Resettlement is receiving greater prominence in the context of the recent surge in numbers of refugees. This traditional ‘durable solution’ – the managed movement of refugees to a safe third country – already affects many thousands of refugees every year, the communities they move into, the people they leave behind and the agencies that work with them. With the prospect that numbers will continue to rise, this is an opportunity both to try new approaches and to re-examine old ones.
This issue of FMR looks at some of the modalities and challenges of resettlement in order to shed light on debates such as how - and how well – resettlement is managed, whether it is a good use of the funds and energy it uses, and whether it is a good solution for refugees. Case-studies draw in particular on some of the countries that resettle the largest numbers of refugees.
While this issue of FMR was going to press, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order indefinitely banning all Syrian refugees from entering the US and suspending the country’s broader refugee programme for 120 days. After this the programme would be much smaller, with the total number of refugees resettled in the US in 2017 more than halved – to 50,000 from 110,000. As the US has the largest refugee resettlement programme in the world by far, this would have a significant impact on global resettlement.
This issue of FMR also contains a mini-feature on Post-deportation risks and monitoring and a selection of articles on other forced migration topics.
Formats and languages: The full issue and all the individual articles in this issue are online in html, pdf and audio formats at www.fmreview.org/resettlement. FMR 54 and its accompanying digest (which provides introductions to all articles plus QR/web links) will be available free of charge online and in print in English, Arabic, French and Spanish.
If you would like printed copies of either the magazine or the digest, in any language, please email us at fmr@qeh.ox.ac.uk.
Please disseminate this issue through your networks, mention it on Twitter and Facebook, and add it to resources lists.
We would like to thank Michael Collyer of Sussex University and Jeff Crisp of the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University for their assistance as advisors on the feature theme of this issue. We are also grateful to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, RefugePoint, the Government of the Principality of Liechtenstein, the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs and UNHCR’s Division of International Protection for their financial support of this issue. All FMR donors are listed on page 99.
Forthcoming issues and feature themes:
- FMR 55: Shelter in displacement (due out June 2017)
- FMR 56: Latin America and the Caribbean (due out October 2017)
- FMR 57: Non-signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention (due out February 2018)
For details, including article submission deadlines, see www.fmreview.org/forthcoming.
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Marion Couldrey and Maurice Herson
Editors, Forced Migration Review