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By Rachel McNally December 2024 With the news in recent weeks highlighting the changes to Canada’s 2025-2027 Immigration Levels Plan (released October 2024), there is one refugee sponsorship program that does not appear in the levels plan: the Joint Assistance Sponsorship Program. In March 2023, I published the paper “Equally Public and Private Refugee Resettlement: The Historical Development of Canada’s Joint Assistance Sponsorship Program” in Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees. In this post, I explore…

By James C. Simeon, Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University, Email: jcsimeon@yorku.ca To note that the world is currently ablaze with protracted armed conflicts is to state the obvious to even the most casual observer of the world scene. The three most notable of protracted armed conflicts are, undoubtedly, the Russia – Ukraine War, the Hamas – Israel War, and the Sudan Civil War. According to the…

By James C. Simeon, Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University, Email: jcsimeon@yorku.ca It is now common knowledge, or should be, that the mass production of refugees is overwhelmingly due to wars. Astonishingly, more than half of the world’s refugees (52%) and others in need of international protection come from just three countries: Syrian Arab Republic; Ukraine; and Afghanistan.[1] In fact, 87 percent of all…

by James C. Simeon Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University Refugee and forced migration studies has evolved as both a multi-disciplinary and an interdisciplinary field that encompasses several disciplines including anthropology, conflict studies, demography, environmental studies, history, international studies, law, peace studies, philosophy, political economy, political science, public policy, public administration, psychology, sociology, social work, war studies, among others. Within this field of studies…

by James C. Simeon Associate Professor, School of Public Policy and Administration, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University The 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees assigns the UNHCR at Article 35, Co-operation of the National Authorities with the United Nations, that states “… shall in particular facilitate its duty of supervising the application of the provisions of this Convention.” And it further specifies that States undertake to provide “… (c)…

By James C. Simeon By the time the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee’s (UNHCR) Global Trends, Forced Displacement in 2021 was released on June 16, 2022, its figures for the previous calendar year were already outdated in a number of key respects.[1] The most obvious being Russia’s blatantly illegal full scale invasion of the Ukraine on February 24, 2022, that has resulted in some 14 million people being forcibly displaced to…

by Benjamin Keenan, PhD Candidate, McGill University   Anthropogenic climate change is now viewed as an existential threat that requires society to question how we live and how we can use our resources more sustainably. The increase in atmospheric CO2, from about 280 ppm prior to the Industrial Revolution (ca. 1850) to approximately 411 ppm today has led to an increase in the number and severity of extreme weather events – including extensive and frequent…

Nicolas Parent, PhD Candidate, Department of Geography, McGill University, winner of CARFMS 2021 student essay contest (graduate/law category), nicolas.parent@mail.mcgill.ca Over the course of four years (2015-2019) and while conducting research with refugees in Basmane (Izmir, Turkey) and Chorrillos (Lima, Peru), I came across what I believed were authentic examples of mutual aid. [1] Mutual aid, from the anti-capitalist and anarcho-communist writings of Peter Kropotkin, can be understood as the horizontal and free assembly of individuals…