Journal of Refugee Studies Vol. 21, No. 4 ß The Author [2008]. Published by Oxford University Press.
All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected]
doi:10.1093/jrs/fen042
Research Beyond the Categories:
The Importance of Policy Irrelevant
Research into Forced Migration
OLIVER BAKEWELL
International Migration Institute, Department of International Development,
University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
[email protected]
Given that research into forced migration is looking at processes of enormous
human suffering and often involves working with people who are extremely
vulnerable to exploitation and physical harm, it seems difficult to justify if
it has no relevance for policy. This article argues that the search for policy
relevance has encouraged researchers to take the categories, concepts and
priorities of policy makers and practitioners as their initial frame of reference
for identifying their areas of study and formulating research questions. This
privileges the worldview of the policy makers in constructing the research, constraining the questions asked, the objects of study and the methodologies and
analysis adopted. In particular, it leaves large groups of forced migrants invisible
in both research and policy. Drawing on a case study of self-settled refugees, the
article explores how these limitations affect the research process, despite the
efforts of the researcher to move beyond policy categories. In order to bring
such ‘invisible’ forced migrants into view, the conclusion calls for more oblique
approaches to research, which recognize the ‘normality’ within their situation
rather than privileging their position as forced migrants as the primary explanatory factor. Such studies may help to bridge the gap between refugee studies
and broader social scientific theories of social transformation and human
mobility. By breaking away from policy relevance, it will be possible to challenge
the taken-for-granted assumptions that underpins much practice and in due
course bring much more significant changes to the lives of forced migrants.
Keywords: self-settled refugees, categories, labelling, forced migration policy,
methodology, Zambia, Angola
Introduction
Despite the efforts of a growing number of academic researchers in the field
of forced migration studies, there are still many refugees and other forced
migrants who remain beyond the view of the ever-expanding body of research
and largely invisible to policy makers. For example, as I will discuss below,
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there is a disproportionate focus of research on refugees in formal camps
across Africa, while the larger numbers of self-settled refugees are neglected.
Moreover, researchers’ interest in forced migrants is often limited to ‘refugee
issues’ such as their interaction with aid programmes, leaving other aspects
of their lives invisible.
In this article, I argue that one of the reasons for the limited scope of
research is that much of it is framed around policy categories and concerns,
often in an attempt to ensure that the findings are relevant and serve to
improve the very distressing circumstances associated with forced migration.
I suggest that this reliance of academic researchers on policy categories tends
to obscure and render invisible some population groups, causal relationships,
and questions that are methodologically difficult to capture.
It is important to note that throughout the following discussion, I am
thinking primarily of academic research, often conducted by researchers
within universities and published in peer-reviewed journals. I recognize that
there is a wide variety of other forms of research generated within communities, aid agencies, governments and other bodies. Of course, these overlap,
for example, when academics undertake commissioned research as consultants for NGOs.
I start by showing how notions of policy tend to focus on formal organizations and their interactions with people. These are an unreliable guide
to what will bring about significant changes, as other aspects of people’s
social worlds may be of much greater important in their day to day lives.
Unfortunately, it is these institutional notions of policy which dominate in
discussions about the policy relevance of research. This has resulted in confusion between categories of policy and analysis, which is widely seen as a major
weakness in the field of refugee studies. In the subsequent three sections,
I suggest that this limits academic research by constraining the type of
questions asked, the objects of study and the methods and analysis adopted.
In the second half of the article, I explore how this has affected research
into self-settled refugees in Africa and describe my attempts to step outside
the categories in research on the Zambia–Angola borderlands. Despite the
practical and analytical challenges presented by the exercise, taking this oblique look at the situation of self-settled Angolans in Zambia generated new
insights into processes of refugee repatriation and integration. I conclude by
suggesting that research which is designed without regard to policy relevance
may offer a more powerful critique and ironically help to bring about more
profound changes than many studies that focus on policy issues from the
outset.
I am perhaps caught by my own argument by restricting my focus in this
article to the field of refugee or forced migration studies, which are broadly
delineated by reference to policy categories. I am referring to a limited set of
literature, much of it from refugee studies and focusing on examples of concern to researchers in this field. There are doubtless many researchers across
the social sciences who may not see themselves as being engaged in the study
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of forced migration, but who are conducting research involving forced
migrants. To some extent I am writing from within the field urging those
of us working in it (myself included) to strengthen our connections to this
wider academic world.
