Journal of Refugee Studies Vol. 20, No. 2 ß The Author [2007]. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email:
[email protected] doi:10.1093/jrs/fem015
In Search of ‘Invisible’ Actors: Barriers to Access in Refugee Research BARBARA HARRELL-BOND Forced Migration and Refugee Studies Program, American University in Cairo, PO Box 2511, Cairo 11511, Egypt
[email protected] EFTIHIA VOUTIRA Department of Balkan, Slavic and Oriental Studies, University of Macedonia, PO Box 1591, 540 06 Thessaloniki, Greece
[email protected] The paper traces the early history of refugee research and shows how, from originally being prime movers in the research, refugees today have largely been reduced to invisibility. In the South, access to refugees held in camps is controlled by local government bureaucracies and by lead agencies, and may be severely restricted or completely denied; in the North, refugees held in detention centres are equally difficult to access and even more disempowered. Examples are given of studies carried out in Sierra Leone, Sudan, Egypt, Kenya, Greece and the Former Soviet Union. The paper also considers barriers to disseminating refugee research, and concludes that now more than ever the duty of the researcher is to speak on behalf of refugees. Keywords: access, refugee camps, detention, empowerment, dissemination
A ‘History’ of Refugee Research It is well known that refugee scholars played a major role in founding the New School for Social Research in New York after the Second World War and in making learned contributions to the various disciplines (see Krohn 1993; Lyman 1994; McLay 1994). But these contributions did not involve the study of the refugee phenomenon itself. In fact, many European refugees explicitly rejected the label ‘refugee’; for example, the White Russians who insisted on being referred to as ‘e´migre´s’ (Chinyaeva 1995: 148; and see 2001). Throughout the first part of the twentieth century, individual refugees contributed greatly to the institutional development and the body of law that today we refer to as the ‘refugee regime’. It would be impossible to name all, but for example, a Russian refugee lawyer, Andre´ Mandelstam, and a Greek, Antoine Frangulis, were moving spirits in the development of human
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rights law in Paris in the 1920s (Burgers 1992). This use of refugees as resources was the original approach taken by the League of Nations where refugees were used to fill gaps in the labour market (in collaboration with ILO) and their specific capacities were mobilized by different offices. This was possible because these refugees were seen as people with capacities, in short, people ‘like us’. After the Second World War, a group of Germanspeaking refugee scholars started the Association for the Study of the World Refugee Problem (AWR) in Vienna, and the AWR still produces a journal in English and in German. Paul Weis, a refugee from Vienna, served on the committee drafting the 1951 Convention. His contributions to legal development are numerous and legend, especially during the time he served with the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (see Weis Collection, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford). In 1951, Jacques Vernant was asked to head a team of researchers with the aim of producing a survey of post-war refugees (see Vernant 1953). This was the time of the transition from the International Refugee Organization (IRO) to UNHCR. As explained by van Heuven Goedhart, the High Commissioner at that time, there were no funds for carrying out such a survey and support was provided by the Rockefeller Foundation which granted my office a sum of $100,000 for the project. It was understood that the survey should be carried out independently and on a purely scientific basis, the authors alone responsible for the substance of the report (van Heuven Goedhart 1952).
Research about refugees became recognized as an academic field in its own right only in the 1980s. York University, Canada and the University of Oxford both launched programmes in 1982. In the USA, Barry Stein at Michigan State University was the first to teach a course on refugees; he also published in migration journals, e.g. Stein (1981). Prior to this, studies of refugees throughout the twentieth century had been undertaken by individual researchers from different disciplines and published in books and journals scattered across the world. Some of these studies were conducted by people who worked in the camps during the First and Second World Wars in Europe (e.g. Hope-Simpson 1939; Proudfoot 1957). In certain regions in Europe that were immediately affected by large scale refugee movements in the inter-war period, such as Greece, research on their economic impact had a major influence on economic thought (e.g. Kostis 1992). In 1975, Holborn published her two volume history of UNHCR. Nearly all studies done after the Second World War concentrated on the impact of displacement and patterns of adaptation of refugees in their new social environment. In this they followed the established tradition within the social sciences, e.g. psychology, sociology, anthropology, that had already established a corpus of knowledge through research done on migrants during and after the First World War.
