Naohiko Omata (Michaelmas)

This course explores the lived experiences of forced migrants through an anthropological lens. It looks into how refugees’ identities as well as notions of home and belonging have been affected by displacement, investigates the social, cultural and economic lives of refugees, and examines how they interact with UNHCR, aid agencies and host governments. The course is structured as an investigation of the archetypal stages of forced migration: human movement, life in camps, interaction with relief agencies, making a living, claiming asylum, and then return and resettlement. Each week will be taught through close reading of first-hand ethnographic materials, combined with lectures, class discussions, guest talks, and workshops. The overall aim of the course is to enable students to study in detail how anthropological thinking, concepts, and methods can be applied and contribute to understanding of experiences of forced migration as well as equipping students with a broad overview of contemporary anthropological concerns.

Catherine Briddick (Michaelmas)

This course covers the core issues in international refugee law and international human rights law that define the scope of international protection. It focuses on the definition of a refugee under the 1951 Refugee Convention and pursuant to regional instruments and agreements. It also explores the role of human rights law in offering protection to refugees and other forced migrants. 

Overall, the course provides students with a critical understanding of the content, workings, and shortcomings of international legal responses to refugees, so that by the end of the term, students will understand both the potential, and the limits, of this body of law. By engaging with the readings, lectures, and class activities, students will also develop their abilities in legal analysis, synthesis, and argumentation. The course is cumulative, building week on week, and moving across regions, to provide a comprehensive overview of the international protection regime. The introductory weeks will, therefore, raise issues that will be returned to throughout the course (and in the advanced law option, should students choose to undertake it) with students gaining greater understanding and insight as the term (and year) progresses.

Matthew Gibney and Tom Scott-Smith (Michaelmas)

Forced migration is inherently political. Its causes, consequences, and responses to it cannot be understood without looking at the role of power, interests, and ideas. The movement of people across communities, especially when forced, leads to competing claims and political conflicts.  In order to understand both the significance of forced migration and the tensions it generates, an analysis of both historical events and political ideas is essential. This course is divided into two substantive sections. The first four weeks look at drivers of forced migration, focusing on central causes of displacement: authoritarianism, colonialism, disorder and capitalism. The second four weeks look at political responses to forced migration, focusing on hospitality, humanitarianism, control and resistance. Each week we will draw upon an empirical case study that illustrates the topic. These are often historical, to give us the benefit of a rich scholarly literature and to facilitate deeper analysis. After outlining some key debates surrounding each topic, we will read the work of political or social theorists to develop understanding and provide a platform for discussion in seminars. 

Matthew Gibney (Hilary)

Human movement across borders raises complex moral questions. States, humanitarian organisations, and individuals often justify their various positions on immigration and refugee movements on moral grounds. This course aims to explore a range of moral issues raised by contemporary border controls. We critically consider questions such as: whether people should have the right to move freely between states; whether states should be allowed to trade responsibility for refugees amongst themselves; under what, if any, circumstances disobeying or resisting immigration controls might be justifiable; whether states have a duty to grant admission to non-citizens from countries they have formerly colonized; and if it is morally acceptable to denationalize and deport citizen terrorists. These questions raise controversial and contested issues. We will map the contours of these lively and important debates and identify the positions that we find the strongest. By the end of this course students should have gained a greater awareness of the moral controversies that underpin contemporary debates on border control; an improved understanding of why actors use moral arguments as a resource in political debates; and an introduction to some key debates in moral and political theory.

Tom Scott-Smith and Catherine Briddick (Michaelmas) and Carlos Vargas-Silva (Hilary)

What is distinctive about scholarly research, and how can we produce it most effectively? What methods can scholars use to examine forced migration in ways that are valuable and ethical? This course examines these questions, with the aim of developing essential skills for understanding the complexities around research related to forced migration. The course is presented over two terms. In Michaelmas term (Part 1), the focus is on qualitative methodologies, research design, and data collection. The emphasis on the first four weeks of this term will be on posing effective research questions, preparing students to produce a proposal in response to a call from funders. The second four weeks of term will turn to specific case studies of ‘research in practice’, drawing on recent research projects from the Refugee Studies Centre and Beyond. 

In Hilary term (Part 2), lectures and classes will turn to quantitative data analysis, led by Carlos Vargas-Silva. The discussion will include aspects related to sampling different populations, developing questionnaires and analysing the collected data. There will also be discussion about ways of ‘mixing’ these quantitative techniques with the qualitative methods introduced in Part 1. Students will prepare for a final assessed exercise, which examines their ability to critically analyse quantitative research findings.

This advanced law option provides students with a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the law on international protection. 

The course commences by considering how refugees are recognised as such, explores the use of Temporary Protection in Europe and Latin America, and then examines legal questions relating to exclusion from refugee status and cessation of refugee status. These topics are followed by a discussion of key refugee rights, including non-penalisation. Finally, we consider the relationships between IRL and other areas of law, including International Humanitarian Law, Trans-national Criminal Law (in relation to trafficking) and the Law of the Sea.