I make no claim that the issues raised in this article are unique to the study
of forced migration. Indeed, similar debates about the relationship between
research and policy have been conducted for many years in many different
strands of the social science literature (for example in applied anthropology
and development studies see Magubane and Faris 1985; Grillo and Rew 1985;
Mosse 2005; Fisher 2003; Crewe and Harrison 1998). Moreover, the delineation of the field by policy categories is also a challenge for those studying
many other phenomena that are the object of policy concern—for example
homelessness (Minnery and Greenhalgh 2007; Tipple and Speak 2005).
Policy Relevance and Categorization
This relationship between academic and policy concepts has always presented
a problem for researchers struggling to strike the balance between achieving
understanding and making a difference (Van Hear 1998). Often their research
is looking at processes of enormous human suffering and involves working
with people who are extremely vulnerable to exploitation and physical harm.
How can one go to the camps of Darfur or western Chad and not want to
change things? It is not surprising that researchers have taken Turton’s
admonishment to heart:
I cannot see any justification for conducting research into situations of extreme
human suffering if one does not have the alleviation of suffering as an explicit
objective of one’s research. For the academic this means attempting to influence
the behaviour and thinking of policy-makers and practitioners so that their
interventions are more likely to improve than worsen the situation of those
whom they wish to help (Turton 1996: 96).
Researchers working on forced migration struggle to keep up with this ‘dual
imperative’ of both conducting rigorous academic research and being policy
relevant (Jacobsen and Landau 2003). Voutira and Donà suggest that it is not
a binary choice between the two; advocacy and scholarship can be integrated
and ‘in refugee studies, scholarship is embedded in advocacy and advocacy in
scholarship’ (Voutira and Donà 2007: 167).
To some degree, the protagonists in such debates on the relationship
between research and policy often appear to be talking at cross purposes
as they fail to make it clear what they mean by policy and policy relevant.
For some, policy appears to be concerned with any practical outcome of
research which results in change in the way people understand the world
and go about their business. In this sense, policy relevance can be read as
a proxy for practical relevance.
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Another perspective suggests that policy is the domain of institutional
decision-making by powerful actors, such as governments, aid agencies, and
so forth. This is reflected in the dictionary definition of policy as:
a principle or course of action adopted or proposed as desirable, advantageous,
or expedient; especially one formally advocated by a government, political
party, etc. (OED online 2007).
In its most common sense, we are talking of policies as principles adopted by
organizations to achieve their aims. It is a realm of organizations and groups
with some institutional form—a set of practices and more or less formal
ways of ‘doing business’ which are guided by ‘policy’. Policy sets the rules
of the game for achieving particular objectives which contribute to the overall
organizational strategy.
By its nature, this understanding of policy tends towards a focus above the
level of the individual or (unstructured) community. In general we do not
refer to individuals or households having a policy in any area, although of
course there may be unstated and deeply embedded principles which direct
household behaviour towards strategic aims (these may be seen, for example,
in households’ livelihoods strategies). Our interest is focused on organizations
because they have explicit statements of policy which are open to influence
and change. For example, we can identify a non-governmental organization’s
(NGO’s) policy, produce research that challenges it—perhaps by questioning
the extent to which it reflects observed realities or is practically useful—and
put forward alternatives.
Such policy-driven action only covers a narrow area of the social world in
which people live: especially in environments where the reach of the state is
limited and formally constituted organizations may be few in number and
very low in capacity. Furthermore, people’s actions are shaped as much by
personal interaction and unstated ‘policies’ embedded in personal relationships as by formal policy positions. However, it is the institutional notion of
policy related to organizations which is dominant in the debate on policy
relevance of forced migration studies. I argue that it is this institutional
form which is a dangerous guide to the focus, methodology and analysis
of research. In particular I am concerned with the way that it shapes the
categories which are used in research into forced migration.
Categorization is a basic mechanism deeply embedded in both social
science and policy. For the social scientist observing the world, people are
assigned to categories as people who are perceived to have ‘unequivocally
shared features’ (Scott and Marshall 2005) and observations related to individuals within these categories can be aggregated and analysed. Some categories, such as gender and age, may seem relatively unproblematic (contra see
e.g. Macklin 1995), while others, such as ethnicity or legal status, may be the
subject of much debate and research themselves. The categories used for data
collection may be derived from the underlying conceptualization brought to
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the research question; for example, we distinguish between people on the
basis of gender as we anticipate that we will see observable differences
between the categories, male and female. This remains a question for research
and researchers can review their categories of observation in their analysis.
I refer to these categories used in the research process as analytical categories.