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It was only when an academic institutional base became available that a concerted effort to bring such disparate literature together as the basis for developing the multi-disciplinary field of refugee studies could begin. Hansen produced one of the first field studies on refugees in the south, on ‘self-settled’ Angolan refugees in rural Zambia (1977). He and Spring, who also wrote about refugees at this time (Spring 1979, 1982), had gone to conduct research in villages in Northwestern Zambia and accidentally found them to be heavily populated with refugees. In other words, the very subject matter of the field was neither clearly delineated nor ‘visible’ in a way that would attract research. Hirschon’s Heirs to the Greek Catastrophe (1989) is another example of someone finding refugees in the field—fifty years after their flight. Loizos’s 1981 follow-up study of the impact of the 1974 invasion of north Cyprus on the village he had studied for his Ph.D. is an example of someone intentionally pursuing the process of people ‘becoming’ refugees. In the 1980s, the Refugee Studies Programme surveyed over 250 centres of migration studies (Center for Migration Studies 1987) to ask about their research on refugees. Only the Center for Migration Studies, New York, published work on refugees offered to them and its journal, International Migration Review, published special issues on refugees from time to time. The situation since the 1980s has obviously changed, with most centres of migration research including refugees and internally displaced people in their studies, and a burgeoning of publications: books, journals, newsletters and magazines. Today the field of refugee studies is being gradually subsumed under migration studies. The Problem Today refugees around the world live in different situations; most visibly they are held in detention or ‘reception’ centres in the ‘north’ and in camps in the ‘south’ where they are perceived to be dependent for their survival on humanitarian assistance; in fact, as most critiques of the humanitarian aid regime reiterate, refugees are largely dependent on their own efforts to survive. It is the proble´matique of studying these refugees which was the main stimulus for writing this paper, but our concerns with the general problems of accessing refugees for research purposes and disseminating the findings led us to include a more general discussion of the challenges raised in the context of accessing the ‘refugee’ as a persona, as a person, and as a public perception, within spaces that are visible and identifiable, but largely inaccessible to researchers for a variety of reasons. Refugees as persons are subsumed under elaborate bureaucratic structures that ‘control’ them. A key feature of these structures of control is the exercise of power by individual actors who represent authority structures at different levels of the hierarchy and often perceive their role in life as saying ‘no’ (see Voutira and Harrell-Bond 1995: 212ff). In this sense, arbitrary denial of access becomes part of the exercise and wielding of power (Foucault 1977: 186).
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Refugees have rights, which they seldom enjoy, but any government or agency responsible is unlikely to welcome the exposure of their failings in protecting refugee rights. Fear of undermining their donor base appears to be a major motivation for the ambivalence that UNHCR and their implementing partners, the NGOs, have concerning independent research among refugees. Moreover, local staff, operating at intermediate levels in the aid distribution hierarchy, have a stake in ‘safeguarding’ their reputation for doing good work on the ground, both with their superiors and with researchers. As a result, attempts to reform administrative attitudes within the humanitarian regime remain on the level of rhetoric and fall short of addressing the substantive issues, since they consistently pay lip service to active engagement with refugee rights. A telling example of what we mean by rhetoric and the underlying fear of bad publicity is brought out in a recent account concerning the supervision and promotion of human rights by the UN (Kagan 2006). Kagan relates the attempt by UN staff to solicit the views of refugees concerning their living conditions in the midst of South Sudan’s civil war. The honesty with which complaints were voiced was startling. In their letters refugees said that their land was insufficient to grow crops; they lacked access to education and training opportunities; the UN forced them to farm when many wanted to learn professions. They also complained that in the remote areas where the camps were located, police and health services were inaccessible during the rainy season. While they preferred to move to the city, they had to remain in the camps. In writing these letters, the refugees assumed they were talking to the UN. However, when the UN official arrived, there was no time for actual visitation of the camps and he was briefed by the local staff in front of a refugee delegation about the contents of the letters, which had been censored. The content that was communicated to the official was that refugees were grateful to Uganda as a host and to the UN for its services. None of the actual complaints were reported to him. The moral of the story concerns the lack of an institutional framework within which communication between refugees on the ground and the UN officials can take place: the UN official did not ‘hear’ what the refugees said and the refugees could not ‘speak’. Their voices had been censored by the intervening bureaucracy and the organizational culture of defensiveness prevailed (cf. Wigley 2005). Refugees held in detention are even more subject to silencing. In Europe, refugees who are detained are still seeking asylum and are subject to deportation if they fail. Special charter flights have been introduced among northern European states to facilitate refugee deportation. This is an additional obstacle to research: refugee detainees ‘disappear’ from sight. Moreover, detention centres are being pushed further south and east; European governments are promoting off-shore locations where status determination can take place, e.g. in Libya and Morocco. This obviously has an impact on accessibility and prioritization of refugee research. The removal of refugees from European territorial space implies that
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increasingly they would only be studied as ‘integrated’ refugees, when and if they have been recognized by the system.
