Putting safeguarding commitments into practice
In 2002, a report released by UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) and Save the Children shocked the world by revealing the abuse of large numbers of children in refugee camps in West Africa by aid workers. The following year, the…
From the editors
We each live according to our own personal code of ethics but what moral principles guide our work? The feature theme articles in this issue debate many of the ethical questions that confront us in programming, research, safeguarding and volunteering,…
Big data, little ethics: confidentiality and consent
People who experience violence or exclusion often share their traumatic experiences with service providers while receiving care – care that is most effective when individuals can be open and honest and know that what they share will remain confidential. In…
New technologies in migration: human rights impacts
Experiments with new technologies in migration management are increasing: from big data predictions about population movements in the Mediterranean, to the use of automated decision making in immigration and refugee applications, to artificial intelligence (AI) lie detectors deployed at European…
Social media screening: Norway’s asylum system
Immigration authorities across Europe are increasingly finding asylum seekers’ social media profiles to be a valuable source of information in case processing, complementing the asylum interview. Access to applicants’ travel routes, photos, network of friends and record of other online activity…
Developing ethical guidelines for research
Despite the depth and breadth of the field of forced migration studies, until recently there were no specific ethical guidelines for research with displaced people. While the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford had adopted Ethical Guidelines for…
‘Over-researched’ and ‘under-researched’ refugees
Since 2012, I have been working at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, undertaking data collection on the economic lives of refugees and host communities in countries including Kenya, Uganda and Ethiopia. This article is based primarily…
Research fatigue among Rwandan refugees in Uganda
During my doctoral research[1] in 2009–13 with Rwandan refugees in Nakivale, one of Uganda’s oldest refugee settlements, I noted many expressions of research fatigue during interviews. Complaints about over-research tend to arise from a combination of the sheer repetition, frequency…
Over-researching migration ‘hotspots’? Ethical issues from the Carteret Islands
A few years ago, as part of my research into climate change-related migration, I carried out a pilot study to measure how best to engage with individuals and communities in remote atolls to the north and northeast of Bougainville, an…