Chapter 3 argues that the successful prosecution of the war relied on civilians living under Allied occupation. In 1917, refugee camps and social services emerged as tools of humanitarian aid and administration to help secure Allied authority. It analyzes the administration of the camps and auxiliary services alongside writings of refugees, eye-witnesses and aid workers who learned to live with a war that wreaked havoc on the local economy, social services and regional governance.

Why do people leave home and seek asylum? Conflict, war, and persecution, living in fragile states, being trafficked, and climate change may all play a part.Global statistics of forced displacement are reviewed.

Types of journeys and attendant experiences are considered, and reasons for how and why people may come to the United Kingdom.

We then review developments in international refugee policy and law, and problems with the current approach, including the role of socioeconomic status, the difficulties in how initiatives are funded, and the lack of long-term perspectives.There are barriers to resettlement in wealthier third countries.Restrictive and punitive asylum policies have a high human cost.There are limits to international cooperation.

This all matters to health professionals because understanding someone’s context explains much about individual behaviour.It enables relevant enquiries to be made, and appropriate help offered. Some possible misapprehensions are considered.

Shifting gears toward a social history of decolonization in the metropole, Chapter 2 looks at the housing provided for the refugee-like groups of returnees that depended on public welfare to put a roof over their heads. Bringing to light both the achievements and the limits of the state’s deliberate policy of integration, the chapter argues that the aid provided to the returnees served as laboratory for building a new welfare state aligned with the Western European model that Portuguese elites wished to espouse. Zooming in on the living conditions of residents, it also shows, however, that a lack of adequate facilities and resources frequently led to considerable hardships for the returnees. What is more, state-fostered integration was starkly unequal and tendentially racialized: Migrants who were non-Portuguese, nonwhite, or both were overrepresented in the housing facilities that offered the most difficult conditions. The success story of integration that dominates some academic and most popular accounts of the returnees’ history so far is in urgent need of qualification.

This chapter examines forced encampment litigation in Kenya. Refugees living in urban areas resisting facing the prospect of relocation to a refugee camp, as well as refugees living in camps seeking permission to leave have initiated these cases. I examine how judges use human rights in the Kenyan Constitution and rights in the Refugee Convention as prisms to articulate the functions and nature of refuge. I show that Kenyan courts have understood refuge as a process as well as a human rights remedy that must allow refugees to live a liveable life in the present, have hope for the future and heal from past trauma. Judges arrive at these sophisticated understandings of refuge when they identify and reflect on irreducible aspects of refugeehood. However, in more recent cases, Kenyan judges instead focus on the uniqueness of the protection from refuge litigant. This results in conceptualising refuge as a limited commodity that, akin to welfare, must be given to those most in need or most deserving. Nevertheless, a feminist analysis indicates that in identifying the anomalous refugee, Kenyan courts have addressed protection concerns relating to gender, age and disability in a sensitive and nuanced manner.

This chapter examines the trajectory of a research project on militant organizations’ adaptation that began as a “classic” case comparison and was “re-cased” into an explicitly network-based comparison of intra-organizational networks. In doing so, it outlines a method of comparison focused primarily on roles, relations, and emergence rather than on organizational form or behavior. The chapter starts by discussing the project’s initial research design, which proposed a study of militant organizations across three Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon that largely adhered to Millian logic. The project dedicated extensive research time to establishing a pre-invasion “control” by seeking to demonstrate pre-shock organizational uniformity across the communities under study. However, the evidence gathered often complicated or contradicted logics of control, independence, causality, and identification that undergird dominant approaches to comparison. Rather, it repeatedly indicated that complex, relational, often contingent interactions among geographic environment, communities’ interpretations of violence, and organizational structures influenced outcomes of interest. The chapter leverages this experience to establish core tenets of a broader approach to studying organizational change in comparative perspective.

There are several large-scale violent conflicts in Africa, which affect some but by no means all African countries. The vast majority of these conflicts are intra-state conflicts; inter-state conflicts rarely occur. This chapter explains why this is the case after having explored the only two large-scale inter-state wars in Africa since decolonization: the war between Uganda and Tanzania as well as the one between Ethiopia and Eritrea. Turning to intra-state conflicts, several reasons for the outbreak of wars – often described as “new wars” – are explained as are the reasons that motivate some to become rebels. The greed vs. grievance argument plays an important role here. Thereafter, the two post-colonial genocides – in Rwanda and Darfur – are scrutinized alongside a discussion of why genocide occur. Being of unprecedented magnitude, “Africa’s Great War”, a war complex in the Great Lakes Region (1996-2006), is also analyzed as is the situation of and in refugee camps that are often a place of insecurity themselves.

The case of Palestinians and Palestinian refugees from Syria (PRS) in Jordan raises the question of how a host society addresses transgenerational displacement. This essay examines how the policy of nonforcible return has been carried out in practice. It argues that the security aspect of refugee assistance has determined the mechanisms that facilitate integration.Security in this context needs to be viewed in two ways: in terms of the state’s perception of the movement of refugees through the borders of the state and the boundaries between the camp and the cities, and from the perspective of the refugees’ personal security, in terms of welfare and socioeconomic stability. The essay analyzes the significance of identity in Jordan. As the Palestinian community has steadily grown since 1948, a schism has emerged between the East Bank Jordanian and the Palestinian-Jordanian communities as the Jordanian population became the minority community. The essay considers how far the insecurity experienced by the host state impacts its refugee policies and whether the country can sustain a policy of integration once the postwar period arrives.

In this chapter the framework developed in Chapter 3 is applied to the UNHCR practice of administering refugee camps. I discuss how the UNHCR thus exercises power over individuals, both directly through its personel and through its so-called implementing partners. The sources of the UNHCR’s human rights obligations are also identified. Thereafter, I turn to assessing the applicable accountability mechanisms: the UNHCR Inspector General’s Office, the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services, and domestic courts. Neither of these mechanisms provide sufficient accountability.