The Political/Administrative Barriers The freedom to conduct research in most societies of the world is neither automatic nor absolute. Studying any population in the context of the Soviet regime, for example, required the ‘protection’ of an academic umbrella and one was chaperoned by a member of the security services, sometimes in the guise of an interpreter, while fieldnotes were always at risk of being confiscated by the secret services (Dragadze 1987). Moreover, research projects had to fall within certain approved parameters in agreement with the mainstream research priorities as set out by the different academies of sciences (Tishkov 1992). Another example comes from contemporary Sudan where the situation is similar to the former Soviet Union. A government ‘minder’ always accompanies any visitor to refugee camps and, in the case of the internally displaced peoples (IDPs), there are only a few camps that an outsider is even allowed to see. In short, in these types of ‘big brother’ surveillance situations, one cannot see without being watched. Moving beyond totalitarian state practices, the very subject of refugees and their living conditions has usually been a sensitive topic for host governments and has become all the more so since 9/11/2001. Even without concern over the threat of ‘terrorism’, governments fear any challenge to their image. For example, recently in Uganda, the Second Prime Minister forbade anyone to make more films about life in the settlements, presumably because the conditions would give Uganda a bad press. But conducting research in the Middle East can be a much more suspect activity, given the governments’ security concerns and conventional ideas of the techniques of research which are embedded in perceptions of national pride in individual countries. In Egypt, for instance, one needs to obtain a permit from the Centre for Public Mobilization and Statistics (CAPMAS). Doing research without ‘the requisite licence is a public security crime’ (Sholkamy 1999: 128).1 CAPMAS imposes rigid requirements which include the submission of a questionnaire, even in situations where such instruments are not relevant to the research questions. Sholkamy relates her own attempt to get clearance for research on child-care practices among pre-school children which required her to ‘make up’ a questionnaire to satisfy CAPMAS. I thought it honest to say that I did not intend to use the questionnaires. Then ‘how will you come up with the results?’ was the genuinely puzzled response. At the time participant observation, open-ended interviews, and other qualitative methods were objectionable. ‘Research must have an objective and a hypothesis by which it can be measured’, I was told. My request was denied and I am still not sure why (ibid.).
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Despite these restrictions, research in Egypt does get done. As in other situations, access does not depend on what one knows but on whom one knows and how well one is connected. Sholkamy makes the point that for students and researchers with no connections, attempts to engage in qualitative research ‘can be a criminal activity for no clear reason’ (ibid.). Another example from Egypt concerns a foreign researcher who was studying Palestinian refugees, a particularly sensitive subject in Egypt. In 2001, Oroub El-Abed, a Palestinian from Jordan, set out to do a study of the livelihood of Palestinians in Egypt under the Forced Migration and Refugee Studies (FRMS) programme at the American University in Cairo (AUC). Having had experience of working with the Jordanian government’s Palestinian office, she wisely informed the security at AUC why she was at the FMRS and what she was planning. She did a number of interviews in Cairo, completed her proposal and got funding from Canada’s International Development Research Council (IDRC). At this point she talked again with AUC’s security, which put her through by telephone to the state security. She was given oral permission to proceed and had a letter confirming this from the head of AUC’s security. She and her team of Palestinian assistants proceeded to interview in several governorates (the administrative unit in Egypt). In July she was summoned to the state security offices at midnight. There she was interrogated about every aspect of her research, although they had read her proposal and were well aware of its aims and purposes. Finally they told her to stop the fieldwork. As she had already conducted 98 interviews, she was able to write up her research. In the meantime, El-Abed was followed and her apartment was searched in her absence. Later, a workshop was scheduled at AUC for her to present her results to an audience of Egyptians including government representatives, her funders, and other foreign guests. Two days before the planned workshop, the state security called the Provost, asking him to ‘postpone’ the workshop, but AUC decided to go ahead with the planned meeting. In 2004, El-Abed was invited to another meeting on the Palestinians at the Al Ahram Centre for Strategic Studies in collaboration with the Badil Centre in Bethlehem, which had been approved by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She was not allowed to enter Egypt, was held in detention at the airport for ten hours, and deported back to Jordan (El-Abed 2004). In most ‘southern’ states, it is necessary for outsiders to apply for research clearance from a particular office of the government. However, in the 1960s in Sierra Leone, when the government was threatening to restrict outsiders from academic research because they suspected some of being spies, the Centre for African Studies, Fourah Bay College, took the initiative of setting up a system of vetting applicants which the government accepted. It required them to submit a curriculum vitae, references, and a research proposal. If approved, the researcher entered into a contractual relationship with the University, which included the obligation of maintaining ethical standards, joining the research community, reporting their research at a seminar,
