Periodic Reporting for period 1 - RPP (Refugee Political Participation)
Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2024-08-31
Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project
This project took as it’s central problematic the political disenfranchisement of refugees. If the 82 million displaced people across the world (UNCHR Global Trends 2020) formed a country, it would be the 20th biggest in the world. But they are not a country. Apart from experiences related to poverty, destitution, insecurity, and violence, refugees experience exclusion from the political community and rights of citizenship.
The RPP project’s overall aim was to transform how scholarship and policy conceives of refugees by placing their politics in the centre of the enquiry, and studying how their voices are – and can be – recognised and empowered in a political context. It was the first interdisciplinary and critical scholarly study of refugee participation bridging work in political science, critical legal studies, and socio-legal studies.
This project brought together Will Jones, a political scientist who has conducted pathbreaking work on algorithmic decision-making and digital identity in the refugee regime, with Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Director of the interdisciplinary Nordic Asylum Law and Data Lab at the University of Copenhagen, to conduct the first systematic study of refugee participation. In so doing, we combined political science, law, and data science to understand how refugees can and could be included and empowered in the refugee regime as it is transformed by the digital revolution.
The RPP project’s overall aim was to transform how scholarship and policy conceives of refugees by placing their politics in the centre of the enquiry, and studying how their voices are – and can be – recognised and empowered in a political context. It was the first interdisciplinary and critical scholarly study of refugee participation bridging work in political science, critical legal studies, and socio-legal studies.
This project brought together Will Jones, a political scientist who has conducted pathbreaking work on algorithmic decision-making and digital identity in the refugee regime, with Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Director of the interdisciplinary Nordic Asylum Law and Data Lab at the University of Copenhagen, to conduct the first systematic study of refugee participation. In so doing, we combined political science, law, and data science to understand how refugees can and could be included and empowered in the refugee regime as it is transformed by the digital revolution.
Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far
The primary objective of this project was the production of basic research, which is presented in five academic publications as described in the DoA. These are:
‘The Right to Refugee Political Participation’ (Forthcoming (submitted)) with Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Journal of Refugee Studies.
We argue that the refugee regime can and should recognise a right to refugee political participation. First, we review the normative and legal bases for the claim that there is a refugee right to participation. We conclude that there is more reason to believe in this right than normally granted, and – furthermore – that UNHCR itself has endorsed this more expansive understanding of refugee rights, and has taken on a responsibility to vitiate a refugee right to participation. Second, we examine the current institutional arrangements which have been put in place to facilitate refugee participation. Third, we critically examine these arrangements in the light of political theory literature on participation. We conclude that there is a mismatch between how UNHCR understands participation and how it implements it: on paper UNHCR understands participation to be decisional and intrinsically valuable, but implements it consultatively, and as if it is instrumentally valuable.
‘Uganda’s Refugee Parliament: Refugees, Patronage and Brokerage’ (Forthcoming (submitted)), African Affairs.
Uganda’s Refugee Engagement Forum (REF) is the closest thing in the world to an elected parliament of refugees. Why does the REF exist? And why in Uganda? What does it do, for Ugandans, for donors and humanitarians, and - not least - for refugees themselves? In what follows I will situate the REF in two literatures: the political science literature on Uganda’s distinctive refugee regime, hosting large numbers in a comparatively liberal and progressive manner despite the government’s general authoritarian drift, which has usefully deployed the literature on neopatrimonialism in Africa to theorise the relationships between refugees, donors, and the Ugandan state. Secondly, in the context of the emerging literature in refugee studies on ‘meaningful refugee participation’, which sees the mainstreaming of participatory initiatives in the global refugee regime over the last decade as a sincere and meaningful development. Uganda’s REF has not been mentioned in either literature, and it can enrich both. I will argue that the REF exposes how the former literature is perhaps too cynical, and the latter literature perhaps too trusting. The REF is not just an expression of clientelist patrimonial politics or neoliberal governmentality, but nor is it a pure exercise devoid of agendas, interests, and the everyday business of ordinary politics. Finally, I will argue that much of the literature has implicitly internalised the donor community’s own standards for evaluating refugee participatory programmes, and this internalisation has the regrettable consequence of making much of what is most interesting about the REF invisible. The REF may not have executive powers, or a budget, but it is nonetheless a deliberative democratic space. Therefore, in the final section I evaluate the REF in the light of deliberative democratic theory.
‘(Not) Sending Refugees to Rwanda: Asylum Externalisation in the UK and Denmark’ (Forthcoming (submitted)), British Journal of Political Science.
