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Transnational blindness: International institutions and refugees’ cross-border activities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 April 2021

Alexander Betts ,
Naohiko Omata Open the ORCID record for Naohiko Omata [Opens in a new window]  and
Olivier Sterck
Alexander Betts
Affiliation:
Department of International Development, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Naohiko Omata*
Affiliation:
Department of International Development, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
Olivier Sterck
Affiliation:
Department of International Development, University of Oxford, United Kingdom
*
*Corresponding author. Email: naohiko.omata@qeh.ox.ac.uk
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Abstract

The Dollo Ado refugee camps, located close to the Ethiopian-Somali border, have been a major focus for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR)'s attempts to build livelihoods for refugees and the host community. The context presents an analytical puzzle: despite the importance of cross-border activity to refugees’ socioeconomic lives, such transnational activity has been institutionally invisible to and hindered by the international agencies seeking to assist them. The article explores how and why refugees’ cross-border activities have been systematically ignored by international institutions. As a theoretical starting point, it draws upon the post-development literature, and notably the work of James Ferguson, which explores how international institutions frequently misunderstand the agency and strategies of their subject populations. However, contra Ferguson's predominantly Foucauldian methodological and epistemologically approach, the article adopts a mixed methods approach, and emphasises the agency of aid workers, bureaucratic politics, and political economy in its account of the disjuncture between international institutions’ state-centric livelihoods programmes and refugees’ own cross-border economic strategies.

Keywords

RefugeesUNHCREthiopiaHumanitarianismTransnationalismDollo Ado
Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 47 , Special Issue 5: The Multiple Origins of IR , December 2021 , pp. 714 - 742
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association

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68 Barnett, ‘Humanitarianism, paternalism and the UNHCR’.

69 UNHCR, Briefing Note on Melkadida.