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and subsequently sending copies of all publications to the Fourah Bay College library. The University, in turn, would write a letter for the researcher which s/he could show to government offices, community leaders, and at roadblocks when they occurred. In this context, the University acted as a facilitator in the realization of the research while maintaining its independence from government control. One wonders if such a letter would work under the insecure post war conditions that obtain in Sierra Leone today. As noted above, one institution that has been apprehensive of independent academic research has been UNHCR. This was reflected during the 1980s in the response of the Kenyan government office responsible for research clearance. One sociologist (a priest) running an assistance programme in Nairobi found that refugees were going to other agencies for the same services. He applied to the government for research clearance to do a study so that the various service providers could find a way to co-ordinate their work in order to distribute services more equitably and efficiently, but was refused. He proceeded to conduct the study without permission, but when the research was complete, was in a dilemma as to how to disseminate the findings. He talked with colleagues at Nairobi University. They happened to serve as advisors to the government committee deciding such applications, and were surprised to hear of his problem, informing him that they had approved his research clearance. They went to the government office and discovered that UNHCR’s negative recommendation was in the file and that it had ‘trumped’ their approval (see Headley 1986). Consultants2 doing research for institutions like the UN do not often bother getting approval, but unless an academic wanting to study refugees has a consultancy with UNHCR, it would be impossible to ‘get in’ (see Conquergood (1979) for a description of how he managed to ‘get in’ to a Hmong refugee camp in Thailand). For example, in 1981, when HarrellBond was intending to do a two year study of humanitarian agencies in the middle of a refugee emergency, she went to investigate the Chadian refugee situation in Nigeria as an appropriate field site. Learning that without UNHCR’s prior approval, she would not be allowed to do the research, she went to Geneva and took her proposal around the various desks. One officer became very interested in the aims of the research and offered her a contract which included a UNHCR laissez passer and guaranteed access to the field. In return, she would produce a 25 page report free of charge. For unconnected reasons, she eventually chose Sudan as a more appropriate site for this research. The resistance of the UNHCR representative in Khartoum to the idea of an independent researcher being in the country, and the various efforts, including his own, to have her deported, go beyond the scope of this article. Suffice it to say, that it was the Refugee Studies Programme’s good relationship with the office of the Sudanese Commissioner for Refugees that ensured the research could be completed.
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The Bureaucratic and Physical Barriers Facing Researchers in Camps Refugee camps are usually administered by a ‘lead’ NGO or UNHCR, although authority apparently lies with the host government’s representative from the relevant central government office responsible for refugees. For example, in Tanzania and Uganda, these representatives are called ‘camp commandants’, a term inherited from prison camps in the colonial era (Chaulia 2003; Kamanga 2005). To conduct research in the camps, one must have permission not only from the government’s research clearance office, but also from the refugee agency in the capital. This permission must be presented to the offices at the district level as well as at the camp. The maintenance of this kind of protocol requires familiarity with local bureaucracies and agency field staff, something not normally anticipated in preparation for research of the standard academic type (see Malkki (1996: 382–384) on some of the implications concerning the exchanges between refugee authorities and refugee researchers). In contrast to Tanzania and Uganda, since 1991, the Kenyan government has taken a ‘hands off refugees’ stance (Verdirame and Harrell-Bond 2005: 19) and there seems to be no problem with getting government permission to conduct research. There, UNHCR is the lead agency administering Kakuma and Dadaab camps and even the Kenyan police presence in the camps is subsidized by UNHCR. Physically getting to a refugee camp is in itself a challenge. Camps are usually located in the most underdeveloped border regions of the host country where access to transport and communication is difficult, unreliable and expensive. Usually the only vehicles available are owned by agencies working in the camps. Once one has obtained permission to conduct a study, they are usually prepared to provide lifts from place to place. However, using this mode of transport can result in refugees identifying the researcher with the agency concerned. In more recent years, because of the real or perceived dangers, remaining in a camp overnight is generally not allowed. As a result, the researcher’s working day is curtailed and observation of what occurs in the evenings is not possible. It is true that some refugee camps are dangerous places, but the danger is mainly for the refugees. However, since many UN workers have been killed or abducted in various places around the world, staff security is a major preoccupation. This has created another barrier to understanding between the agencies and refugees in camps. Furthermore, exclusion from the research site from 5 p.m. until the morning shuts researchers off from socializing with the refugees during their non-working hours and therefore from conducting participant observation on family relations, religious practices, survival strategies and the like. Access to Refugees who are Seeking Asylum in Detention Centres in the ‘North’ People are refugees from the moment they are forced to flee their country but from the viewpoint of the host country they are seeking asylum.
