Responding to displacement

Balancing needs and rights

Over the past 50 years, forced displacement has been a major obstacle to development and the fight against poverty. Despite the efforts of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and others to find ‘durable solutions’ for those who are forced to flee their homes, attitudes have, if anything, hardened towards refugees and asylum-seekers.

Today, refugees from war are seen as contrary to development – an unwanted reminder of the failure of governments and the international community to promote peace and prosperity. But how useful is it to see forced migrants as an obstacle to development? In practical terms, what are the real needs of refugees and other displaced people, and to what extent are separate policies needed to address their plight? What is the best way to provide emergency assistance and ongoing support to refugees to see them through their difficulties? And can lessons be learned from emergency assistance for development, and vice versa?

Durable solutions

Traditionally, after an initial period of providing emergency assistance in camps, refugee agencies such as the UNHCR have focused on three alternative ‘durable solutions’ for refugees: local integration, third country resettlement and repatriation.

Local integration was often the preferred strategy in Africa, frequently through the building of new refugee settlements in which people could live and farm until it was safe for them to return or they became fully integrated. The response to the three million refugees who left Afghanistan during the Soviet invasion included development actors such as the World Bank, which helped provide work opportunities and infrastructure to integrate Afghans in camps along the border in Pakistan. In contrast, in other parts of Asia, third country resettlement was initially prioritised. The resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees in the US, France and other northern countries represented the most visible of a number of movements in which poor refugees from the south were offered ‘new lives’ in the north.

However, the options of integration and resettlement were firmly dropped by the 1990s, which was dubbed by the UNHCR as the ‘decade of repatriation’. Research evidence in Africa showed that far from being a success story, agricultural settlements for refugees had failed. In Pakistan, the cost of assistance to Afghan refugees spiralled out of control. Resettlement suffered too, partly through concern in places such as Hong Kong that it encouraged people to present themselves to the authorities as ‘refugees’, but much more because of a backlash in the north against all forms of immigration.

The focus on repatriation also had a problematic side. Inspired by optimism that the end of the Cold War meant the end of many of the conflicts that had fuelled displacement through the 1980s, repatriation plans often ignored the real difficulties faced in returning and re-integrating people who may have been outside their country or place of origin for decades. Worse, the emphasis on return of refugees reinforced the anti-immigration rhetoric of those who wanted to see poor people more generally contained in the developing world.

Camps or local integration?

During the 1990s refugee camps were not discarded, as Barbara Harrell-Bond’s work illustrates. Instead, she argues that refugee camps continue to harm refugees, especially children. Indeed, in some respects, conditions in camps have become worse. In Tanzania and what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, camps set up between 1994 and 1996 for Rwandan refugees housed hundreds of thousands of people in cramped conditions, providing a breeding ground for diseases and leading to thousands of deaths. Massive and often unsanitary camps were also set up during the Kosovo crisis and led to a new wave of third country resettlement, although in this case, a decisive military campaign ensured that the camps and the resettlement were short-lived.

Partly in response to these well-publicised problems of large camps, researchers have put much effort into exploring other solutions, including dispersal in local towns and villages, and the provision of integrated services to refugees and locals. One of the more interesting examples of this is Guinea in West Africa, where over half a million refugees have lived dispersed along the border with Liberia and Sierra Leone for nearly a decade, with relatively few negative (and some positive) consequences for Guinea. Here, and in the Zambian example summarised by Oliver Bakewell, there are circumstances that favour the local integration of dispersed refugees, including ethnic similarities across the border and demand for a workforce.

New approaches

The latter part of the 1990s has also seen the exploration of a number of other new approaches to refugees and forced migrants, again stimulated partly by the Rwandan experience. The ‘livelihoods’ approach focuses on the way in which refugees’ needs are understood and measured – thus, attention is turned to the capabilities, assets and entitlements of refugees, and how they can contribute to their own survival and development. There are misunderstandings about refugee livelihoods, especially of those who remain outside the view of international agencies, notably in urban areas. Hence the need for studies such as that in Cairo reported by Oroub Al-Abed, which highlights some of the legal and political constraints on the livelihoods of urban Palestinian refugees in Egypt.

A ‘participation’ approach draws on a rich line of thinking in the broader development field. The promotion of refugee livelihoods by humanitarian agencies is of little use unless refugees are empowered to develop their own livelihood strategies. Yet, as Tania Kaiser points out, participatory approaches can be problematic in emergency situations, especially when top-down mentalities are clung to, or where agencies manipulate a ‘participatory’ agenda to pursue their own ends.

The livelihoods and participatory approaches are also closely linked to a third new strand of thinking – where emphasis is placed on the rights of displaced people. As Lyla Mehta argues, a rights-based approach is as applicable to those forcibly displaced by ‘development’ projects such as dams, mines and roads as it is to those displaced by war and persecution. Meanwhile, without rights, such as the right to work or to move outside their camps and settlements, refugees become trapped and impoverished, as highlighted by Choudhury Abrar.

Any way home?

The adoption of these new approaches does not mean that the notion of the eventual return of refugees has been abandoned – indeed refugees themselves often welcome it. But as Gaim Kibreab and Stephen Lubkemann demonstrate, returning ‘home’ is far from straightforward. There remains a need to understand refugees’ own strategies and to build appropriate responses. As in much of the development literature, this frequently involves understanding strategies to diversify risk, as well as to secure rights and entitlements: in this, dealing with refugees and development are not so far apart after all.

Richard Black
Sussex Centre for Migration Research
University of Sussex
Falmer
Brighton BN1 9SJ
UK

T +44 (0)1273 877090

r.black@sussex.ac.uk

Richard Black is Director of the Graduate Centre for Culture, Development and Environment, and Co-Director of the Sussex Centre for Migration Research at the University of Sussex. His work focuses on the study of international migration, including forced migration and post-conflict return, and related social and economic transformations.

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