Thesis (M.A.)--University of California, San Diego, 2009. / Title from first page of PDF file (viewed July 7, 2009). Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Includes bibliographical references (p. 96-100).

The Rohingya, an ethnic minority group that traditionally have lived in Rakhine State, Myanmar, are facing severe structural discrimination from the Myanmar state. Rohingya women and girls have experienced horrific acts of gender-based violence from the Myanmar army in Rakhine State before they fled to Bangladesh and the refugee camps in Cox Bazar area. In these refugee camps gender-based violence continues to be widespread, much like other refugee camps in other parts of the world. Rohingya women and girls are vulnerable because of their gender, refugee status and ethnic affiliation. In addition they become even more vulnerable because family and community structures have broken down. These intersecting vulnerabilities make them exposed to gender-based violence from a number of different perpetrators. In addition these intersecting vulnerabilities lead to a lack of access to sexual and reproductive health services. Overall the humanitarian organisations operating in Cox Bazar did not manage to deliver these sexual and reproductive health services to the amount of Rohingya women and girls that needed them. Although gender-based violence was identified to be widespread in the refugee camps preventive measures were few. The unequal power relationships are identified as an underpinning reason for gender-based violence. In addition, the underlying causes of gender-based violence are connected with beliefs, norms, attitudes and structures that promote and/or tolerate gender-based discrimination and unequal power relationships.

This thesis examines political mobilisation into secular groups within Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. It focuses on context and identity in order to find out why and how Palestinians in the camps mobilise into these groups. The thesis uses a framework that incorporates three levels of analysis: structural; organisational; and individual. An ethnographic methodology is deployed involving interviews and participant observation in refugee camps in Lebanon. The thesis starts by looking at what sort of theoretical framework is necessary in order to understand the three key levels of analysis, including literature focusing on opportunities and constraints; human needs; resources; recruitment; social construction; and identity. The next focus is on context, looking at both the legal issues surrounding refugees - international, regional and local - as well as the historical context. The last three chapters examine the three levels of analysis individually, using them in conjunction with ethnographic research data to find out why and how Palestinians in the camps mobilise. The conclusion shows that, contrary to what one would imagine from most of the mobilisation literature, the Palestinians in the camps are not mobilising as would be expected. Instead the ethnographic research results found that the political groups within the camps are not as politically and militarily active as would be presumed. Mobilisation into these political groups is happening for different reasons than in previous findings – focusing instead on solidarity and social issues. This change has happened for contextual and financial reasons, including the end of the Civil War and the Palestinian Revolution in Lebanon, as well as a severe lack of resources available to the political groups. The research results found that although there is still mobilisation into the political groups, there was also disillusionment among many youths at the political groups' inability to facilitate their return to Palestine from Lebanon, as well as dismay at what they saw as disunity between the Palestinian political groups.

This thesis aims to depict Syrian refugees' detrimental livelihoods in the area of Izmir, Turkey and to through mapping, prototyping building and analysing two live projects - developed using a combination of Participatory Action Research and Design Thinking - provide examples on how architects and architecture students can work within the field of displacement. The projects are in two different contexts and have been carried out by students at Umeå School of Architecture, including the authors of this paper. The first is about creating a multi-use activity space at the rooftop of TIAFI community centre, located in Basmane - a refugee dense area in the city of Izmir. The second one is based in the nomadic labour camps in the farmlands of Torbali - a peripheral city to Izmir.

This study examines the various ways that Central American migrants traversing Mexico’s southern border interpret, negotiate, and resist conditions of immobilization imposed by state refugee policy and other institutional impediments to northbound movement. My findings are informed by 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tapachula, Chiapas, followed by an additional six, non-consecutive weeks in various sites of transit across Mexico as a Human Rights Observer in the migrant caravans of 2017 and 2018. Since 2011, as a result of increasing rates of violence, flows of Central American women, youth, and families across Mexico’s southern border have risen substantially. In efforts to curb northbound movement, the US has exerted significant pressure for the Mexican government to assume a greater role in the retention, organization, and deterrence of prospective refugee populations, resulting in the temporary resettlement along the southern border of thousands of migrants seeking international protection. Many of these migrants find themselves in a liminal space of legal and social uncertainty in which they must contend with a range of limitations and distinct possibilities as they consider their ongoing trajectories. Through close attention to the social worlds that emerge around and within migrants’ transit communities, I explore central themes related to the existentiality of im/mobility, gendered experiences of transit migration, the paradoxes of institutional practices of refugee protection within predominant transit zones, and diverse forms of resilience and coping that are given breadth through collective travel. Ultimately, I argue that it is critical to explore the narratives and lived realities of those most affected by migration-centered policy and discourse, and to recognize the critical role that migrants play in challenging and reimagining the terms of their in/exclusion.