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Theoretically, it is through the procedures of seeking asylum that genuine refugees can be distinguished from those who are merely using the system to migrate. The onus of providing evidence of ‘well founded fear of persecution’ to substantiate one’s claim lies with the refugee. This situation puts them in a state of trepidation, especially if, as is usually the case, they have little knowledge of refugee law and thus no idea of what events are significant to the decision maker. Waiting for an interview or a decision is generally protracted and is experienced as a condition of uncertainty and disempowerment. This is precisely the condition in which researchers normally encounter refugees in the ‘north’, where fear and anxiety are the dominant feelings they display. As noted by a number of ethnographic field studies (e.g. Brekke 2004; Moorehead 2005) the main predicament for refugees in the detention centres is that they find themselves in conditions of imprisonment and violation of their rights as asylum seekers, most notably the ‘right to move’ (Black et al. 2006). Specifically, the characteristics of asylum seeker centres vary from open reception centres (e.g. Sweden, the Netherlands, Greece) to closed prison-like facilities for refugees and immigration cases (e.g. Campsfield in Oxfordshire, UK, (see http://www.barbedwirebritain.org.uk/campsfield.shtml), and Baxter in Australia (Moorehead 2005)), or actual prisons where refugees are kept with convicts or, at best, with those on remand (Amnesty International 2006). Because such refugees are living in a legal limbo, and are being held under conditions which violate the principles of international law (see Art. 9 of the 1951 Convention for exceptions), usually only lawyers are permitted inside to talk with them and sometimes even their access is extremely limited. Under these conditions, how is it possible to conduct research? In Greece, after pressure from UNHCR, which was funding the research, the Ministry of Health and Social Welfare gave Voutira clearance to access unaccompanied minors who were being held in a youth centre in Crete. Our research was about living conditions and services available to the single women who were heads of households and separated children in these reception centres. In the case of single women, access was available at the reception centres, but there were problems with establishing trust with the refugees, an issue which will be discussed below. In the case of Lavrion, the oldest reception centre in Greece, after clearing all the bureaucratic hurdles with the Greek authorities, it was found that the refugees held there were Kurds under the control of the ‘Partiya Karkaren Kurdistan’ (PKK) leadership, who resisted giving us access to their co-ethnics (cf. Papadopoulou 2004). In the meantime, Afghans were brought to Lavrion, but were held in separate facilities with no interaction between the two groups. Serendipitously, we met a group of artists who had become interested in these refugees by accident. In Rome the artists had found Kurdish refugees painting their exile narratives from Eastern Anatolia on stones. They asked the artists to send the stones to Lavrion where their friends and relatives were kept. It was in this way that the connection between the different detention
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centres housing these Kurds was discovered by the artists and us. The artists went to Lavrion to distribute the paintings to the inmates there who were challenged to commission new narratives on stone to be sent to Albania, to Florence, and elsewhere where their friends and relatives had been dispersed after fleeing Turkey. This chance encounter allowed us to actually observe social relations between different groups of refugees by joining the artists on their visit to Lavrion and gaining entre´e. We were able to go beyond the original evaluation of service provision to address the actual living conditions, expectations, and aspirations of the inmates. Not everyone trying to conduct research in a detention centre can expect to be so fortunate, but one lesson emerging from this experience is that we often need to look for non-academic collaborators. In the particular example discussed above, the art projects and art in the detention centre apparently were considered innocuous and apolitical from the standpoint of the administrators, and as such, did provide access to the refugees and their narratives, albeit in an unconventional manner (Voutira 2005). The Participatory Approach: Accessing and Engaging Refugees in Research We eschew research among refugees that treats them as ‘subjects’ or ‘informants’ (see also Dona´, this volume). This general position statement would probably apply to most research that we would undertake, but it becomes particularly relevant in the case of research on refugee populations because of their extreme vulnerability, the complexity of their relationship with the host state, and the role of the agencies responsible for assisting and protecting them. The only way we can recommend engaging refugees, that is, getting their full cooperation, is to convince them that the research is in their own best interest either because it addresses urgent conditions of survival or because it acknowledges their presence and historicity or both. This methodological approach does not include the so-called participatory techniques such as ‘rapid rural appraisal’ and its many variants. Because our approach is so widely used in the social sciences it would be impossible to give credit to all; we will use two examples from our own research to illustrate the principle and its situational variations. Voutira’s research in the Former Soviet Union was conducted at a particularly critical period during perestroika, when the whole society had begun questioning its foundations (Voutira 1991, 2006). Like other minority groups living under the Soviet regime, the Greek deportees in Central Asia had not previously engaged in questions of self-reflection among themselves, much less with an ‘outsider’. Talking about issues concerning their deportation experiences and narratives of survival under extreme conditions of scarcity and oppression had been taboo, even within the family. The high risk of members of the family leaking information was something that everyone was socialized to observe. Every village had a statue of little ‘Comrade Pavlik’, a mythical member of the komsomol (communist youth party) whose claim
