Between Ghurba and Umma: Mapping Sudanese Muslim Moralities Across National and Islamic Space

“Muhammad1” is a thoughtful and dedicated youth worker for the local council of a small coastal town in the United Kingdom, where he has been an especially important role model for young refugees from the Horn of Africa, including Sudan and Somalia. Muhammad, a member of Sudan’s dominant Muslim Arab professional class, claimed asylum in the United Kingdom in 1993 along with many other Sudanese.2 After establishing himself professionally, Muhammad applied to the UK Home Office for his wife and four children back in Sudan to join him in the United Kingdom in the late 1990s. Over the next few years, Muhammad experienced a rise in family tension and a deterioration in his marital relationship. “W’Allahi (by God), she was always nagging me,” Muhammad said of his wife—talking back to him, instructing him on his responsibilities, and taking decisions without his approval. In particular, Muhammad mentioned his anger at his wife’s unilateral act of sending money to her own uncle in Sudan without Muhammad’s permission. “This is too much,” he complained. “It is not her right to do this!” Adding to Muhammad’s woes, his tween and teen children were not behaving “properly.” The three girls preferred to wear clothes that were popular with British youth but that did not necessarily meet the ideal of modest dress promoted by many first-generation Muslim Sudanese. The boy braided his hair in the style of his Afro-Caribbean classmates

Concept Note -- Draft

A concept note which gives insight into the mission and operations of the Integration and Belonging Hub

Mobilizing home for long term displacement: a critical reflection on the durable solutions

With long term displacement becoming the ‘new normal’, the three ‘durable solutions’ of local integration, resettlement and return, are increasingly unsuitable for offering social, economic and cultural means for refugees to rebuild their lives and livelihoods. This article retreads some common observations and critiques of the durable solutions, while attempting to find a new vocabulary to help address the conundrum of a refugee protection model that tries to integrate rights and needs. There have been other attempts to revise the durable solutions, introduce new solutions —often acknowledging refugee mobility—or revert to informality as an alternative. However, such attempts have not sufficiently taken into account the extent of what refugees do. The consequences are an ‘integration lite’ where people may be able to survive, but their refugee status is not ended, nor is their refugee predicament closer to being addressed. The article suggests a new framework--constellations of home--that can be a significant bridging tool for the gap between rights and needs and that incorporates the static and ahistorical notion of the durable solutions as well as the mobile strategies of refugees in long-term displacement

Bridging and breaking silos: Transformational governance of the migration–sustainability nexus

Sustainability and migration are typically treated as discrete policy spheres in inter-national, national, and local fora, separated in governance structures and institutions. This results in policy incoherence that hinders just transitions toward more sustainable societies cognizant of mobile realities. This explorative effort identifies the (dis)connec-tions between policy domains using data collected on how the sustainability–migration nexus is governed in four countries with a special emphasis on urban areas: Belgium, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States. Results of 73 interviews show that migration and sustainability actors find it challenging to see how they could be working together and that migrants are rarely conceived of as sustainability actors and/or targeted populations of sustainability policy. Despite the cross- sectoral nature of sustainability, it appears that migration and sustainability are sequestered into silos that hinder collabo-rative actions. Lamenting the existence of silos is not enough to encourage new lines of thinking or practice in how sustainability is governed; therefore, we examine the evidence to ascertain current barriers blocking synergetic governance and the opportunities for change perceived by respondents via three critical elements of transformations toward sustainability: structural, systemic, and enabling conditions. We argue that for sustain-ability transitions to happen, a wider set of societal actors needs to be included from policy intention to action, but that this transformation may require more than policy integration via horizontal coordination. It demands reflexivity and pluralistic pathways that close vertical gaps between national and municipal levels and diminish structural inequalities as they intersect with migration type and status

Middle East. Developing DFID’s Policy Approach to Refugees

A Research Consultancy by the Refugee Studies Centre (Oxford University) for the Conflict and Humanitarian Affairs Department, Department For International Development, United Kingdo

The migration-sustainability paradox: Transformations in mobile worlds

Migration represents a major transformation of the lives of those involved and has been transformative of societies and economies globally. Yet models of sustainability transformations do not effectively incorporate the movement of populations. There is an apparent migration-sustainability paradox: migration plays a role as a driver of unsustainability as part of economic globalisation, yet simultaneously represents a transformative phenomenon and potential force for sustainable development. We propose criteria by which migration represents an opportunity for sustainable development: increasing aggregate well-being; reduced inequality leading to diverse social benefits; and reduced aggregate environmental burden. We detail the dimensions of the transformative potential of migration and develop a generic framework for migration-sustainability linkages based on environmental, social, and economic dimensions of sustainability, highlighting identity and social transformation dimensions of migration. Such a model overcomes the apparent paradox by explaining the role of societal mobility in achieving sustainable outcomes.Migration, transformation, sustainability (MISTY