Refugee economies

Betts, Alexander; Bloom, Louise; Kaplan, Josiah; Naohiko, Josiah

doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198795681.003.0003

Cited by 18 publications

(38 citation statements)

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“…Outside of the proponents of UNHCR GP3s in Refugee Studies (i.e. Betts et al 2016), few have acknowledged this phenomenon. Finally, the UNHCR was chosen out of a normative concern for the well-being and rights of refugee populations, particularly at a time where refugee numbers are increasing at a similar rate of corporate engagement in refugee response.…”

Section: A Critical Political Economy Methodology To Constitutionalismentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This intensification of corporate engagement in refugee assistance has continued apace in the post-2010 era. In 2011 the UNHCR underwent a ‘modernisation’ remit following a privately commissioned review of the organisation, undertaken by Synthesis Corp, that recommended opening up further to GP3s and leveraging corporate partners as sources of expertise and institutional innovation (Betts et al 2016). Resulting out of this process was the creation of UNHCR Innovation, a collaborative research group and epistemic forum that leverages private entrepreneurialism in humanitarian ventures.…”

Section: Unhcr–business ‘Partnerships’: Constitutionalising Business mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Global public–private partnerships and the new constitutionalism of the refugee regime

Machacek

2018

Glob. Con.

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Abstract:Since the early 2000s, regimes and institutions of global governance have undergone a paradigmatic shift in their relations with multinational corporations. The United Nations, in particular, has increasingly embraced big business as ‘partner’ in humanitarian response and development with the establishment of ‘global public–private partnerships’ (GP3s). This article situates this emerging mode of global governance within the recent academic discussions on Global Constitutionalism from a critical political economy perspective, focusing on the case of the UN Refugee Agency’s GP3s in refugee protection and assistance. Critically inquiring into GP3s not only as informal global constitutional arrangements but also as a set of political relations, this article asks: what is the constitutional and political nature of UNHCR–business partnerships? What impacts, if any, do they have on the agency? And, what does this mean for understanding global constitutionalism? The article argues that UNHCR partnerships are constituted as asymmetrical political relations in terms of their distributions of power, benefits, risks and commitments, that they are having neoliberal-oriented constitutive effects on the agency and that these constitutional dynamics challenge the more mainstream and liberal-based conceptualisations, analyses and promotion of current global constitutionalism processes.

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Section: A Critical Political Economy Methodology To Constitutionalismentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Unhcr–business ‘Partnerships’: Constitutionalising Business mentioning

confidence: 99%

Global public–private partnerships and the new constitutionalism of the refugee regime

Machacek

2018

Glob. Con.

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“…Contributions include ethnographic literature on refugees' agency Refugees, localisation and humanitarian governance 3 (Chambers, 1986;Grabska, 2006;Hammond, 2004;Harrell-Bond, 1986;Horst, 2008;Kibreab, 1987). A growing strand of this work focuses on refugees' economic agency (Betts, Bloom, & Omata, 2016;Carrier, 2016;Jacobsen, 2005;Krause, 2014;Maystadt & Verwimp, 2009;Ruiz & Vargas-Silva, 2015;Werker, 2007) and their transnational political mobilisation (Horst, 2008;Lischer, 2005;Mylonas & Shelef, 2017;Salehyan, 2010).…”

Section: Literature and Contributionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Rhetoric and Reality of Localisation: Refugee-Led Organisations in Humanitarian Governance

Pincock

Betts

Easton‐Calabria

2020

The Journal of Development Studies

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When refugees flee war and persecution, protection and assistance are usually provided by United Nations organisations and their NGO implementing partners. In parallel is a largely neglected story: refugees themselves frequently mobilise to provide protection and assistance to other refugees. At a global level, there has been a shift in international policy rhetoric towards 'localisation' and inclusion of refugees, which potentially provides an opportunity to engage with refugee-led community organisations (RLOs). However, RLOs rarely receive access to international recognition or funding despite often being regarded by refugees as an important source of assistance. In this paper we draw upon ethnographic research on the interactions between international institutions and RLOs in Kampala, Uganda, to explore how 'localisation' unfolds in practice within humanitarian governance. In the absence of a clear policy framework for localisation at the global level, national level representatives have considerable discretion in whether and how they partner with RLOs, leading largely to their exclusion-and the development of alternative support strategies by RLOs. We suggest that an effective localisation agenda will require much more attention to the role of power and interests at the local level if RLOs are to be engaged as meaningful actors in humanitarian assistance.

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“…Although I acknowledge that protection and economic productivity are not necessarily oppositional nor intrinsically destructive processes or aims, I seek to introduce the concept of humanitarian exploits as a way to characterise situations in which these imperatives, when combined, produce situations of constraint and precarity. Highlighting such situations is important because providing protection and giving people the opportunity to lead productive lives are processes that are increasingly characterised in political and development discourse as empowering (Betts and Collier, 2017; Betts et al., 2017), but, as I describe below, such discursive framings can obscure the ways in which such intersections of protection and productivity can actually work to produce insecurity, not resolve it.…”

Section: Humanitarian Exploitsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Humanitarian exploits: Ordinary displacement and the political economy of the global refugee regime

Ramsay

2019

Critique of Anthropology

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Can the displacement of refugees continue to be understood as exceptional? The recent global increase in refugees has prompted calls to develop new solutions to displacement that focus on integrating refugees into the local economies of nations that receive them. Transforming refugees from economic burdens to economic benefits does not, however, resolve displacement: doing so only shifts the project of refugee protection from a supposedly humanitarian imperative to an economic incentive. Examining how political economy intersects with moral economy in the global refugee regime by drawing on fieldwork conducted with refugees in Uganda and Australia, I describe how efforts to incorporate refugees into local economies not only fail to resolve their displacement but serve to exacerbate it, with such ‘humanitarian exploits’ transforming refugees from recipients of humanitarian aid to highly exploitable workers who are, in their words, unable to ‘make a life’. I consider that continuing to analyse refugees as objects of humanitarian intervention rather than actors in a globalised political economy is a way to reproduce the exceptionality of refugee experiences and conceal how their lives are implicated within and indicative of new formations of global capitalism. Not only is the displacement of refugees not exceptional: it is emblematic of an increasingly globalised experience of ordinary displacement through which citizenship and civic rights are stratified by reducing the value of human life to the potential to extract economic productivity.

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Refugee economies

Cited by 18 publications

References 0 publications

Global public–private partnerships and the new constitutionalism of the refugee regime

Global public–private partnerships and the new constitutionalism of the refugee regime

The Rhetoric and Reality of Localisation: Refugee-Led Organisations in Humanitarian Governance

Humanitarian exploits: Ordinary displacement and the political economy of the global refugee regime

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