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to fame was that he denounced his father to the KGB for his subversive activities (Kelly 2005). In most societies, family memory is social memory in that members of the family are normally socialized into their own family history. In the Soviet Union, family memory was considered dangerous, especially if it did not coincide with the official norms of public memory, i.e. what was ‘allowed’ and ‘not allowed’ to be remembered both in private and in public (see Sherbakova 1992: 101–116). As a result, the researcher was confronted with a generalized state of inter-personal secrecy. Nevertheless, she was able to gain trust and engage individuals in contemplating the past through their narratives about what had happened to them. For them this was both a unique and liberating experience. It can be argued that all research which goes beyond reporting about refugees and seeks to elicit the refugee experience is critical. It can also provide a ‘therapeutic’ function, as in the process of telling, the refugee has an opportunity to try to make sense out of senseless experiences of uprooting, large scale violence, individual torture, and traumatized pasts. Research for Imposing Aid (Harrell-Bond 1986), which began as a study of humanitarian agency responses to an emergency, could not have been accomplished without engaging the refugees, not merely as voices but as researchers. In the course of the first few months, it became obvious that agencies were struggling in almost total ignorance of the characteristics of the population they were trying to assist. By that time, many refugees had become acquainted with ‘Dr. Barbara’ as a result of frequent visits to the camps and her assistance in setting up the field office for UNHCR. In one of many discussions with the large group of refugees employed by the agencies she posed the question, ‘What do these agencies need to know to do their work better?’ On the basis of the refugees’ advice a survey and questionnaire was planned which they also translated and administered. Based on an essaywriting exercise, a research team was selected from former secondary and university students in each camp. At first they were preoccupied with their own problems, but as the research proceeded, they were transformed into researchers with as much concern for the refugee situation in general as for their own position, and also into spokesmen for their people’s problems (see Harrell-Bond 1986 Annex II, p. 390, and Annex V). It should be remembered that in most refugee situations, however convincing one’s approach and the research project itself is to the refugees, there are other obstacles to gaining full cooperation. For example, refugees are unlikely to reveal the presence of political movements amongst them. Moreover, being an outsider, the researcher is likely to arouse expectations of help or be seen as a way of effecting change, that will distort data on a number of levels. Dissemination of Research The first requirement for conducting most research is to obtain funds, which may both determine the approach adopted and limit dissemination.
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Simply put, there are funds available for academic research from foundations and national research funding bodies, and funds available through governments, think tanks, NGOs, and UN agencies that set out the terms of reference and call for tenders. With the first group, it is expected that the recipient will publish research in journals or books that are subject to scholarly review. The risk with taking funds from the second set of sources is that in many cases a recipient is asked to sign away intellectual property rights, leaving to the funder to decide whether or not, and where, the ‘report’ will be disseminated.3 Some variations do exist, for example, funding from some governments simply requires that they see any product in advance of publication. But where such funding agencies demand signing over any research results to them, the author has no control over the use and cannot use the data in subsequent academic articles. Some people simply ignore the restrictions and use the data freely but they are unlikely to get a consultancy contract again with the same funding agency. Some scholars have been successful in getting consultancy contracts to do research and have refused to sign the clause. Perhaps more researchers should take advantage of this ‘room to negotiate’ that always exists in any contract. The situation for researchers studying refugees was transformed as far as UNHCR was concerned after the Kosovo crisis. Jeff Crisp was, at the time, the head of the Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit. He convinced the management in Geneva that the best way to deal with the barrage of criticisms facing UNHCR was to be transparent and publish such research (Crisp, personal communication). Since 1999 two series have been mounted on the UNHCR website: a working paper series and evaluation reports, the former usually unsolicited, the latter commissioned.4 None of this discussion addresses the substantive problem of writing and disseminating research on behalf of refugees. One of the major challenges in this context is determining what is in their best interests collectively. Or, to put it in contemporary terms, what is in the best interests of the ‘imagined community’ of refugees. From the standpoint of the researcher, a major challenge concerns the ability to translate personal narratives into theoretical debates taking place within disciplines; to paraphrase Hayden White’s claim about the challenge of the use of personal narrative by the historian, the issue is how do you transform ‘telling into knowing’ (1987: 1) in a way that the private self becomes part of a wider cultural narrative. Who are we writing for and in what language? Sholkamy (1999), in writing about the ‘revival’ of anthropology in Egypt, has identified a series of issues relating both to professional ethics and disciplinary limitations when practised in the context of Egyptian society. We have already referred to her discussion on obstacles in implementing qualitative research in Egypt. Three additional points of relevance here are brought out. First, the official national stereotype of Egyptians and the role of the anthropologist in debunking stereotypes; related to this, what language research findings are
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written in, English or Arabic; finally, the ‘monologic’ character of communicating intra-disciplinary research. As she puts it Anthropologists write for anthropologists, architects for architects, and each generally unto their own. This exclusivity, however, is compromised by interdisciplinary endeavours . . . on issues of mass concern . . . as public health campaigns and projects, urban and rural development, and ‘renewal’ and other such politicized projects (1999: 123).
