As more and more attention turns towards global displacement, strong research as well as new lenses for examining refugees and forced migration are needed. The Rethinking Refuge platform from the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre offers short, research-based articles aimed at rethinking refugee issues from various angles, including politics, international relations, normative political theory, law, history, and anthropology. While many articles contribute to debates on necessary reforms of the international refugee regime, others shed light on understudied theories and topics, and offer a rethinking of how Refugee Studies can contribute to issues of contemporary displacement. Articles fall under one of six core themes of great relevance to the international refugee regime today: refugee protection, emergency and crisis, mobility, refugee agency, humanitarianism, and refugees' economic lives. This interdisciplinary platform seeks to bridge the gap between scholarly research, policy-making, and public understanding, and in so doing develop a research agenda to meaningfully engage with the challenge of forced displacement in the 21st century.
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It is time to rethink the evidence so often submitted and relied upon in asylum claims, to return to a core principle of refugee law – the need to afford asylum seekers the benefit of the doubt.
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Refugee-led organizations are at the front line of COVID-19 responses. Ugandan refugee-led organization CECI presents its lessons for health awareness campaigns and makes recommendations to governments, INGOs and donors to improve their support to refugees
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Child protection concerns have never been central to refugee policy or practice. COVID-19 creates added pressure to repatriate refugees, but also an opportunity to rethink repatriation policies to better serve the interests of vulnerable child migrants.
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This research from Ethiopia highlights how traditional social groups, created by women refugees to offer a shared savings scheme, can increase both self-reliance and integration with locals, especially when international NGOs are impeded by Covid-19
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Rarely consulted, specialist legal regimes developed to respond to violence against women offer an important legal framework for cases of gender-based violence constituting grounds for refugee status.
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Refugee responsibility sharing has been an ongoing topic in debates on asylum in the EU, but consideration of the role that refugees as actors ought to play in it is neglected.
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The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) was set up to create a fair and efficient common asylum policy across the EU. However, my research suggests instead that the CEAS is premised upon containment policies
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Public and humanitarian discourses on refugees in the Global South often present women as highly vulnerable. The logic of vulnerability behind such aid, however, prompts questions; its focus risks portraying women as passive - although they are not.
The Rethinking Refuge platform has been made possible through a generous grant from the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and DELMI (Migration Studies Delegation).