In recent years, the governments of Denmark and the United Kingdom have attempted – so far without success – to implement schemes to send refugees to Rwanda. Although there are differences between the schemes (indeed, the Danish government alone has proposed two), they are both particularly dramatic examples of the drive to externalization, privatization, and securitization. The point of these systems is to create systems of non-entrée (or, as the Danish spokesman more bluntly says, to stop people seeking asylum in Europe). Scholars have pointed to a variety of causes underlying the shift to non-entrée systems, including the end of the ‘calculated kindness’ towards asylum seekers necessitated by the ideological competition of the Cold War, bottom-up social change reshaping public opinion and politicizing asylum, changes in how the modern state manages the tensions of liberal democracy, and elite strategies for limiting the rising power and scope of international law.
In these cases, the schemes appear to be forestalled in quite different ways: in the UK, the scheme is eventually defeated after one of the most spectacular political and legal battles the UK has ever seen (in a period with no shortage of such spectacles); in Denmark, the plan is quietly shelved. What the stories thereby reveal is the different ways in which a system of political order relates to law.
Modes of Refugee Participation: Evidence from the USA, Canada, Germany, and Uganda (unfinished. Planned submission end of 2024).Intended for Refugee Survey Quarterly.
`Refugee participation' has arrived. In numerous countries and protection contexts, diverse actors are implementing programmes or creating structures indented to facilitate `meaningful refugee participation'. But what exactly is meant by that is not always the same thing. In what follows, I review four of the most prominent different mechanisms currently being implemented under the banner of refugee participation:(1) participatory assessments as conducted by UNHCR, (b) refugee engagement forums, of which the most longstanding is conducted by UNHCR in Uganda (3) refugee delegates to high level official intergovernmental meetings, as innovated by the government of Canada, and (4) refugee congresses, as most prominently embodied by the organisation Refugee Congress in the USA. I will deliberately leave questions as to what exactly is meant by participation until the section after this, where I attempt to disentangle the different meanings given to participation in these contexts. I will then make two criticisms which are intended to be constructive: firstly, firstly, that these programmes could all easily make more effective use of digital participation technology, which has undergone huge development in recent decades; secondly, that using this technology could help bridge the hard problem all of these systems face, which is how to systematically, cheaply, and routinely incorporate the voices of non-elite refugees.
‘Zombie Norms: Participatory Discourse in the International Refugee Regime’ (unfinished. Planned submission summer 2025). Intended for World Development.
Humanitarian organisations have a newly (re-)discovered passion for refugee ‘participation’. So much so that in 2022 the Inter-Agency Standing Committee declared a ‘Global Participation Revolution’. But we have been here before, more than once, and without much to show for it. In this article I use the recurrence and recurrence of refugee participation as a valorised norm to critique contructivist international relations scholarship on what norms do in international politics. I suggest that at least some norms are never intended to have an effect on behaviour. Rather, their purpose is to conceal that action will continue to not be taken. Never truly alive, these norms nonetheless refuse to die.
It should also be noted that there are at least three other planned scholarly outputs which will emerge from this research, but are studies of processes which have not concluded so fieldwork is ongoing. They are (a) a single-country study of the process of the appointment of high-level refugee delegates in Germany, (b) a participant study of the advocacy campaigns of the US Refugee Congress, and (c) a speculative digital design paper on the use of digital civic participation platforms in refugee contexts.
In accordance with the open access publishing rules, preprints will be available as working papers in the series of MOBILE (the Danish Centre of Excellence in Mobility Law).
‘The Right to Refugee Political Participation’ (Forthcoming (submitted)) with Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Journal of Refugee Studies.
We argue that the refugee regime can and should recognise a right to refugee political participation. First, we review the normative and legal bases for the claim that there is a refugee right to participation. We conclude that there is more reason to believe in this right than normally granted, and – furthermore – that UNHCR itself has endorsed this more expansive understanding of refugee rights, and has taken on a responsibility to vitiate a refugee right to participation. Second, we examine the current institutional arrangements which have been put in place to facilitate refugee participation. Third, we critically examine these arrangements in the light of political theory literature on participation. We conclude that there is a mismatch between how UNHCR understands participation and how it implements it: on paper UNHCR understands participation to be decisional and intrinsically valuable, but implements it consultatively, and as if it is instrumentally valuable.
‘Uganda’s Refugee Parliament: Refugees, Patronage and Brokerage’ (Forthcoming (submitted)), African Affairs.
Uganda’s Refugee Engagement Forum (REF) is the closest thing in the world to an elected parliament of refugees. Why does the REF exist? And why in Uganda? What does it do, for Ugandans, for donors and humanitarians, and - not least - for refugees themselves? In what follows I will situate the REF in two literatures: the political science literature on Uganda’s distinctive refugee regime, hosting large numbers in a comparatively liberal and progressive manner despite the government’s general authoritarian drift, which has usefully deployed the literature on neopatrimonialism in Africa to theorise the relationships between refugees, donors, and the Ugandan state. Secondly, in the context of the emerging literature in refugee studies on ‘meaningful refugee participation’, which sees the mainstreaming of participatory initiatives in the global refugee regime over the last decade as a sincere and meaningful development. Uganda’s REF has not been mentioned in either literature, and it can enrich both. I will argue that the REF exposes how the former literature is perhaps too cynical, and the latter literature perhaps too trusting. The REF is not just an expression of clientelist patrimonial politics or neoliberal governmentality, but nor is it a pure exercise devoid of agendas, interests, and the everyday business of ordinary politics. Finally, I will argue that much of the literature has implicitly internalised the donor community’s own standards for evaluating refugee participatory programmes, and this internalisation has the regrettable consequence of making much of what is most interesting about the REF invisible. The REF may not have executive powers, or a budget, but it is nonetheless a deliberative democratic space. Therefore, in the final section I evaluate the REF in the light of deliberative democratic theory.
‘(Not) Sending Refugees to Rwanda: Asylum Externalisation in the UK and Denmark’ (Forthcoming (submitted)), British Journal of Political Science.
In recent years, the governments of Denmark and the United Kingdom have attempted – so far without success – to implement schemes to send refugees to Rwanda. Although there are differences between the schemes (indeed, the Danish government alone has proposed two), they are both particularly dramatic examples of the drive to externalization, privatization, and securitization. The point of these systems is to create systems of non-entrée (or, as the Danish spokesman more bluntly says, to stop people seeking asylum in Europe). Scholars have pointed to a variety of causes underlying the shift to non-entrée systems, including the end of the ‘calculated kindness’ towards asylum seekers necessitated by the ideological competition of the Cold War, bottom-up social change reshaping public opinion and politicizing asylum, changes in how the modern state manages the tensions of liberal democracy, and elite strategies for limiting the rising power and scope of international law.
In these cases, the schemes appear to be forestalled in quite different ways: in the UK, the scheme is eventually defeated after one of the most spectacular political and legal battles the UK has ever seen (in a period with no shortage of such spectacles); in Denmark, the plan is quietly shelved. What the stories thereby reveal is the different ways in which a system of political order relates to law.
Modes of Refugee Participation: Evidence from the USA, Canada, Germany, and Uganda (unfinished. Planned submission end of 2024).Intended for Refugee Survey Quarterly.
`Refugee participation' has arrived. In numerous countries and protection contexts, diverse actors are implementing programmes or creating structures indented to facilitate `meaningful refugee participation'. But what exactly is meant by that is not always the same thing. In what follows, I review four of the most prominent different mechanisms currently being implemented under the banner of refugee participation:(1) participatory assessments as conducted by UNHCR, (b) refugee engagement forums, of which the most longstanding is conducted by UNHCR in Uganda (3) refugee delegates to high level official intergovernmental meetings, as innovated by the government of Canada, and (4) refugee congresses, as most prominently embodied by the organisation Refugee Congress in the USA. I will deliberately leave questions as to what exactly is meant by participation until the section after this, where I attempt to disentangle the different meanings given to participation in these contexts. I will then make two criticisms which are intended to be constructive: firstly, firstly, that these programmes could all easily make more effective use of digital participation technology, which has undergone huge development in recent decades; secondly, that using this technology could help bridge the hard problem all of these systems face, which is how to systematically, cheaply, and routinely incorporate the voices of non-elite refugees.
‘Zombie Norms: Participatory Discourse in the International Refugee Regime’ (unfinished. Planned submission summer 2025). Intended for World Development.
Humanitarian organisations have a newly (re-)discovered passion for refugee ‘participation’. So much so that in 2022 the Inter-Agency Standing Committee declared a ‘Global Participation Revolution’. But we have been here before, more than once, and without much to show for it. In this article I use the recurrence and recurrence of refugee participation as a valorised norm to critique contructivist international relations scholarship on what norms do in international politics. I suggest that at least some norms are never intended to have an effect on behaviour. Rather, their purpose is to conceal that action will continue to not be taken. Never truly alive, these norms nonetheless refuse to die.
It should also be noted that there are at least three other planned scholarly outputs which will emerge from this research, but are studies of processes which have not concluded so fieldwork is ongoing. They are (a) a single-country study of the process of the appointment of high-level refugee delegates in Germany, (b) a participant study of the advocacy campaigns of the US Refugee Congress, and (c) a speculative digital design paper on the use of digital civic participation platforms in refugee contexts.
In accordance with the open access publishing rules, preprints will be available as working papers in the series of MOBILE (the Danish Centre of Excellence in Mobility Law).
Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)
Expected scientific impact(s): this project is the first scholarly treatment of refugee political participation. It contributes to our empirical store of knowledge about refugee political participation. Theoretically, it will furnish other scholars, whose works is currently hampered by disciplinary fragmentation, and the use of uncritical activist conceptions of concepts such as identity, inclusion, and empowerment, with a sophisticated conceptual vocabulary to better understand these concepts. Methodologically, it is the first project of its kind to unite multiple disciplinary perspectives alongside innovative mixed-methods which include subject-participation, inverting normal academic power dynamics (the town halls) and incorporating digital designers (the theory hack).
Expected economic/technological impact(s): this project was not designed to produce finished products, or even minimum viable proofs of concept. Rather, it was intended to sharpen the conceptual vocabulary of digital designers, end-users and managers (in this case, refugees and refugee management officials) as the digitalisation of the refugee regime gains pace. However, that is speculative. Dr Jones continues to work with refugees.AI and we continue to find new implementations of empowerment orientated, agentic digital solutions in resettlement, such as the RUTH algorithm now being used to resettle Ukrainians. However, research on the long term impact of these interventions is a decade away, given how recently they have been implemented.
Expected societal impact(s): The project has the potential to improve policies and decision-making in asylum and refugee policy. It includes targeted publications for policy makers, workshops and consultations around the project. It includes evaluations of the effectiveness of particular policies in every single work-package. In particular, refugee policy makers are already trying to grapple with the digital transformation in a host of areas, and there is an acknowledged need for those managing the international refugee regime to enhance their understanding of digital capabilities and risks. As such, we are confident of a strong uptake to our policy-orientated events and publications, and anticipate that there will be other invited opportunities to engage with policy makers, both domestic and international, through Professor Gammeltoft-Hansen’s excellent links with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Danish Refugee Council, and UNHCR. The Lab has excellent links with policy-makers across the Nordic region. In addition, Dr Jones has worked and is working with asylum policymakers in both the UK and the USA and we have built those links into this project.
Impact on the researcher's career:
• Dr Jones leaves this fellowship with a provocative and policy-urgent set of publications forthcoming, which position him in the ongoing debates on the digitisation of the international refugee regime, the inclusion of refugee voices, externalisation policies, and smart resettlement policy. Thanks to the fellowship, he has acquired a grounding in international refugee law, but also an engagement with bleeding-edge empirical legal approaches being pioneered at MOBILE. He has acquired and deepened a wide set of policy contacts, which will be crucial as this academic space evolves in the coming decades. It has been a transformative experience, to put it mildly.
• Dr Jones has moved to London to take up a permanent position as Associate Professor in International Relations at the Department of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Expected economic/technological impact(s): this project was not designed to produce finished products, or even minimum viable proofs of concept. Rather, it was intended to sharpen the conceptual vocabulary of digital designers, end-users and managers (in this case, refugees and refugee management officials) as the digitalisation of the refugee regime gains pace. However, that is speculative. Dr Jones continues to work with refugees.AI and we continue to find new implementations of empowerment orientated, agentic digital solutions in resettlement, such as the RUTH algorithm now being used to resettle Ukrainians. However, research on the long term impact of these interventions is a decade away, given how recently they have been implemented.
Expected societal impact(s): The project has the potential to improve policies and decision-making in asylum and refugee policy. It includes targeted publications for policy makers, workshops and consultations around the project. It includes evaluations of the effectiveness of particular policies in every single work-package. In particular, refugee policy makers are already trying to grapple with the digital transformation in a host of areas, and there is an acknowledged need for those managing the international refugee regime to enhance their understanding of digital capabilities and risks. As such, we are confident of a strong uptake to our policy-orientated events and publications, and anticipate that there will be other invited opportunities to engage with policy makers, both domestic and international, through Professor Gammeltoft-Hansen’s excellent links with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Danish Refugee Council, and UNHCR. The Lab has excellent links with policy-makers across the Nordic region. In addition, Dr Jones has worked and is working with asylum policymakers in both the UK and the USA and we have built those links into this project.
Impact on the researcher's career:
• Dr Jones leaves this fellowship with a provocative and policy-urgent set of publications forthcoming, which position him in the ongoing debates on the digitisation of the international refugee regime, the inclusion of refugee voices, externalisation policies, and smart resettlement policy. Thanks to the fellowship, he has acquired a grounding in international refugee law, but also an engagement with bleeding-edge empirical legal approaches being pioneered at MOBILE. He has acquired and deepened a wide set of policy contacts, which will be crucial as this academic space evolves in the coming decades. It has been a transformative experience, to put it mildly.
• Dr Jones has moved to London to take up a permanent position as Associate Professor in International Relations at the Department of Politics, International Relations, and Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London.