Refugee politics in the Middle East and the Governance of Syria's mass displacement

Abstract

Syria’s neighbourhood currently hosts almost 6 million forcibly displaced from Syria. In this context, supranational actors have provided assistance to both refugee and host communities so as to help Syria’s neighbours cope with the refugee quandary. This seminar will review the overarching policy legacies  characterizing refugee governance in the Middle East. It will then explore how state actors namely Lebanon and Jordan and key supranational institutional bodies such as the European Union (EU) and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) have collaborated but also clashed on the refugee issue, generating ‘governance dilemmas’. The conclusion will show the implications of these dilemmas for the global refugee regime and for the power dynamics in the transregional Mediterranean system.

About the speaker

Dr. Tamirace Fakhoury is an associate professor in Political Sciences and International Affairs in the Department of Social Sciences, and the associate director of the Institute of Social Justice and Conflict Resolution (ISJCR). She has furthermore taught at the summer sessions at the University of California in Berkeley between 2012 and 2016. In Fall 2018, Fakhoury will be a visiting fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg/ Centre for Global Cooperation Research where she will be carrying out a project on the European Union’s role in the multi-governance of displacement. Her core research and publication areas are: power sharing in divided societies, migration dynamics and governance, Arab states’ coping mechanisms with forced migration, and the role of immigrant communities and diasporas in political transitions. She is member of the core coordination team of the Global Migration Policy Associates in Geneva.