published_or_final_version / Urban Planning / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

This research dealt with the following cases of relocation that occurred in Rundu, namely: Nkondo village in the 1950s, forced removal to Nkarapamwe Black Township in 1968, and the relocation of Sarusungu and Mangarangandja in 1971 and 1972. The central research aim of this study was to explain why and how relocations occurred and their impact on the communities. The study also aimed to explain the motives of the authorities for the removals.

Despite the lack of robust empirical evidence, a growing number of media reports attempt to link climate change to the ongoing violent conflicts in Syria and other parts of the world, as well as to the migration crisis in Europe. Exploiting bilateral data on asylum seeking applications for 157 countries over the period 2006-2015, we assess the determinants of refugee flows using a gravity model which accounts for endogenous selection in order to examine the causal link between climate, conflict and forced migration. Our results indicate that climatic conditions, by affecting drought severity and the likelihood of armed conflict, played a significant role as an explanatory factor for asylum seeking in the period 2011-2015. The effect of climate on conflict occurrence is particularly relevant for countries in Western Asia in the period 2010-2012 during when many countries were undergoing political transformation. This finding suggests that the impact of climate on conflict and asylum seeking flows is limited to specific time period and contexts. / Series: Department of Economics Working Paper Series

Thesis advisor: Sarah Babb / Thesis advisor: Lisa Dodson / Through a qualitative thematic analysis of sixty-four semi structured interviews, this thesis focuses on the situation facing Burmese forced migrants in Thailand. In particular, I look at the ways in which forced migrants, their host government, and humanitarian actors negotiate the meaning of refugee status and what it means to be in a protracted space of transition. Findings for this study point to the ways in which the policies and norms of the Royal Thai Government and the offices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees inadvertently interconnect to complicate the space for refugee protection. The paper also finds that refugee status can be gained or lost through interactions between asylum seekers and various parties on the Thai Burma border. Certain actors within the refugee community and among local and humanitarian authorities play the role of gatekeepers, granting access to a variety of services and protection at a cost and excluding those who cannot pay the cost. Underlying this context of asylum are themes of extreme repression and resistance that have implications not only for the lives of those who seek refuge, but also for notions of sovereignty and citizenship. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2009. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

This dissertation examines the case of 250-300,000 largely Orthodox Christian refugees who fled Ottoman Bosnia and Hercegovina for the Habsburg Empire during the uprisings of 1875-1878. The violence during this period started out as a peasant uprising, but over the course of three years cascaded into revolts and violence across the Ottoman Balkans and led to a major European diplomatic crisis. The Treaty of Berlin of 1878, which ended the violence, reconfigured the political geography of the Balkans, making the former Ottoman provinces of Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia independent; giving a sweeping autonomy to Bulgaria, and handing over to Austria-Hungary the administration of a nominally Ottoman Bosnia and Hercegovina. Refugees played an under-appreciated role in the international and domestic politics of the period, and this dissertation argues that forced migration was in fact one of the key considerations of Great Power diplomacy. Forced migration offered a means to measure degree of violence, and control over population movement offered a way for empires to lay claims to legitimacy. In a similar manner, philanthropists and international humanitarians used forced migration to build and advocate for their own civic spheres. The dissertation argues that during this period, the modern category of "refugee" was defined as states developed processes to manage refugees domestically and to create international policies for refugee aid and return.

Conflict between returning and non-migrant populations is a pervasive yet frequently overlooked issue in post-conflict societies. While scholars have demonstrated how out-migration can exacerbate civil war, less is understood about what happens when the same populations return. This dissertation interrogates how legacies of forced migration influence conflict dynamics in countries-of-origin. I argue that return migration creates new social divisions in local communities based on where individuals lived during the war – in-country or abroad. These new cleavages become sources of conflict when institutions – like land codes, citizenship regimes, or language laws – provide differential outcomes to individuals based on their migration history. Using ethnographic evidence gathered in Burundi and Tanzania between 2014 and 2016, I demonstrate how refugee return to Burundi after the country’s 1993-2003 civil war created new identity divisions between so-called rapatriés and résidents. Local institutions governing land disputes hardened competition between these groups, leading to widespread, violent, local conflict. Consequently, when Burundi faced a national-level political crisis in 2015, prior experiences of return shaped both the character and timing of renewed refugee flight. By illuminating the role of reverse population movements in shaping future conflict, this study demonstrates why breaking the cycle of return and repeat migration is essential to conflict prevention.

