Helping Familiar Strangers

Louise Olliff

Description

Who helps in situations of forced displacement? How and why do they get involved?

In Helping Familiar Strangers, Louise Olliff focuses on one type of humanitarian group, refugee diaspora organizations (RDOs), to explore the complicated impulses, practices, and relationships between these activists and the "familiar strangers" they try to help. By documenting findings from ethnographic research and interviews with resettled and displaced persons, RDO representatives, and humanitarian professionals in Australia, Switzerland, Thailand, and Indonesia, Olliff reveals that former refugees are actively involved in helping people in situations of forced displacement and that individuals with lived experience of forced displacement have valuable knowledge, skills, and networks that can be drawn on in times of humanitarian crisis.

We live in a world where humanitarians have varying motivations, capacities, and ways of helping those in need, and Helping Familiar Strangers confirms that RDOs and similar groups are an important part of the tapestry of care that people turn to when seeking protection far from home.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
List of Abbreviations
1. Humanitarianism and the international refugee regime
2. The ecology of refugee diaspora humanitarianism
3. Forces that compel
4. Modalities: governance and economies
5. Modalities: mobility, (in)visibility, knowledge, and networks
6. Implications and imaginings
7. Helping familiar strangers
Epilogue
Appendix
Bibliography

Sujets

• Refugees
• Ethnic Studies
• Social Science
• Sociologie, société et politique
• International humanitarian law
• Australia
• Migration

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 06 décembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253063588
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

HELPING FAMILIAR STRANGERS
WORLDS IN CRISIS: REFUGEES, ASYLUM, AND FORCED MIGRATION
Elizabeth Cullen Dunn and Georgina Ramsay, editors
HELPING FAMILIAR STRANGERS
Refugee Diaspora Organizations and Humanitarianism

