Dislodged from History, Confronted by Walls : Picturing Migration as a Global Emergency

This essay examines select visual representations of refugees and migrants as embodied subjects in photography, art, and video. It focuses on American asylum politics and explores the questions of free movement, the right to have rights, and the ethics and efficacy of border walls. It argues that the catastrophe of global forced displacement makes the elimination of national borders and the nation state itself a revolutionary necessity.

Religion and Forced Displacement in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia

This book examines the social and political mobilisation of religious communities towards forced displacement in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. It analyses religious strategies in relation to tolerance and transitory environments as a result of the breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the post-2011 Syrian crisis and the 2014 Russian takeover of Crimea. How do religious actors and state bodies engage with refugees and migrants? What are the mechanisms of religious support towards forcibly displaced communities? The book argues that when states do not act as providers of human security, religious communities, as representatives of civil society and often closer to the grass roots level, can be well placed to serve populations in need. The book brings together scholars from across the region and provides a comprehensive overview of the ways in which religious communities tackle humanitarian crises in contemporary Armenia, Bulgaria, Greece, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Poland, Russia, Serbia, Ukraine and Uzbekistan.

What About Us?

This article outlines the research being undertaken to develop the Assembling Queer Displacements Archive (AQDA). This open digital archive is the central focus of a research project that will address the lack of understanding of LGBTIQ+[i] experiences of forced displacement. These experiences are unique but have not received adequate attention. The existing body of work on ‘queering archives’ has been focused on challenging the archival approaches and practices in order to either queer these practices and/or make them more inclusive. However, this work has tended to ignore LGBTIQ+ stories of forced displacement. One reason for this lack of engagement is the lack of direct knowledge and experience of such stories by the researchers and archivists themselves. My positionality as an LGBTIQ+ forcibly displaced person has motivated me to embark on the present research project and to demonstrate inclusive practices to address these gaps in archives. In this article I explore the role that positionality plays in creating an LGBTIQ+ forced displacement archive. I offer solutions for creating an inclusive practice to collect stories of LGBTIQ+ forcibly displaced people. These solutions have the potential to support a range of digital archival projects that engage with structurally marginalised and oppressed communities. [i] It is important to acknowledge that LGBTIQ+ acronym is a Western terminology, which has become adopted in non-western countries for a variety of reasons (Anzaldua, 2009). These reasons include this terminology being a legacy of colonisation, a potential lack of respectful terminology in country languages and out of necessity to adopt commonly used language when engaging globally. These reasons are not limited to those above and may vary in different contexts. When using a term ‘LGBTIQ+’ in this article I am referring to the diversity of sex, gender, sexual orientation, bodies and relationships. The ‘plus’ sign in the acronym signals fluidity and further possible identifications.

Introduction: New Border Studies in South Asia

In this special section, New Border Studies in South Asia, BIG_Review Board Member and regional specialist Dhananjay Tripathi edits a collection by emerging scholars of the Indian subcontinent. Through new research and fieldwork, themes explored include identity formation, postcoloniality, forced displacement, and looking beyond the human-centric world in border governance

The Gender Dimensions of Forced Displacement: Findings from New Empirical Analysis

To date, research and analysis of the gendered dimensions of forced displacement have been limited. This Quarterly Digest highlights findings from a new, major World Bank Research Program which has sought to fill this important gap. The papers published from the Program include eight detailed country investigations and three multi-country studies covering 17 countries, and feature innovative methodological approaches, combining different sources of data to test hypotheses. The Digest presents the results over four main areas of research (poverty, livelihood, intimate partner violence, and gender norms), and concludes with a series of recommendations to improve the collection of data to investigate the intersectionality of gender and displacement. The Program’s findings lend support to a number of expected patterns, like the disadvantages faced by displaced women in economic opportunities, but also reveal some counter-intuitive results in particular settings, underscoring the importance of country-specific analysis.

Health system considerations related to voluntary and forced displacement in the Eastern Mediterranean Region: a critical analysis of the available literature

Background: The WHO Region for the Eastern Mediterranean has had a history of complex migration patterns, with high levels of migration to, from and within the Region, overlaid by massive recent forced displacement. Relatively little is known about the health system response to this large-scale mobility. Aims: To review the literature on the Region critically, identify gaps and suggest areas needing research and policy attention. Method: A search of the published literature using MEDLINE and POPLINE was conducted on health and migration focusing on the WHO health system building blocks with no date or language limitations. Results: Out of 4679 retrieved articles published between 1964 and January 2019, 140 met our inclusion criteria; 45 additional articles were included in a December 2020 update. Most publications focused on refugees and on the delivery of services. Conclusions: Few studies explored the responsiveness of health system to refugees and migrants compared with those for host communities, or assessed the quality of services or refugees’/migrants’ perceptions of available health services. Few suggested new approaches to financing health care access for these populations or new governance arrangements.