Centre for Refugee Studies

The first problem is with definitions themselves. Squeezed into one category of refugees, Hathaway confuses two very different categories: convention refugees who, in flight from persecution, cross a border to claim refugee status, and humanitarian refugees who flee across a border ...

The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist's copyright.

This paper summarizes the presentations and discussions of a virtual stakeholder meeting on Refugee Resettlement in the United States which built on the foundation of the May 2019 workshop represented in this special issue. With support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and hosted by the Committee on Population (CPOP) of the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on Dec 1–2, 2020, 1 the meeting convened migration researchers, representatives of US voluntary resettlement agencies, and other practitioners to consider the role of migration research in informing programs serving refugees and migrants during the COVID-19 pandemic, continuing an emphasis on bringing global learning to those on the ground working with refugees. The goal of CPOP's work in this area has always been to build bridges between communities of research and practice and to create a dialogue for a shared agenda. We present the goals and framework fo...

Research partnerships are the foundation of successful engaged scholarship, which typically unites partners across disciplines, institutions, sectors, and countries. While rewarding and generative, these partnerships can also be challenging due to differences in expectations, power, and culture, and difficulties in trust and communication. This article reports on interviews with members of an international refugee research network about participating in global partnerships. Responses are interpreted in light of community university partnerships and South-North partnerships and suggest that both face many similar challenges arising out of structures and norms that privilege Northern, theory-based scholarship, institutions, and outcomes. Vigilance and awareness regarding context can help to confront these challenges. Moreover, global partnerships can benefit from strategies developed in the area of community university partnerships to facilitate trust, communication, and shared owners...

THE FOLLOWING IS AN EXAMINATION of the concept and contemporary practice of social planning in Canada, a term that is rarely seen today in the literature or in government documents. Social planning was part of the postwar attempt to establish social order in the wake of an economic depression and a long war. It was meant to use rational processes to resolve what were perceived as social problems, and was located at two main sites. One was the federal government, where it took the form of social policy planning that resulted in the development of a modest welfare state consistent with the prevailing liberal ideology. The other field of activity was the third sector, often referred to as the voluntary sector or, more recently, as "civil society."

Technology specifically designed for people with disabilities is important in lowering boundaries to education, employment and basic life needs. However, the growth of a vibrant tech sector in Kenya has had little effect on the prevalence of digital assistive technology in the country. In this chapter, the authors report on initial explorations undertaken in Kisumu, Kenya to identify existing strengths, relationships, and gaps in access to digital assistive technology. The goal was to explore opportunities for initiatives in participatory design of assistive technology, using an international community/academic partnership. Relevant literature and projects from the areas of Information and Computer Technology for Development (ICT4D), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Critical Disability Studies are reviewed and, these theories are grounded in the authors' experience working with stakeholders in the region. The conclusion discusses promising future directions for participatory...

Recognizing and bridging the gaps between those who are part of a community and those from mainstream culture is an important one for community social work. There is however, little research on the experience and perception of the insider worker. This paper reports on a SSHRC funded project that is focused on community practice in marginalized communities. Community workers from four diverse communities were interviewed. An issue that recurred throughout was the significance of their personal location. This paper will outline some of the key elements that appear to provide the workers with important advantages and some dilemmas. The paper argues that it is crucial for community social work practice to listen to the voices of insider community workers and the issues they raise.

There is little longitudinal research that directly compares the effectiveness of Canada’s Government-Assisted Refugee (GAR) and Privately Sponsored Refugee (PSR) Programs that takes into account possible socio-demographic differences between them. This article reports findings from 1,921 newly arrived adult Syrian refugees in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec. GARs and PSRs differed widely on several demographic characteristics, including length of time displaced. Furthermore, PSRs sponsored by Groups of 5 resembled GARs more than other PSR sponsorship types on many of these characteristics. PSRs also had broader social networks than GARs. Sociodemographic differences and city of residence influenced integration outcomes, emphasizing the importance of considering differences between refugee groups when comparing the impact of these programs.

This paper describes initial efforts to use open-source data to capture knowledge about forced migration in Iraq. Our goal is to understand the connection between open-source data and possible leading indicators of forced migration. For our preliminary analyses, we use a corpus of 2.6 million documents. Here we describe the techniques we used and challenges we faced. We conclude with recommendations for those using open-source data for grand-scale data science challenges.