We would argue that refugee studies constitutes precisely such a ‘politicized project’ which, as often repeated, necessitates inter-disciplinary research and dialogue across disciplines. The language in which research results are to be communicated also determines their audience and by implication their responses to the research findings. For example, to continue with the particular case under consideration, reporting the research finding that ‘76 per cent of children under age five do not have their bottoms wiped after defecation’ would be a major offence to Egyptian culture. As one of Sholkamy’s colleagues commented, ‘If this were ever translated into Arabic, then what would happen?’ The researchers’ decision was to edit to avoid offence, and thus compromise the research, but at the same time, they found a way to communicate the result by focusing on why this occurred in particular contexts, therefore mediating the potential sensationalism of the 76 per cent figure by pointing to the reasons people do what they do (Sholkamy personal communication). Another dimension of writing on behalf of refugees involves the transformation of research projects as researchers are faced with understanding the refugee narratives themselves. Skultans (1997; see also 1995) presents her own progressive engagement with the people she studied (1992–1993), which transformed her original modest study of neurasthenia in post-Soviet Latvia into a complex inquiry, addressing fundamental issues of violence and national destiny among these people. She began studying illness experiences with a view to distinguishing between lay and professional definitions of the illness. She advertised the research in the newspaper, asking for neurasthenia sufferers to write. ‘The letters which I received devoted less space to describing illness experiences than to recalling what was perceived as the injustices of history’ (1997: 761). The final result of her long-term research was to conclude that neurasthenia was a Soviet diagnostic code used to subsume political disaffection into medical channels. She moved on to a longer term project that engaged her interviewees in narrating their experiences of exile and return, interpreting those narratives and going on to explore the significance of ‘narrative memory’ in contextualizing these narratives both in the historical and political spheres. The opening of the KGB archives in Riga represented an opportunity to engage these people with the ‘official’ Soviet interpretation of their experiences, which, as they related, had nothing to do with their own experiences (2001: 233ff).
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The eruption of the war in former Yugoslavia in 1991 presented new challenges for researchers and their field of inquiry. A number of Yugoslav anthropologists came to question their own role in the consolidation of pre-war identities and in what Davis has called ‘the anthropology of maintenance’ (1992). The urgency of engagement with the refugees forced a number to shift their priorities and define new research agendas, and to question the foundations of their previous research that was predicated on the communist slogan of ‘peaceful co-existence and friendship of the peoples’. One modest example of research transformation narrated by Povrzanovic (1993) concerns the change of her own Ph.D. research from the original proposal ‘Gathering at Open-Air Places in Town Centres’ to ‘War and Fears: Strategies of Adaptation’. This topic seemed more relevant than or at least not as sarcastic as the former in the light of the new circumstances (Povrzanovic 1993: 7). War generally transformed the agendas of most research institutes in the Former Yugoslav state (Kirin and Povrzanovic 1996). The war in Kosovo was the impetus for starting an inter-disciplinary programme from countries neighbouring Kosovo called ‘Urgent Anthropology’ (Zhelyazkova 2004). All the above examples suggest that one of the major predicaments concerning the dissemination of research is accessing the audience. In a recent engaging critique on the role of anthropology in public debate, human rights and development concerns, Eriksen (2006) notes the resistance of anthropologists to simplifying their research results and making them accessible to a wider audience. As he puts it in the first line of the book, ‘Anthropology should have changed the world, yet the subject is almost invisible in the public sphere outside the academy’ (emphasis added). He goes on to say, After the Second World War [when the number of anthropologists greatly increased] anthropologists have increasingly been talking to each other, the argument goes, simply because they no longer had to speak to others (2006: 23).