LOUISE OLLIFF
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS
This book is a publication of
Indiana University Press
Office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells Library 350
1320 East 10th Street
Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.org
2022 by Louise Olliff
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
First printing 2022
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-0-253-06355-7 (hardback)
ISBN 978-0-253-06356-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-253-06357-1 (ebook)
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction
List of Abbreviations
1. Humanitarianism and the International Refugee Regime
2. The Ecology of Refugee Diaspora Humanitarianism
3. Forces That Compel
4. Modalities: Governance and Economies
5. Modalities: Mobility, (In)Visibility, Knowledge, and Networks
6. Implications and Imaginings
7. Helping Familiar Strangers
Epilogue
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
PREFACE
WHILE MANY OF THE WORDS in the following chapters initially found form in a doctoral thesis, this book is really the culmination of nearly two decades of work. Prior to starting a doctorate at the University of Melbourne in 2014, I had worked for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in Australia on refugee policy, research, and advocacy for over ten years; I had been an executive committee member of one refugee diaspora organization (RDO) for five years; and I had long-standing links with many other RDOs through my professional and volunteer networks. On a personal level, my husband arrived in Australia as a refugee in the 1990s, and the years I have spent with him, his family, his friends, and his community have greatly informed my understanding of the everyday experiences of forced displacement. In short, I was already embedded in the field prior to starting a PhD, and my positionality had implications for how I went about the research that underlies this book.
To begin with, my decision to pursue doctoral research was very much informed by a sense of injustice that the RDOs that I was frequently coming across in my work and personal life seemed to be invisible or count for little to the organizations and institutions that claim a mandate to work for refugees . The invisibility of RDOs was apparent, for instance, when I traveled to Geneva in 2015 for both my work with the Refugee Council of Australia and for PhD fieldwork. My work role at the time was to support Australian NGO and refugee community advocates participating in a series of formal meetings between NGOs and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). This coordination role gave me access and opportunities to observe discussions involving both senior representatives of humanitarian organizations and refugee diaspora advocates who were among the Australian delegation.
One meeting I participated in involved senior representatives of UNHCR s Africa Bureau and five delegates from Australian NGOs. Among these delegates was a refugee support agency senior manager, Dr. Melika Sheikh-Eldin, who had herself arrived in Australia as a refugee originally from Eritrea. At the meeting, Dr. Sheikh-Eldin asked UNHCR for an update on plans to support young Eritreans accessing education in the notoriously underresourced Shegerab refugee camp in eastern Sudan. She was told that due to issues with external security threats and Sudanese authorities, NGOs were constrained in what they could do at Shegerab at that time. Dr. Sheikh-Eldin responded by remarking that an organization in Melbourne-an RDO-had recently raised funds and built three permanent classrooms at a site designated as a school in Shegerab and that those in the Eritrean diaspora might be willing to help. A UNHCR representative dismissed this claim, saying, That s not possible; the school must be outside the camp. But I knew, as others did, that it was inside the camp. I knew because one of the people who traveled to Shegerab to negotiate and oversee the construction of this school building was an Eritrean Australian man from Melbourne whom I knew very well. I had spoken to him in some detail about this project, both while he was in Sudan and after his return. I had seen videos taken from a car window that showed the boundaries of the camp and the road that led to the dusty school site, with its ugly cinder-block building, newly cemented. I knew it was possible for a humanitarian organization to get things done inside this camp; it might just be a different sort of organization to the ones that this representative of UNHCR had in mind.
The feeling of injustice that led me to embark on doctoral research was fueled by my desire to make visible the breathtaking generosity and acts of kindness that I had seen time and time again in the actions of those involved in RDOs and to counter the jarring narrative of refugees as burden or refugees as threat that so dominates public discourse in Australia, as it does in many parts of the world. I started out wanting to be a stronger advocate and ally for RDOs and hoping that I could do this by contributing some rigorous research to support their cause. I lay out my position here as an activist with an investment in the field of refugee diaspora humanitarianism because I want to acknowledge the effect that this had on how I undertook this research. But I also want to suggest that my positionality-my embeddedness and investment in RDOs-was fundamental to being able to access this multisited, rapidly changing, and at times elusive field and that I actively strove to be self-reflexive-to understand the light I cast on the field and to dampen my desire to see the world in a particular way (Fine 1993, 286).
For researchers undertaking study of a field in which they are deeply immersed, Pierre Bourdieu reminds us that it is with difficulty that genuinely scientific research can be undertaken because the beliefs of the field ( what goes without saying ) are shared (2010). Yet Bourdieu does not diminish the potential of scholarly endeavor for someone immersed in the field of study, affirming the value of prior knowledge as long as it is subjected to examination and disclosure to self and others. Bourdieu s own research in the field in which he was immersed in Homo Academicus (1988), for example, shows how reflexivity and a relentless pursuit of empirical rigor can result in valuable insights into a particular social world. In terms of how one is reflexive in these circumstances, a Bourdieuian approach speaks of a painful amputation of the enchanted beliefs one holds (Bourdieu et al. 2010, 6). For me, I may have been (and still am) invested in the idea that refugee diaspora humanitarianism is a good thing, and it was a somewhat painful process to disinvest myself of this belief and to allow myself to be subject to the gravitational forces that pull you into a social field (Bourdieu 1993, cited in Hage 2005, 465) and reveal a much messier reality.
Being embedded and invested was significant because it gave me access to a range of people, networks, and situations in which RDOs were working that I may otherwise have struggled to access. Without having spent years developing relationships with people involved in RDOs, I doubt I would have been able to organize the number and variety of interviews with RDOs that I did or to pursue more philosophical and challenging discussions with individuals with whom I had stronger connections. Without my affiliation with the Refugee Council of Australia, my ability to access international discussions on refugee protection-particularly the more intimate ones involving senior representatives of humanitarian organizations and refugee diaspora advocates-would likewise have been much different. Indeed, George Marcus provides an insightful discussion about how access and objectivity for an embedded ethnographer undertaking multisited research can lead to productive and unique insights. He writes, In certain sites, one seems to be working with, and in others one seems to be working against, changing sets of subjects. This condition of shifting personal positions in relation to one s subjects and other active discourses in a field that overlap with one s own generates a definite sense of doing more than just ethnography, and it is this quality that provides a sense of being an activist for and against positioning in even the most self-perceived apolitical fieldworker (1995, 113-114).
This description of having to position oneself differently depending on the site rang true in my own experience of undertaking fieldwork. When talking to or observing people involved in RDOs in Australia, humanitarian professionals in Geneva, or people whom RDOs were trying to help in Indonesia and Thailand, I was acutely aware of my own positioning on the question of refugee diaspora humanitarianism. My position shifted as I sought to understand and connect to people in different sites. In Thailand, when I met with refugees who were engaging with RDOs, I was confronted by their views that those in the diaspora were not doing enough. I was forced to reevaluate my own belief in and position as an advocate for refugee diaspora humanitarianism and to see my own position as ultimately mutable. This, I hope, led to a richer and deeper exploration of the complexities underl