Paper short abstract:

This paper looks at how the idea migration can contribute to development is giving way to a resurgence of investments in development as a way of tackling the root causes of migration.

Paper long abstract:

Over the last two decades, there has been a huge growth in research on the relationship between migration and development. Much of this has explored the potential benefits of migration for developing countries and helped to stimulate a plethora of policy initiatives to maximise the positive impacts. At the same time, migration from developing areas continues to be widely seen as a reflection of development failure, despite a large body of research that suggests the opposite. This can be clearly seen in the European response to the 'migration crisis' which includes directing development funding towards origin areas in Africa with a view to reducing the scale of irregular migration. It has recently been suggested that we are now in an era of 'containment development', which is more concerned with controlling the movement of Africans than improving the quality of their lives. However, far from being new, this echoes the historical and conceptual roots of development as an arena of action for states and many international organisations. This paper will discuss the shifting debates and practices linking migration and development, with particular reference to African experiences, and suggest that it raises critical questions about how development can move beyond the container.

Paper short abstract:

The Egyptian legal framework towards refugees in general highlights a lack of implementation of international rights. In specific, Palestinian refugees are susceptible to changes in the Egyptian regime and are vulnerable to political interests of the government.

Paper long abstract:

Today, 6 million Palestinian refugees live in different countries around the world. At a micro-level, Egypt hosts over 120,000 Palestinian refugees (0.1% of the population) in different cities like Alexandria, Cairo, and Al-Arish (UNHCR, 2014). While the majority arrived after the Nakba (1948) and the 1967 war, more recent refugees arrived from Gaza following major Israeli raids. Although Egypt's responsibility as a host state is to ensure Palestinian refugees a decent life, assistance efforts have not been consistent over time. Since the 1940s, the Egyptian government has been refusing to have any permanent refugee camps fearing that Palestinians would stay permanently. As a result, unlike Lebanon and Jordan, Palestinians in Egypt live within the Egyptian community in the urban setting (Abed, 2009). Additionally, although UNRWA is the official assistance and protection provider to Palestinian refugees, Egypt does not fall under its scope of operations. Palestinian refugees report directly to UNHCR whose efforts have been either insufficient or curtailed by government's constraints. Due to a void of international and local protection, Palestinian refugees have been vulnerable vis-à-vis government's laws which have been fluctuating according to the preferences of the regime in power. The deprivation of rights due to the unstable legal and

economic conditions of Palestinians in Egypt has placed them in a state of in limbo. This paper examines how Egyptian domestic and foreign political developments over the past seven decades affect Palestinian refugees' rights and treatment in Egypt.

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Paper short abstract:

To understand the Kurdish diaspora in London requires answering two interrelated questions of Kurdish forced migration history and Kurdish cultural identity. This study evaluates the integration experiences of the Kurdish diaspora in London, who have settled in this city since the1990s.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper comparison is made between the positions and perspectives of second generation Kurds born in Britain and the first generation that came to Britain in the 1990s.This allows an exploration of the notion of identity and ideas of home and belonging in the light of contemporary changes and concomitant theories of diaspora and refugee studies, and, where necessary, challenges those ideas. Evidence from previous academic work suggests that questions of Kurdish history and Kurdish cultural identity are inextricably linked. This study's research method is based on ethnographic fieldwork and the collection of qualitative data through 25 one-to-one semi-structured interviews, with participants selected from across different sections of the Kurdish diaspora community(ies) in London. In order to test and clarify complex conceptual issues. The stages as reflected in the personal narratives include initial arrival in London and encounters with the British state's immigration and integration policies, the actual process of rebuilding individual or family life, and new home making through the on-going challenges, shifts and negotiations of identities. That is, the slow process of becoming a Kurdish-Londoner.

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses protest symbolism by refugees. It argues that visual representations of protest can undermine global solidarity based on rights, as well as struggles to realise such rights in actual political space in a world characterised more and more by exclusionary nation - state politics.

Paper long abstract:

Much has been written about the visual dehumanisation of refugees in the media, showing them as faceless hordes walking towards borders or on overcrowded boats.

But refugee populations are not only objects of representations that distort their agency as well as the global history of mobility, they are also producers of symbolic images and slogans in the protests they stage for their rights. One of the most recognisable slogans in this aspect is perhaps the phrase 'no one is illegal' that has united protest movements for refugee rights globally. In this paper I engage with such an example of protest symbolism, the campaign against the deportation of African refugees (mainly from Eritrea and Sudan) in Israel to a third country, namely Rwanda.

Under slogans like 'slaves for sale' and 'refugees for sale' this protest, carried out in Israel as well as other cities globally and mainly in front of Rwanda embassies, in a troubling way distorts important historical events and is, I argue, based on racialised assumptions of 'bad Africans' and 'white saviours'. While intending to promote international solidarity and the respect for human rights, it ultimately invokes the trope of refugees without agency in need of pity based on their suffering. In doing so, such visual representations in fact undermine global solidarity based on rights, as well as struggles to realise such rights in actual political space in a world characterised more and more by exclusionary nation - state politics.

Paper short abstract:

Most of the literature on 'global care chains' is based on the experiences of women migrants working in care work and engaging in South-North migration between a small number of countries. In this paper I focus on South-South migration and the experiences of men working in a broader range of jobs.

Paper long abstract:

There has been a lot written about care and international migration in the last couple of decades. The 'global care chains' (GCC) literature has shown that when women migrate from poorer countries in the Global South to richer countries in the Global North to work as nannies or elderly care workers, they leave a 'care drain' in their countries of origin (Hochschild 2000; Yeates 2004, 2009). Globally, this indicates a resource move from poorer to richer countries, along gender, class and racial hierarchies, in which households and countries of destination are the net beneficiaries (Silvey 2009). However, most of the literature on 'global care chains' is based on the experiences of women migrants working in care work and engaging in South-North migration between a small number of countries (Kofman and Raghuram 2015). In this paper I propose to expand this narrow view by including regional, South-South migration, and the experiences of men working in a broader range of jobs. Based on longitudinal and multi-sited research with Bolivians in Argentina and Spain, the paper shows how a broader perspective on care, combined with an analysis of how it influences migration flows and how it is reconfigured through regional and South-North migration and through time, gives a more varied and less bleak picture.

Paper short abstract:

This paper uses migrant precarity as a lens through which to analyse mobilisation efforts for migrants' rights by civil society (including unions). It does so by drawing on the specific case of the Migrant Forum in Asia, a region-wide network of grassroots organisations.

Paper long abstract:

Asia's temporary migrants have been identified as a particularly precarious group of workers due to their insecure legal and residential status, as well as their specific position within the international division of labour which comes with the performing of un- or under-regulated types of work along the global (re-)production chains. Moreover, as argued in this paper, with local employment in countries of origin often characterized by informal employment, poor working conditions and unsustainable livelihoods, migrant workers are caught within a 'protracted precarity' that spans life at home and abroad which is often overlooked within the existing literature. Greater attention, therefore, needs to be paid to the issue of achieving decent work in countries of origin, to overcome conditions of protracted precarity that continue to structure the need for Asia's working poor to migrate.

This paper uses migrant precarity as a lens through which to analyse mobilisation efforts for migrants' rights by civil society (including unions) at the intersection of migrant temporarlity and transnationality. Such CSO action is vital in light of the emergence, and consolidation, of global and regional migration governance frameworks which tend to actively constrain considerations for migrants' human and labour rights. The emerging global migrant rights movement emanates from regional migrant rights networks, one of the most established and active of which is the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA).