist and political scientist decided to collaborate on refugees in the Middle East. This initiative emerged after the Jordanian think tank, WANA, invited both academics to come to Jordan and brainstorm with government on the issue. Subsequently, the authors broadened the scope beyond Jordan, aiming to develop a framework of ideas for rethinking a failing refugee system. In this sense, they put forward broader ideas to carry forward, including the argument that refuge is as much a development issue as a humanitarian issue; the need to restore refugees’ autonomy through jobs and education; emphasis on creating sustainable safe havens in the countries that host the majority of the world’s refugees; recognition of a role for business alongside government and civil society; and the necessity of reconsidering refugee assistance for a world utterly different to that which the existing system was designed.

On Refuge and Displacement: Challenges to the Provision of Rights and Protection for Syrians Inside and Outside Syrian Borders

Researching Internal Displacement, 2021

Since the outbreak of the Syrian conflict close to one decade ago (2011-present), more than one quarter of its population have fled the country to neighboring Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey. Another 25% of the population has been internally displaced. By the conflict's seventh year, more than 12 million Syrians were forcibly displaced, half of which were now refugees, and the other half of which became internally displaced (IDPs). Lebanon hosts the largest proportion of refugees compared to its population worldwide, with an estimated 1.5 million refugees between those registered and unregistered. IDPs from Syria are among the world's most vulnerable people. Unlike Syrian refugees in neighboring countries, these IDPs have not crossed an international border to receive the humanitarian protection they need, but have remained inside Syria as the conflict goes on. Even though they have fled from the same conflict, IDPs in Syria remain under the protection of the Syrian government. As citizens, though they do not have access to their rights or any form of protection from their government, they are considered entitled to their rights and protection under both human rights and international humanitarian law, and thus have a different legal standing to refugees from Syria who reside in Lebanon. Interestingly, both these populations (refugees and IDPs) are assisted by UNHCR. The paper discusses the two types of displacement the Syrian population has experienced (across borders and internally) through a comparative approach. The paper intends to challenge the notions of protection and displacement, through shedding light on the Syrian case, while also discussing definitions of refugee and IDP in contemporary conflicts and how these "labels" affect access to labor, citizenship, mobility and rights for the same population.

Alternative Voices on the Syrian Refugee Crisis in Jordan – An Interview Collection. Ramallah: RLS, Nov. 2015.

Refugee Studies Programme, University of Oxford

Disasters, 1992

Refuge in a Moving World: Tracing Refugee and Migrant Journeys across Disciplines. Edited by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh. UCL Press, 2020, pp. 529

Refuge: Canada's Journal on Refugees, 2021

'Life is Tight Here:' Displacement and Desire amongst Syrian Refugee Women in Jordan

Anthropology of the Middle East, 2021

Since the civil war began in 2011, 5.5 million Syrians have fled their home country and are now living as refugees. Building upon anthropological studies of precarity, the article draws upon 14 months of person-centered ethnographic fieldwork to examine the contextual specificities of Syrian women's protracted displacement in Jordan. By foregrounding bodily experience as described by three interlocutors during person-centered interviews, the article considers how subjectivities are reshaped under such conditions. The narratives analysed here illustrate how the precarity of displacement fosters an embodied sense of tightness, constriction and stagnation while reconfiguring temporal horizons and rendering visions of imagined futures increasingly myopic.

Mobilizing Global Knowledge: Refugee Research in an Age of Displacement

2019

The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist's copyright.