He refers to ‘altercentric writing’ in identifying convoluted prose and stylistic norms that guide social scientific writing in general (ibid.: 115–117), which act as a barrier to public appreciation. He gives a personal example of writing for a Swedish newspaper in order to substantiate his point about accessible popularization. The critique is addressed to the discipline of anthropology specifically, but it has much wider relevance for social scientists engaged with refugee research which imposes its own criteria of urgency and immediacy of dissemination.
Concluding Remarks As noted in the beginning of the paper, there are three aspects of our ‘invisible actors’ that are constitutive of their invisibility: the refugee as a persona, a social role that underlines in psychological terms specific
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experiences of fear and suffering; the refugee as a person understood from the standpoint of individual human agency which entails patterns of flight undertaken under duress; and the public perceptions of refugees often entailing the dehistorization of their experiences. It is with respect to all three of them, that the refugee voice has become distorted and progressively inaudible (Malkki 1996). The examples of refugee engagement with which we began this paper were those of refugees as persons with skills, capacities, and histories that contributed to their host societies and the creation of the refugee regime itself. It is a sad story to acknowledge that today the term ‘refugee’ signals a burden, a victim, and a threat. In the preceding sections we have referred to different barriers that undermine accessibility to refugees. Part of this exploration involved the intentional strategy to re-enact the challenges confronting researchers in search of refugees. Because, it is in fact the refugees who are the subject matter of this paper: the ‘invisible actors’. The challenge for researchers is to identify and bypass the obstacles that stand between them and the refugees. Our discussion has sought to mark and occasionally suggest ways to bypass the obstacles that emerge in the process of accessing refugees. We have also identified a regional difference between refugee locations of confinement: refugees in camps in the south and detention centres in the north. Although the conditions of incarceration in both cases appear to be similar, the differences are equally important to note. For one thing, in the north, the term ‘refugee’ is progressively less used in the media and in policy discourse. The preferred terms adopted are ‘irregular migrants’ and ‘asylum seekers’. It is with respect to both these bureaucratic categories that detention centres exist. Given the increasing restrictionism in the north, those who are recognized as refugees should be considered heroes because they managed to overcome all the obstacles set in their way to the acquisition of status. The situation in the south is very different, especially for groups who have come to identify themselves with the collective experience of having been confined to a refugee camp. Under certain conditions, as described by Malkki’s well-known work in Mishamo camp in Tanzania in the 1980s, ‘People tended to see their refugee status as a positive productive status and as a profoundly meaningful historical identity’ (1996: 381). According to the refugees, their status was to be transmitted genealogically until such time as they could return home to Burundi. Yet for most contemporary camp inhabitants, preoccupations with security and daily survival tend to obfuscate such a moral vision of return. Particularly since the 1990s, life in refugee camps has been characterized by such high levels of insecurity, both physical and material, that it would be difficult to defend a view of a moral community within them (Verdirame and Harrell-Bond 2005). One final point to address is the issue of dissemination, which as we saw, raises its own ethical concerns. Malkki pinpoints some of the epistemological barriers and cultural misunderstandings that occur in the context of
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researchers encountering refugee authorities. She describes the types of systematic ambiguities that undermine the capacity to communicate directly on a topic of common concern when it comes to translating the language of refugees into the language of project evaluations and development discourse (1996: 383). Our suggestion to engage refugees in the process of research is not new, yet the issue of how we gain their trust to speak on their behalf in such circles where they unfortunately have no access remains the ultimate Herculean labour. 1. Whenever a foreigner is involved in an application, it is forwarded to the state security for approval. State security, it appears, is mainly concerned that foreigners do not have access to Egyptian subjects. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the only research projects by foreigners to be approved are those in which all interviews are conducted by Egyptian assistants. 2. When academics do consultancy research, the sponsoring agency provides the terms of reference and asks the consultant to sign over all intellectual property rights (see Harrell-Bond and Voutira 1993). 3. The temptation to apply for consultancies to conduct research is related to availability, but also to the time (and obviously funding) needed to write a proper proposal for independent research. The centralization of funding within the European Union has introduced a variety of criteria that have superseded our simplistic distinction between independent academic research and consultancies. 4. One of these, Kuhlman (2002), is an evaluation of the situation of Liberians in Ivory Coast which is highly critical of UNHCR’s policy there. The organization has also commissioned ‘beneficiary-based’ evaluation, e.g. Kaiser (2002). See also Crisp (2003).
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