Doctoral Dissertation Research: Community-Based Aid Responses to Refugee Crises

Brown University, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the United Nations has increasingly acknowledged the prolonged nature of refugee crises, and the need for humanitarian solutions that not only offer emergency relief to refugees but also address their long-term needs. Accordingly, it has called for a new "Community-Based Approach" to humanitarian aid, which integrates refugees in their neighboring countries through welfare programs and infrastructural support. The Syrian refugee crisis, however, throws this new approach in grave doubt. The sheer scale of civilian displacement, now reaching 4.3 million people, makes integration immeasurably difficult for countries neighboring Syria. With the mass exodus of refugees, it is now vital to understand how the refugee crisis is being managed in asylum countries. This project, which trains a graduate student in how to conduct rigorous empirically-grounded scientific fieldwork, explores how humanitarian organizations negotiate the challenges of community-based aid programs in response to refugee crises. Malay Firoz, under the supervision of Dr. Catherine Lutz of Brown University, will examine how humanitarian organizations implement community-based aid programs in Jordan and Lebanon. As small developing countries, both Jordan and Lebanon are struggling to cope with the sudden influx of refugees, and their governments are anxious to prevent refugees from integrating. However, while the relatively stable Jordanian government has strictly regulated its borders and contained refugees in camps, domestic turmoil has prevented the Lebanese government from doing the same. The two countries therefore provide ideal locations for comparing how humanitarian organizations frame their official roles and responsibilities in different political contexts, how aid workers on the ground adopt or transform these framings in the course of everyday aid work, and what refugees expect from humanitarian organizations. In order to pursue these questions, the researcher will conduct twelve months of ethnographic fieldwork based in Amman and Beirut. He will employ a mixed-methods approach, including textual analysis of policy statements and institutional charters, semi-structured interviews with UN officials, aid workers and refugees, as well as participant observation in humanitarian field offices and refugee camps. The comparative findings from this research will provide insight into the effectiveness of community-based aid programs amidst large-scale displacement, and help humanitarian policy-makers design programs specifically suited to different contexts.