This dissertation examines how the formal schooling trajectories of forced migrant women from Africa and the Middle East are shaped by the ongoing confrontation of the women with the policies and practices of the community college they attend. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork done at a community college in the largest metropolitan area in the otherwise predominantly rural state of Maine. This work is motivated by an interest in the validity of the rhetoric of community college as the vehicle for upward social mobility for marginalized populations. The students in the study are constructed as various types of minorities: linguistic, racial, religious, national, depending on the bureaucratic, social or schooling context. Because of the ideology of equal opportunity, often the only documentation by the community college of minority status is their language status that is recognized in the standardized entrance exam. Racial and national origin information is voluntary and commonly left blank on official forms, but, along with religion, are made meaningful both in and outside of the classroom through interactions with white peers and teachers. Forced migrant students experience this construction of otherness, and react through the formation of social support networks made up exclusively of forced migrants where they teach each other ways of adaption and resistance. Because of the conditions that led to their flight, forced migrants have survived traumatic situations, face language barriers and may have interrupted formal schooling, as well as retain familial obligations around the globe that present unique challenges. The community college does not fully recognize these challenges, and maintains a narrow standard that is upheld through teaching practices and the use of standardized exams, which serve to marginalize forced migrant students. This marginalization translates into low graduation rates for forced migrants, effectively blocking any upward social mobility to be gained from the community college.

Suicidal behavior and death by suicide are significant and pressing problems in the Bhutanese refugee community. Currently, Bhutanese refugees are dying by suicide at a rate nearly 2 times higher than the general United States population. Proper identification of risk factors for suicide saves lives and prevents suicides (Mann et al., 2005); however, if suicide risk is underestimated due to culturally inflexible risk assessments, preventable deaths may continue to needlessly grow. In a community sample of Bhutanese refugees resettled in Vermont (N=60), the current study aims to (1) test elements of a comprehensive conceptual model of incremental risk factors for suicide – adapted from the interpersonal psychological theory of suicide (IPTS; Joiner, 2005) – including suicidal desire, suicidal ideation, thwarted belongingness, and perceived burdensomeness and (2) test the relative contributions of suicidal desire and suicidal ideation as risk factors for suicidal behavior. Participants attended a single study visit at which they completed self-report measures administered in an interview format via an interpreter, if needed. Key measures included the Beck Scale for suicidal ideation (BSS; Beck & Steer, 1991), Interpersonal Needs Questionnaire (INQ; Van Orden et al., 2012), Wish to be Dead Scale (WDS; Lester, 2013), Refugee Health Screener – 15 (RHS-15; Hollifield et al., 2013), Postmigration Living Difficulties checklist (PmLD; Laban et al., 2005), Brief Biosocial Gambling Screen (BBGS; Gebauer et al., 2010), basic demographics questions, and qualitative questions about suicide within the Bhutanese refugee community. The analytic approach relied on the use of hurdle models, Fisher’s exact tests, hierarchical logistic regression, and independent samples t-tests to assess the relationships among aspects of our conceptual model. Although endorsement of suicidal ideation (n = 4, 6.7%) and suicidal behavior (n = 2, 3.3%; measured by combining the planning and concealment subscales of the BSS) was low in the sample, a substantial minority (n = 29, 48.3%) endorsed some desire to be dead. Perceived burdensomeness, but not thwarted belongingness, was significantly associated with both suicidal ideation and the desire to be dead. There was no evidence that the desire for death contributed additional risk of suicidal behavior, above and beyond suicidal ideation. Of participants with a history of suicide attempts (n = 4), none reported any suicidal ideation and 3 reported some desire to be dead. Neither desire to be dead nor suicidal ideation was significantly related to suicide attempt history. These findings have implications for suicide detection and prevention among resettled Bhutanese refugees. The cultural responsiveness of suicide screening in this population could be improved by assessing two constructs not typically assessed: desire to be dead (e.g., the WDS) and perceived burdensomeness (e.g., INQ). Explicit evaluation of these two constructs in Bhutanese refugees may increase the sensitivity of risk assessments without sacrificing specificity in comparison to assessments exclusively focused on self-reported suicidal ideation.

