Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Nebraska--Lincoln, 1994. / Includes bibliographical references.

Both practitioners and academics have recently begun referring to humanitarian agencies operating within an active 'aid marketplace' in which limited funding pits actors against each other in pursuance of their own projects and wider aims. This thesis seeks to explore how the pressures of a competitive environment impact on the motivations and actions of aid actors at an individual and organizational level. Based on the common saying that aid workers are 'mercenaries, missionaries and misfits', I construct a typology of pressures (interest-based, altruistic, and bureaucratic), which, it is argued, can be used to explain and understand much of this competitive and collaborative behaviour. A particular focus of the thesis is the impact of these various influences on the process and politics of information transfer and discourse creation regarding the process of needs assessment, monitoring and evaluation. I explore all of these issues through the medium of a case study of UNHCR's interventions in Afghanistan between 2001 and 2015, and seek to provide a detailed history of the agency's activities, politics and challenges during this period. In particular I am interested in the motivations driving the agency's actions; the strategies it has employed to achieve its aims; the calculated narratives that it has crafted to justify its interventions and attract greater support; and the very different ways in which it has approached the needs of different categories of displaced people.

No description available.

Although civil war affects all civilians, it impacts men and women in different ways, and it influences their gender roles and responsibilities. Comparatively little attention has been given to assessing the gender sensitivity of international organizations who implement post-conflict reconstruction programs. The different social, economic and political dimensions of war to peace transitions, and how they impact on gender relations, can shed some light on the complicated intersections of needs and interests in wartorn societies. An examination of the policies of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the World Bank reveals that there is relatively little gender mainstreaming within their post-conflict operations. This research finds that the lack of resources and coordination, the failure to build on local capacities, and a lack of commitment to gender mainstreaming are the main obstacles these organizations face. To improve the situation it is recommended that organizations develop and use a 'gender checklist' at all stages of project planning, implementation and monitoring to ensure increased gender sensitivity in post-conflict programming.

This thesis by article contains three chapters. The first chapter provides an overview of recent developments in global refugee education policy to situate Refugee Education 2030, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ current international refugee education strategy, within global policy initiatives. It then reviews the literature on refugee education policy that informed the development of a methodology of vertical policy coherence analysis with Refugee Education 2030 to answer the research questions of the thesis. Finally, it addresses my researcher positionality and journey leading to the thesis. The second chapter contains the manuscript for an article. The purpose of the article is to analyze the vertical coherence of Canadian policy regimes towards the primary and secondary education of refugee children and youth with Refugee Education 2030. The article presents a theoretical framework for policy coherence analysis that combines policy coherence theory, policy attributes theory, and policy behaviour theory, as well as a tri-phasic methodology for vertical policy coherence analysis with an international framework designed to be adapted to different contexts to guide the development of country-specific education policies. The theoretical framework and methodology are applied to determine the categories of needs underpinning Enabling Activities of a Strategic Objective of Refugee Education 2030, to assess these needs as presented by refugee children and youth in Canada, and to analyze the coherence of Canadian education policy responses to these needs with Refugee Education 2030. The findings indicate that there are five categories of needs inherent in the Enabling Activities of the selected Strategic Objective, specifically access to education, accelerated education, language education, mental health and psychosocial support, and special education; that all of these categories of needs are present in refugee claimant and/or refugee children and youth in all of Canada’s educational jurisdictions; and that there are significant gaps in policy responses to these needs. Taken together, the findings permitted a discussion on priorities for the revision and development of refugee education policy across Canadian jurisdictions to ensure greater coherence with Refugee Education 2030. The third chapter summarizes the findings of the contextualized analysis of the vertical coherence of Canadian refugee education policy regimes with Refugee Education 2030. Additional findings that could not be incorporated in the article due to the manuscript submission guidelines Schutte iv of the intended journal of publication are then presented and discussed. The thesis concludes with reflections on my research journey.

