The age of environmental migration is upon us, and the world is woefully unprepared for it (ā¦) areas threatened range from Bangladesh and Nigeria to New York City and Washington, DC (ā¦) this is a global problem threatening developed and developing countries alike.5
A Global Surge of Innovation
Even if you have some prior knowledge about refugees or about oral history, this book will show you both through lenses that may be relatively new to you. Despite ā or because of ā the unprecedented numbers displaced now, there is actually an exciting climate of innovation and lateral thinking around refugee issues. As Oxford Universityās Professor Alexander Betts puts it: āThe humanitarian system is at a crossroads. With growing needs and finite resources, creative solutions are urgently neededā.6 In one of his recent reports, part one is called āThe Rethinkā (with sections on āRethinking Ethicsā, āRethinking Assistanceā and so on) and part two is called āThe Remakeā.7 Overall, the message from the worldās leading experts, both at design and delivery levels, is that:
- āThe refugee system was created 50 years ago, and is nowhere near fit for purpose in a fast changing, globalized worldā.8
- Only new relationships and partnerships can tackle the scale and complexity of the problem.
- Every single person in the world ā with any skill or idea in any field ā is invited to respond to this need with their own creative innovations.
- Only a whole society, 360-degree approach can work, both locally and globally.
- Only deeply participatory approaches will work, i.e. listening to service-users and community members, and involving them in designing services and policies; top-down solutions wonāt fit.
So the UN ā together with all the major agencies designing and delivering refugee services ā have put out a formal call to the whole world, inviting everyone to contribute their ideas to a movement called āHumanitarian Innovationā, which they consider to be the only way forward.9 This book is reaching out to you as part of that call, giving you tools to respond in your own unique way, wherever you are.
Consider, for instance, the creativity that refugees themselves are showing in their use of the simple, free resource that is language. Refugees have realized that replacing one tired, overused word with a fresh one can sometimes unleash huge new resources. They are teaching us that one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective improvements we can make to the refugee crisis is to start by changing the story, simply by changing our vocabulary. For instance, there are networks of Syrians online who now refer to themselves not as refugees but as Syrian expatriates. (On the spectrum of all English-language terms for those who live in a foreign country, this is the most high-status, while refugee is surely the lowest. For instance, āexpatriateā is the word the British have always proudly used to refer to themselves only, when they choose to live abroad.) Meanwhile, some host communities have learned to swap the term refugee for newcomers. Those resettled in Berlin are often referred to now as New Berliners, a term replete with all the resources these new residents can bring to the old city. Refugees receiving asylum from Canada are proudly welcomed by the Canadian government as New Canadians. The term inherently clarifies too that the former refugee must now adopt the shared values and responsibilities of Canadian citizenship: they canāt import with them a set of incompatible values from their old country. Those have to be traded in, in exchange for their new Canadian identity.
The field of migration studies too has improvised some important new ways of looking at people and place that are not just academic jargon. They include concepts like the ātransnationalā, the ātranslocalā, ālocalizationā and even āglocalizationā. Other new perspectives include the āNo-Bordersā movement, āthinking through oceansā, and concepts like the āRefugee Nationā and the āRefugee Economyā. We will unpack all these ideas as we move through our chapters. For instance, the ātransnationalā is a perspective that ignores national boundaries to trace instead the connections that cross or transcend them, such as travel-routes, export-routes and other lines of international communications and relationships. The ātransnationalā is clearly an indispensable perspective when describing the networks, movements and relationships of migrant diasporas, which can stretch right around the globe, well beyond a little country of origin.10
The ātranslocalā is a subset of the ātransnationalā approach.11 The translocal zooms in on the tight weave of connections that may link up two localities that are far apart geographically. An example could be the rural parts of the island of Sicily off southern Italy and the Bronx area of downtown New York where so many Sicilian migrants settled across the twentieth century. Though so far apart both in distance and in landscape style, the two localities are densely bound through links of migration, family relationships, regular journeys in both directions, gifting relationships and exchanges of money, as well as through the resulting ties of language, culture and collective memory. Another example of translocality would be the intense relationship between the tiny village port of Lampadusa in southern Italy and the sub-Saharan African villages, whose youth, seeking a better economic future in Europe, are dumped in their thousands upon Lampadusa by people smugglers.
Another example of a potent reuse of language is the online movement called āNot just a refugeeā.12 On a related website, forcibly displaced persons upload their photo and an account of their professional background, offering their skills to the world under the banner āIām not a refugee, Iām ā¦ a musicianā, ā...