Forced migration is increasingly becoming a global issue of concern. In this paper, we present an effective model of targeted event detection, as an essential step towards the forced migration detection problem. To date, most of the the approaches deal with the event detection in a general setting with the main objective of detecting the presence or onset of an event. However, we focus on analyzing the magnitude of a given event from a collection of text documents such as news articles from multiple sources. We use violence as an illustration as it is one of the most critical factors of forced migration. The recent advancements in semantic similarity measures are adopted to obtain relevant violence scores for each word in the vocabulary of news articles in an unsupervised manner. The resulting scores are then used to compute the average daily violence scores over a period of three months. Evaluation of the proposed model against a manually annotated data set yields a Pearson's correlation of 0.8. We also include a case study exploring the relationship between violence and key events.

Trauma-informed interventions have recently received more attention in the field of refugee resettlement and mental health. Although these interventions can be helpful to all trauma survivors, our model offers enhanced and cultural-based practice benefiting war-related trauma survivors, especially those from Post-Colonial nations. This model is based on needs identified by participants and collaboratively developed with the research team and the community. Our community-based participatory research (CBPR) began with three objectives. The first was to explore the current use of culturally-based, trauma-informed interventions and to assess service users’ (SUs) and service providers (SPs) experiences. This was accopmlished by collaborating with a local community agency. The second objective was to identify service needs and gaps. The third objective involved working with the project’s steering community members to develop a more effective model of interventions that can be used by rese...

"LGBT refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people. Currently, there is a ‘tsunami’ of a debate raging in Uganda, in particular, and Africa, in general about LGBT. This paper delves into impressions of the Ugandan people and their leaders about the phenomenon, if one can call it that. Homosexuality, or LGBT, is still a taboo subject in many African societies. There was fallout in the Anglican Church over the ordination of gay priests as bishops in the worldwide Anglican Communion. In October 2009, a bill entitled the 'Anti-Homosexuality Bill' was tabled before the Ugandan parliament with the aim of legislating penalties for 'homosexual acts' and those who defend the rights of people who engage in sexual relations with people of the same gender. President Museveni said, “We used to have very few homosexuals traditionally. They were not persecuted but were not encouraged either because it was clear that is not how God arranged things to be.” A Ugandan Minister has been quoted saying that LGBT people are trying to impose a strange, ungodly, unhealthy, unnatural, and immoral way of life on the rest of our society.
On the flip side, gay groups in Uganda say the proposed law is not necessary and will only legalise discrimination. They call on government to respect people’s rights and fundamental freedoms, as prescribed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Human Rights Watch has accused the government of promoting state homophobia in Uganda and urged it to repeal of a colonial-era law against sodomy.
The debate is so intense it is bordering on extremism. The same scenario is playing out in many parts of Africa and one wonders if there is a possibility of finding a middle ground. There is talk of possibilities of aid being cut and an increase in the number of people seeking refuge in western capitals because they believe their rights are being denied.

Keywords: Uganda, Africa, homosexual, lesbian, LGBT, transgender, gay, bisexual

JEL Classifications: I28, J71, K19, K42, N47, N40, Z00

Working Paper Series
Date posted: November 22, 2009 ; Last revised: December 27, 2009
Suggested Citation
Kaduuli, Stephen Charles, Perceptions of LGBT in Uganda and Africa (November 21, 2009). Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1510822
"

Uganda resurfaced in the global headlines at the tail end of 2009, when the Anti-Homosexuality Bill 2009, which appears to be supported by most Ugandans, was tabled before Parliament. This paper probes homophobia in Uganda and addresses the theme of "sexuality", justice and the concomitant implications for forced migration. It looks at the analysis of the bill in relation to the issue of human rights. Methodologically, it briefly focuses on addressing the socio-cultural aspects in respect of Afro-societal aversion to homosexuality and legislative change.

Ethnicity and citizenship issues have been among the contributing causes of conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) over the past decades. These identity issues are exacerbated by the large-scale migration of people to and from the DRC and neighbouring Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, both historically and in the context of recent political violence. Using ethnographic data collected over a 15-month period, this paper explores Congolese young people’s self-identification vis-à-vis ethnicity and citizenship discourses in Kampala and Kyaka II refugee settlement, Uganda. In particular, research findings highlight the conceptual and practical implications of the territorialisation of ‘tribe’ and citizenship for migrants; the consequent conflation of ethnicity and nationality in migration contexts; a reinforced notion and assertion of ‘Congoleseness’ among refugee populations, even when this creates conflict with Ugandans; and, migrants’ limited opportunities for formal political participation. Understanding this political context from which Congolese refugees have fled, and to which they are returning and will return, is important in anticipating the peace and conflict implications of current Congolese migrations.