Cette thèse soulève l’importance d’acteurs et de voies de transferts souvent négligés en adoptant une perspective longitudinale et multi-niveaux sur les transferts internationaux de normes et de politiques. Elle examine le rôle d’organisations internationales dans le développement de politiques et de pratiques relatives à l’asile en Ukraine depuis la première loi sur les réfugiés en 1993 jusqu’en 2015. Elle montre la dépendance de l’action des organisations internationales (OI) et non-gouvernementales (ONG) à l’égard de modes d’influence plus connus, telles que la conditionnalité sectorielle exercée par l’Union Européenne, mais elle met aussi en lumière les modalités propres à leurs interventions. Elle étudie les interactions et les relations entre les acteurs étatiques et non-étatiques au long d’une « chaîne de transferts », révélant les logiques de dépendance, de délégation et de contrôle ainsi que les processus de traduction, de soutien et de résistance aux transferts. En analysant le soutien et des formes subtiles de résistance à l’adoption législative des normes internationales par le Parlement, elle montre l’impact de la quête de reconnaissance internationale et d’incitations offertes par les OI. Les OI et les ONG cherchent à influencer les pratiques étatiques en adaptant leurs stratégies aux résistances et aux obstacles structurels, par des approches consensuelles ou confrontatives, formelles ou informelles, verticales ou horizontales. En dépit de l’effort des entrepreneurs de normes pour induire la formalisation de certains changements, les effets des transferts sur les pratiques étatiques restent hétérogènes et instables. / This thesis uncovers the importance of often overlooked actors and transfer channels by adopting a longitudinal and multi-level perspective on international norm and policy transfer. It examines the role of international organisations in the development of asylum policies and practices in Ukraine since the adoption of the first Law on Refugees. It shows how the action of international and domestic non-governmental organisations is interlinked with and differs from the sector-specific conditionality exercised by the European Union. In this manner, it enriches the findings on transfer from research that has mostly focused on top-down processes and political elite actors. It investigates the interactions and relations between state and non-state actors of the “transfer chain”, revealing logics of dependence, delegation and control as well as processes of translation, support and resistance. Analysing the support and subtle forms of resistance to the legislative adoption of international norms at the Parliament, it demonstrates that adoption is shaped, to a large extent, by domestic politicians’ pursuit of recognition and incentives by international organisations. Moreover, non-state actors seek to influence state practices by adapting their strategies to domestic resistance and structural obstacles, utilising confrontational and harmony-seeking, formal and informal, top-down and horizontal strategies. While norm entrepreneurs try to trigger the formalisation of certain changes, the effects of the transfer attempts on state practices remain heterogeneous and unstable. This thesis thus adds to transfer scholars’ widespread findings regarding the weak application of norms.

South Africa is seen as a major destination for refugees and asylum-seekers and is, according to the 2010 Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the world’s highest destination country for asylum-seekers, mainly from Sub-Saharan Africa. Following the 1994 democratic elections, there was a transformation in foreign policy, embracing the African Agenda, and South Africa became a major country of destination because of its relative prosperity in Africa. As a State Party to the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention on the Status of Refugees, South Africa is under a legal obligation to protect refugees and grant them legal rights. At the same time, South African citizens, who had legitimate aspirations that the 1994 democratic government would address their development challenges, opposed the significant flow of refugees into the country by violent acts of xenophobia. The government, seen as a moral authority internationally with human rights being a key principle underpinning its foreign policy, found itself between the promotion of the African Agenda and its commitments to its own citizens. The refugee issue was addressed in the United Nations where the government made multilateral diplomacy a central platform of its foreign policy, a policy embedded in Africa and the South. South Africa is used as a case study to determine how it used multilateral diplomacy in the United Nations refugee regime through its coalition, the African Group, to address the migration issue. The study draws out the weaknesses of the international refugee regime by discussing the roles of two important diplomatic actors: the sovereign states in the United Nations General Assembly, and the international organization mandated to supervise the international refugee regime, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. South Africa’s foreign policy objective of promoting the African Agenda at times conflicts with the promotion of its national interest. Its progressive Constitution (1996) provides economic, social, and cultural rights to refugees, to the resentment of its own citizens, who view the refugees as beneficiaries of the United Nations. The study provides a critical analysis of South Africa’s multilateral diplomacy, and also provides the following recommendations where South Africa could use this mode more effectively to address the migration issue: Reform the international refugee regime; Allocate funds from the United Nations regularly assessed budget to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; and, Develop an international normative regulatory framework for irregular migrants. / Dissertation (MDiplomatic Studies)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Political Sciences / Unrestricted

Cette thèse se donne pour objet de tester, dans le contexte spécifique du droit français, la véracité et la pérennité des critiques féministe puis genrée de la définition du réfugié consistant à dénoncer la non-prise en compte des persécutions subies par les femmes et les minorités sexuelles dans le cadre de l’élection audit statut. Et c’est un constat mitigé qui ressort de l’étude car, en dépit des nombreuses pressions internationales et européennes invitant à une analyse genrée de la notion, ces critiques héritées des années 1980 apparaissent, dans une large mesure, encore d’actualité. Certes, le phénomène d’exclusion des persécutions liées au genre qu’elles dénonçaient s’est quelque peu affaibli, en ce que les persécutions subies par les femmes et les membres des minorités sexuelles ne sont, par principe, plus exclues du champ de la définition du réfugié. Mais il n’existe cependant toujours pas de volonté, politique ou juridictionnelle, visant à les intégrer pleinement dans l’analyse. En effet, les efforts consentis pour leur prise en compte se révèlent encore insuffisants, laissant demeurer des obstacles subtils à leur intégration, des obstacles d’autant plus délicats à identifier et à surmonter. / The purpose of this thesis is to test, in the specific context of French law, the veracity and durability of feminist and gendered review of the refugee definition, which consists in denouncing the failure to take into account persecutions suffered by women and sexual minorities in the election process. It is a mixed conclusion that emerges from the study because, despite the numerous international and European pressures calling for a gendered analysis of the concept, these criticisms inherited from the 1980s still appear, to a large extent, to be relevant. Admittedly, the exclusion of gender-related persecution that they denounced has somewhat weakened, because persecutions suffered by women and members of sexual minorities are no longer excluded, as a matter of principle, from the scope of the refugee definition. However, there is still no political or jurisdictional will to fully integrate them into the analysis. Indeed, the efforts made to take them into account are still insufficient, leaving subtle obstacles to their integration, obstacles that are all the more difficult to identify and overcome.