Biographical Note:Sarah Dryden-Peterson leads a research program that focuses on the connections between education and community development, specifically the role that education plays in building peaceful and participatory societies. Her research reflects connections between practice, policy, and scholarship and is strengthened through long-term collaborations with UN agencies, NGOs, and communities. Dryden-Peterson is on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She previously taught middle school in Boston and founded non-profits in Uganda and South Africa.

This article explores the understood purposes of refugee education at global, national, and school levels. To do so, we focus on a radical shift in global policy to integrate refugees into national education systems and the processes of vernacularization accompanying its widespread implementation. We use a comparative case study approach; our dataset comprises global policy documents and original interviews ( n = 147) and observations in 14 refugee-hosting nation-states. We analyze how the purposes of refugee education are understood and acted upon by actors occupying diverse positions across these nation-states and over time. We demonstrate that the articulated purposes of refugee education are oriented toward possible futures for refugees, and they presuppose refugees’ access to quality education, social belonging, and economic opportunities. Yet we find that across nation-states of exile, refugees’ access to these resources is tenuous. Our findings suggest reconceptualizing refugee education to reflect how refugees are simultaneously embedded within multiple national contexts and to address the exclusions they face within each one. This study of refugee education has implications for understanding the purposes of education in other ever-more-common contexts of uncertainty, including the rapid economic and social changes brought about by migration, globalization, and technology. Empirically, understanding the purposes of refugee education is critical in a time of unprecedented forced migration.

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In this article, I probe a question at the core of comparative education—how to realize the right to education for all and ensure opportunities to use that education for future participation in society. I do so through examination of refugee education from World War II to the present, including analysis of an original data set of documents ( n = 214) and semistructured interviews ( n = 208). The data illuminate how refugee children are caught between the global promise of universal human rights, the definition of citizenship rights within nation-states, and the realization of these sets of rights in everyday practices. Conceptually, I demonstrate the misalignment between normative aspirations, codes and doctrines, and mechanisms of enforcement within nation-states, which curtails refugees’ abilities to activate their rights to education, to work, and to participate in society.