Amidst the daunting scale of protracted displacement worldwide, there has been growing interest in the economic and development potential of refugees across policy and academic arenas. In this course, we explore the economic lives of refugees in a variety of contexts through systematic and theoretical approaches. The guiding question of the course is: What difference does it make, in economic terms, to be a refugee? While refugees engage in economic activities and participate in markets in their host states, their economic lives are shaped by various aspects of ‘refugeehood’ – defined here as the legal, social, political and/or institutional contexts in which refugees find themselves in exile. By examining a range of factors that influence refugees’ economic decisions, strategies, and outcomes, we investigate the ways in which their economic lives are analytically distinct. Building upon this micro-level knowledge, we will also critically interrogate influential developmental ideas promoted by the international refugee regime, such as the humanitarian-development nexus, self-reliance, and economic inclusion, and discuss what they mean for refugees’ well-being and protection. The course takes an interdisciplinary approach by integrating the work of anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, political scientists, economists, lawyers, and practitioners. The geographical scope is global, covering refugees in both the Global South and Global North. 

Home has been a central concept to Forced Migration Studies since its inception. Often thought of as the counterpart to being ‘on-the-move’ or ‘in refuge’, the idea of home continues to animate contemporary scholarly and grounded understandings of displacement and humanitarian responses. This course uses home and homemaking as a lens through which to understand epistemological changes in Forced Migration Studies from the 1980s to the present day, asking what contemporary scholars can learn from this historical intellectual trajectory about rethinking paradigms of responses to displacement.

It begins with understandings of home as mapped onto the nation-state, investigating the role this idea played into the UNHCR’s ‘Durable Solutions’ and 20th century humanitarian response frameworks. It then moves to an understanding of how post-colonial, intersectional, temporal and deconstructionist approaches to understanding home have destabilised such classical understandings, to consider the ways in which homemaking and displacement are not necessarily antithetical to each other – indeed, homemaking in displacement not only occurs, it can even sometimes be considered a form of strategic politics from below. The course finishes cyclically, by reconsidering how ideas of the State-as-Home continue to affect contemporary understandings of belonging and anti-immigrant politics, and examining how this intellectual history has helped us reconsider paradigms of aid and state responses to Forced Migration.

Humanitarian aid is concerned with the provision of basic necessities – such as food, water, shelter and security – to people affected by conflict and disaster. Since its roots in the nineteenth century, humanitarianism has grown to become a massive industry, with aid agencies now spending billions of dollars around the world, employing hundreds of thousands of people and wielding considerable political influence. This module examines the nature and purpose of humanitarianism with reference to its ‘classical’ operating principles and the dilemmas these have produced in situations of forced displacement over the past fifty years. Through studying a series of recent case studies, students will explore the following questions: Is it possible for humanitarian actors to be neutral in conflict? How can aid prolong war and suffering? Is it ever justifiable for humanitarians to withdraw their assistance when it is needed? Should humanitarian agencies create alliances with military actors? Can we see humanitarianism as a modern form of colonialism? What principles are useful in the negotiation of humanitarian access? What is the proper role of advocacy and media engagement in humanitarian action?

To be recognised as a refugee, a person must cross an international border. Yet, many borders as we know them today are the product of colonial dynamics. Through case studies from the United States, Africa, the Middle East, Haiti, and Asia, students examine the colonial origins of modern borders, migration control, and citizenship. Some questions we ask are: How do colonial histories of forced and free migration, relocation, and displacement, as well as the concomitant phenomenon of immobility, shape modern postcolonial borders and nation-states as we know them today? How did colonial rule and movements for national self-determination produce different forms of bordering, such as apartheid and partition? How did decolonisation and postcolonial citizenship regimes create new waves of displacement? Are colonial legacies relevant to contemporary refugee and migration regimes? Although each case study is taught as a discrete topic, they are connected, and each week builds on the previous weeks.  

Mass destruction of cities is at its worst levels since World War II. Only in the last fifteen years, we have witnessed how rich and diverse cities have been brutally turned into sites of urban misery, devastation and ruins. Peoples’ achievements of hundreds and thousands of years old have been destroyed in seconds. From Aleppo in Syria, to Gaza in Palestine, from Benghazi in Libya, to Kharkiv in Ukraine, cities have been radically reshaped by the killing and displacement of their people, and the destruction of their architecture. Whilst destroyers label their harms as “collateral damage” or “war on terror”, destruction has become a tool to punish local communities and destroy their sense of belonging, dignity and freedom. In a damaged world filled with ruins, a global sense of despair, suffering and pain emerges. 

In this course, we examine the impact of destruction on local communities and research how they approach the future reconstruction of their cities. Do we rebuild these cities exactly as they looked like before the war? Who decides? What does the reconstruction of a homeland mean for those forcibly displaced in exile? As politicians, architects, urban planners and policy makers struggle with the dilemmas and complexities of these questions, local communities continue their everyday life in ruins, waiting for a future reconstruction yet to come. In Violence and Cities, we answer these questions by examining several themes such as the rule of heritage during and after conflicts, the destruction of people’s homes (domicide), and the politics of reconstruction.