This master thesis is based on a field study, conducted in Lugufu 1 and Mtabila 1 refugee camps in Kigoma, western Tanzania, where we held twenty-eight interviews with Congolese and Burundian refugee women. The Congolese and Burundian refugees have fled to Tanzania due to long-lasting conflicts in Congo and Burundi respectively; most arrived in mid-1990s. Thereby, the camps are no longer in phases of emergency and refugees have, since long, established everyday routines and habits that shape their everyday lives; our main interests lie in these. Accordingly, our aim with this study has been to attain a deepened understanding of how these refugee women experience their everyday lives with regards to safety. Since the women themselves were the narrators, security-related problems connected to firewood collection were, inevitably, frequently brought up and are therefore given much space throughout the study. Of great importance for the study is the Sphere Project, in particular the three Cross-Cutting issues - Gender, Environment, and Security – which are all, we believe, intimately related to Feminist Geography. Moreover, our purpose has been to interpret the answers given by these refugee women through arguments and concepts included in Feminist Geography and thereby enable new ways of understanding how, for example, the physical environment affects the everyday routines of refugee women. Furthermore, as several feminist geographers (who, to this date, mainly have focused on western, urban areas) approach women’s fear by looking at the prevailing social and power structures, such structures have also been given much space in our study. Consequently, our study sheds light on security-related issues, which refugee women face in their everyday lives. From the results found in our study, we believe, that if feminist geographers were to include refugee women residing in a non-western, rural context, they would stand to gain a broadened knowledge of how different women experience and are affected by fear and safety.

This thesis explores the normative propriety of immigration detention in liberal states. In the first part of the thesis, I explore the development, current practice, and popular justifications for immigration detention in the United Kingdom. I argue that a crucial but unacknowledged role for immigration detention is to function as a political spectacle of the centralisation of power in liberal states. I find that the key motivation for detaining non-citizens is that they could abscond before their removals. I conclude that this basis for detention is normatively acceptable in only very limited cases and, even then, alternatives are often available and ethically preferable. Based on the fact that there is a normatively acceptable rationale, albeit circumscribed, for detention practices, I then propose a framework of minimum standards of treatment in detention that I advise all liberal states to follow. After outlining my proposal, I turn in the second part of the thesis to an examination of the normative theories of immigration control and how they take account of detention. Normative theorists differ in how they balance their commitments to individual and state rights, yet I find the majority concedes the need for some degree of immigration admissions control. Such theories face a moral dilemma: there can be no immigration control without detention, and so detention becomes an implicit assumption for these normative theories to be coherent. A potential solution for combating the practical problems associated with the growing, worsening detention estates as well as the moral dilemma of incarcerating a non-citizen based on fear of absconding would be to open borders and eliminate immigration control. Given the reality of the sovereign right to control immigration, however, I argue that the more feasible normative answer is lobby liberal states to adopt my framework of minimum standards of treatment while simultaneously pressing for open borders as the long-term ethical goal.