This thesis provides a criminological perspective on the Australian state???s responses to unauthorised migrants. In particular, it attempts to build on recent criminological literature on state crime by contrasting the alleged deviance of unauthorised migrants with the organised and deviant human rights abuses perpetrated by the Australian state. The main argument of the thesis is that through the systematic alienation, criminalisation and abuse of unauthorised migrants, particularly refugees, the Australian state is engaged in state crime. While this can partly be measured by breaches of international humanitarian law, the acts in question are criminal according to the broader sociological understanding of state crime as ???state organisational deviance involving the violation of human rights???. The thesis develops this argument by locating the phenomena of forced and illicit migration within an increasingly globalised world economy in which the needs for international human migration are confronted by the restrictive migration policies of the dominant Western states. In this context, the Australian state has played a pivotal role in the development of three major Western exclusion zones, which are designed to contain unauthorised migrants in the developing world and are enforced by measures that systematically abuse human rights. The fundamental criminological dynamic of the Australian exclusion zone is its systematic assault on the movements and by definition, the rights, of forced migrants. This operates at a number of levels: unauthorised arrivals are alienated by their lack of legal status; they are denied access to a full refugee determination process; their status as refugees is subordinated to that of the resettled refugee; their experiences are denied and delegitimised through their construction as queue jumpers; they are criminalised through their participation in smuggling enterprises; they are punished and abused through the use of detention, dispersal and forced removal; and they are put at greater personal risk by the measures employed to enforce the zone. The thesis traces the development of this zone from the formation of the white Australia policy through to the Pacific Solution and critically analyses the ways in which current policy draws on and reinforces the exclusionist traditions of Australian nationalism.

This thesis is a qualitative study of health practices of resettled Vietnamese refugees in Victoria, B.C. This thesis looks at the past and present sociocultural and political experiences of forced migration and resettlement which have influenced definitions, understandings and practices of medicine among refugees today. Previous studies of Vietnamese refugee groups have identified traditional Chinese medicine and biomedicine as complementary healing systems which are used. These studies report that Vietnamese refugee groups still experience sociocultural barriers to care after resettlement to their host country. This research found that resettled Vietnamese refugees in Victoria, B.C. still demonstrate a syncretic approach to medical practice which is also inclusive of traditional Vietnamese medicine (TVM). Using semi-structured interviews and participant observation methods to collect materials and gain a detailed understanding of how medicine is understood and used by resettled Vietnamese refugees, this study is based on interviews from a sample of 7 resettled Vietnamese refugees, six female and one male. I demonstrate that medicine is much more complex than simply practicing different forms of medicine. There are underlying sociocultural and political issues that continue to shape how medicine is defined and represented by resettled Vietnamese refugees today. This thesis identifies TVM as a recognized healing system and shows how perceptions of medicine and health have changed over the course of resettlement. Although forced migration and long term resettlement has resulted in the internalization of certain socio-cultural and political norms and expectations regarding medical practice, some of these changes have been beneficial for resettled Vietnamese refugees in Victoria, B.C. / Graduate / 0326 / 0566 / 0631 / jcly2@uvic.ca