Ending Forced Migration as a “Weapon of War”

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Forced Displacement in 2021 was released on June 16, 2022, its figures for the previous calendar year were already outdated in a number of key respects.[1] The most obvious being Russia’s blatantly illegal full scale invasion of the Ukraine on February 24, 2022, that has resulted in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…

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Migration as Climate Adaptation

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…

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Mutual aid amongst refugees: Evidence from Turkey and Peru, by Nicolas Parent

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…

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Striving to Achieve International Justice Through the Protection of Refugees: The Challenges for Greece and the European Union

Striving to Achieve International Justice Through the Protection of Refugees:  The Challenges for Greece and the European Union

by Stephanie P. Stobbe and James C. Simeon   Dr. Stephanie P. Stobbe, Associate Professor, Conflict Resolution Studies, Menno Simons College (a College of CMU) at the University of Winnipeg, s.stobbe@uwinnipeg.ca     Dr. James C. Simeon, Associate Professor, Head of McLaughlin College, and School of Public Policy and Administration, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University, jcsimeon@yorku.ca       International justice should be the prime objective of all of us. It…

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CARFMS Meets: IMRC!

CARFMS Meets: IMRC!

By Stephanie J. Silverman Dr. Stephanie J. Silverman is a sociolegal scholar who focuses on the tripwires of migration control. Her recent publications include articles on detainee risk assessments, administrative decision-making, Canadian quarantine powers, and a special journal issue on abolishing detention and other forms of incarceration. Her forthcoming monograph presents a new explanatory and analytic theory of the meteoric rise and normalization of immigration detention, drawing on Canada as a key case study. Contact…

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Moving Refugee Protection from Regional Divergence to International Convergence

Moving Refugee Protection from Regional Divergence to International Convergence

by Dr. James C. Simeon, Associate Professor, Head of McLaughlin College, and School of Public Policy and Administration, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, York University, jcsimeon@yorku.ca     The international refugee protection regime is highly complex, regionally based, and far from uniform. There are, for example, at least three major United Nations Agencies that deal with refugees: the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); the United Nations Relief and…

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Unpacking the knowledge-practices of the “collective self”: The Rohingya social movement in Canada

Unpacking the knowledge-practices of the “collective self”: The Rohingya social movement in Canada

by Yuriko Cowper-Smith, Ph.D. Yuriko Cowper-Smith holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and International Development from the University of Guelph. Her main research interests lie in migration, statelessness, and social movements, and her dissertation research investigates the Rohingya social movement in Canada. For three years, she has worked with this diaspora community by volunteering, organizing and attending events, and raising public awareness about the refugee crisis and genocide through her research and writing. Yuriko’s research…

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Introducing De-Carceral Futures: Bridging Prison and Migrant Justice

Introducing De-Carceral Futures: Bridging Prison and Migrant Justice

Editors’ Introduction: Detention, Prison, and Knowledge Translation in Canada and Beyond by Stephanie J. Silverman and Sharry Aiken   Immigration detention refers to the law, policy, and practice of incarcerating asylum seekers and other migrants to wait for a resolution in an irregularity of their immigration status. The medical literature is conclusive that even short periods of detention cause irreparable damage to the health of men, women, and children in Canada and abroad. Sometimes referred…

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15 Ways to Evaluate the Success of Community Sponsorship Programs, by Rachel McNally

15 Ways to Evaluate the Success of Community Sponsorship Programs, by Rachel McNally

Last year marked 40 years since the signing of the first agreement for private sponsorship in Canada. The government credits the program for “thousands upon thousands of new Canadian success stories.”[i] But what does the government mean by “success”? How can we determine if a sponsorship program is “successful”? New research reflects on these questions, including the Refuge journal’s new Special Issue on Private Sponsorship in Canada, the forthcoming book by McGill-Queen’s University Press Strangers…

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Methodology, Reflexivity and Decolonizing Refugee Research: Reflections from the Field, by Dina Taha

  During the summer of 2017, I was conducting fieldwork for my doctoral dissertation in Egypt. I interviewed thirty-five Syrian refugee women who, after escaping the conflict in Syria, settled in Egypt and then married Egyptian men. Initially my aim was to compare Syrian refugee women’s narratives with the pervasive, and often unquestioned discourses in social media and humanitarian blogs which “explained away” these women’s marriages to Egyptian nationals as coercion, exploitation, and at times…

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