This is an ethnographic study of the lives and experiences of Eritrean refugee women in Um Gargur, a settlement in eastern Sudan established in 1976. It is based upon fourteen months of fieldwork and builds upon the findings of my 1985 M.Phil, thesis, "A Preliminary Study of the Position of Eritrean Refugees in the Sudan", for which I conducted two months of research in Urn Gargur. While the M.Phil, thesis was a comparative study of Um Gargur and two other cases of resettlement in Africa, here I am concerned primarily with questions of gender, everyday life, and how processes of change and realignments of power impact upon women in displaced heterogeneous societies. After more than a decade in exile the people of Um Gargur continue to be fiercely nationalistic and as unresigned to remaining refugees as they are to assimilating into Sudan. There is also a growing trend towards Islamic conservatism in the settlement. This, coupled with the fact that Um Gargur is composed largely of mistrusted "strangers", means that women experience more restrictions in Um Gargur than they did in their communities of origin. The aim of the thesis is to examine the effect of displacement and exile upon gender roles, social infrastructures, traditions and perceptions, as people of disparate origins, occasionally with conflicting beliefs and mores, negotiate a way of living together. The title "Mothers of Steel" is taken from a riot instigated by women when charges were introduced for water. As the women revolted, their children shouted "Our mothers are steel, our fathers are monkeys!" This represented the main crisis point between men and women. Yet although the title derives from this incident, women, as they feed, nurture, socialise their children and keep their families intact, have clearly become "mothers of steel" in the eyes of their children since they have lived in Um Gargur. Chapter One introduces an overview of the settlement and shows that women's deliberate exclusion from all formal institutions leaves them at a disadvantage despite the fact that over 50% of them are household heads for much of the year. The following chapters examine how categories as diverse as politics, honour, health, and economics, impinge on the lives of the refugee women and their families, and argue that in contexts of displacement, where social realities are constantly being redefined, these categories all have a moral dimension. In Chapters Three and Four I show how limited employment opportunities in Um Gargur have meant that the majority of men continuously resident in the settlement have lost their roles as providers while women's roles have taken on a new symbolic significance. The society attempts to compensate for men's loss of status by placing greater restrictions upon women. Women's reactions to this are varied, but significant numbers of them have redrawn the parameters of "honourable" behaviour to allow themselves more flexibility. Women establish ties, not unlike kinship bonds, which traverse ethnic and religious boundaries and offer limited economic power and physical and psychological support. In Chapter Five I explore the tensions between traditional beliefs and practices and "Western" models of health care. While society's notion of what constitutes honour has calcified in reaction to a situation of extreme social dislocation and jeopardisation of "male" and "female" behaviour patterns, I show in Chapter Six that the women of Um Gargur have recognised their common plight and responded by renegotiating their identity, whilst at the same time being the primary agents - through myths, songs, names, and stories about Eritrea - in the construction of their children's identities as Eritreans. In the Conclusion (Chapter Seven) I introduce the story of the aforementioned water riot to illustrate how radically women's perceptions of their own power have altered, and how their children now perceive them. I suggest that though the process of change has been slow, the pressures faced by the community have meant that women's reconceptualisation of their own roles has been inevitable.

This thesis examines the role of international organizations (IOs) at the domestic level. While International Relations (IR) offers an extensive literature on IOs, with understandings of IOs ranging from instruments of states to autonomous actors, it tends to ignore the role of IOs working at the domestic level, with an 'on-the-ground' presence of their own, and what this means for the IO's relationship with the state. The thesis develops a heuristic framework for understanding what is called IO 'domestication', which outlines a range of ways an IO can work domestically. It then focuses on one type domestication in particular: surrogate statehood, or cases where an IO substitutes for the state by providing services, executing functions of governance, and assuming authority in a given locale. The framework identifies indicators of surrogacy, the conditions for IO surrogacy, and reasons why it is sustained. It also considers the various types of relationship that can emerge from IO surrogacy between the IO and the state, ranging from states that willingly choose to abdicate responsibility to the IO, to states that partner with the IO. Empirically, the thesis examines these relationships through the case studies of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, which present a spectrum of UNHCR’s surrogacy over time. Ultimately, the thesis puts forth a counterintuitive claim: IOs that take on surrogate state properties actually have less influence on the states in which they are working. The analysis draws on two mechanisms to help explain this outcome: marginalisation of the state, and responsibility shifting.

The Westsaharian women are a civic group that during their soon to be thirty years as refugees in the Westsaharian camps in south western Algeria have become empowered as citizens and advanced strongly in political representation. In theory, empowerment of women’s democratic citizenship has been described as a complex phenomenon. To gain an understanding about this in this study, I have described the women’s perceived access to resources and attitudes, and in what way these factors play a role for their active citizenship. This has been done by the use of Axel Hadenius’ theory about the democratic citizenship and Jo Rowlands’ theory about which resources that are to be considered as essential for women’s empowerment. To be able to perform the study, a case study was performed in the Westsaharian refugee camps during April-May 2004, followed up by a second during October-November 2004. The study shows that there are resources and attitudes within both human and social capital that the women perceive to play a significant role for their active citizenship. These factors make the women take part in societal activities, strive to reach higher political positions, and work for a common civic development as women and as Westsaharian citizens. The result of the study further shows that there are contextual inhibiting and encouraging factors that the women perceive to affect their resources and attitudes that play a significant role for their active citizenship.