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The challenge of increasing diversity and inclusion in global conversations about forced migration is widely recognised. Research and policy decision-making have tended to be led by actors who rarely originate from or represent the voices of people most directly affected…

Refugee researchers are typically included in research projects as assistants and data collectors rather than core or lead researchers. This can lead to exploitation and power imbalances between insider and outsider researchers in individual research projects and in the field…

Over the past decade there has been increasing attention to tensions between refugees and host communities, especially in contexts of protracted displacement. UNHCR has long recognised that mass displacement can have negative impacts on receiving communities. The 2016 New York…

Lebanon has recently experienced multiple crises: the COVID-19 pandemic, an unprecedented currency collapse, nationwide protests against a corrupt sectarian state, and the Beirut Port explosion in August 2020. State and humanitarian actors have therefore become increasingly concerned about inter-communal tensions…

In August 2020, a massive explosion tore through north-eastern Beirut, damaging tens of thousands of homes and buildings. As humanitarian assistance poured into the affected neighbourhoods, there was widespread public scrutiny about how aid was targeted and distributed. Amidst a…

Policies should aim to realise a people or a group’s aspirations. However, in politically complex institutional environments, the design and adoption of policies may lose sight of common goals. Since the 1990s, Kenya has enforced a strict policy of refugee…

In many contexts of large-scale protracted displacement, the distribution of humanitarian aid can become highly contentious, especially where local people face their own economic challenges and vulnerabilities but do not qualify for refugee assistance. In order to counter this resentment,…

With the increased attention paid to social cohesion in refugee policy, there is greater need for robust methods of measuring cohesion among displaced and displacement-affected communities. At the project level, organisations that have adopted social cohesion goals into their programming…

The concepts of reconciliation and social cohesion are intimately linked: reconciliation is a process of “recreating right relationships”, with oneself and with others[1], and social cohesion is the glue that holds these relationships together. Both entail a complex and at…