In the policy sphere, categories are used to define those groups of people
who are assumed to share particular qualities that make it reasonable to subject them to the same outcomes of policy. The policy will lay out how the
organization concerned will interact with people who fall into a particular
category; for example, granting them legal rights or providing them with
resources and services. In contrast to analytical categories, these policy categories are likely be fairly invariant over time (they mean the same today as
yesterday) and space (they are interpreted in the same way in the field as in
headquarters for national policy, or in Zambia as in Sierra Leone, for global
policy). If they are subject to constant revision, it is likely to cause confusion
and potentially the collapse of the policy. For example, an NGO’s staff will not
be able to function if they have no clear idea of who is eligible for their services.
This policy categorization is one of the core processes in the production
of bureaucratic labels, which shape the interface between individuals
and bureaucratic organizations, including governments and aid agencies. However, I think it is important not to conflate the terms ‘category’ and ‘label’,
although they are intimately linked. In his seminal paper on labelling refugees,
Zetter argues that the production of labels entails ‘stereotyping which involves
disaggregation, standardization and the formulation of clear cut categories’
(1991: 44). This suggests the starting point is the identification of a particular
issue or problem of concern to policy makers; for example, ‘what shall we do
to cope with the movement of thousands of people in war?’ As part of the
process of policy development and bureaucratic labelling, the formal policy
category of ‘refugee’ is established. In this case, the category follows the policy
concern and is then followed by the application of that category as a label.
In other cases, the categories seem to precede the policy concern or set the
parameter for that concern. For example, the difficulties faced by youths in
refuge camps only become apparent if we start looking at the camp with
an implicit category of youths. Once the category is established, a set of
problems associated with those who fall into it may be identified, and
the category becomes a client group for policy, with a stereotypical set of
assumed needs. The category of youth is attached to a bureaucratic system
and becomes a label. Thus, we can envisage what starts as an analytical
category being accepted as a policy category and in due course a bureaucratic label.1 This progression can be seen in the development of the category
‘vulnerable’ within refugee aid operations, which is now effectively a bureaucratic label which undermines its utility for analysis (Bakewell 2006: 332–333).
Of course, there is considerable blurring of the distinction between analytical and policy categories. In many instances, the difference may depend
more on who is using the category and for what purpose, rather than
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substantive differences in who is included within it. However, I argue here
that distinguishing clearly between policy and analytical categories is important for academic researchers, both to avoid confusion, and to ensure that
they are aware of the significance their categories may have in the arena in
which they are conducting their research.
It is important to emphasize that I see the use of categories as a fundamental
part of both the process of social scientific research and the exercise of policy.
The problem I address in this article arises when the distinction between the
categories is not maintained: when policy categories are conflated with the
analytical. This has been a particular problem for the field of refugee studies
as its origins lie in policy concerns (Black 2001) and they continue largely to
shape the boundaries of the field. While there are ongoing debates about
terminology, academic researchers in refugee studies have adopted definitions
of refugees based on those of concern to UNHCR, or falling within the UN
convention definition or some other protocol or agreement. For the most part,
Black argues, the term has been adopted from policy with limited reflection
on any ‘deeper academic meaning or explanatory power’. There have been
attempts to stretch the field to include other ‘categories’, most notably ‘internally displaced persons’ but also ‘environmental refugees’ and ‘economic refugees’. However, Black suggests that this is more concerned with ‘the extension
of policy definitions than in any deeper academic attempt to understand in
a more comprehensive way the situation or distinctiveness of refugees as
opposed to other kinds of migrants’. There is little to show that new terms are
sociologically significant in the sense of describing a set of characteristics that
are innate or defining features of a theoretically distinct population group.
Meanwhile, attempts to promote the use of other terms in academic literature
seem to represent a struggle to ensure that these terms are also incorporated
into concrete policy initiatives (Black 2001: 64).
This over-reliance on policy categories is a fundamental weakness in the field
of refugee studies. As I will show below, it puts constraints on the questions
to be addressed by research, the objects of study, the methodologies, the
analysis and the connections with broader social scientific theory. As a
result, it not only undermines the academic depth of the field of refugees
studies, but ironically, it also limits the extent to which research can offer a
radical analysis of the situation of forced migrants that may bring substantive
change to their lives (in contrast to changing only policy).
On the contrary, and paradoxically, the academic study of human displacement
is less likely to be ‘relevant’ to policy, the more closely it follows policy related
categories and concepts in defining its subject matter and setting its research
priorities (Turton 2005: 277).
As Turton goes on to argue, the role of academic research should be to
reflect critically on the taken-for-granted assumptions of policy makers
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rather than simply confirming or legitimizing them: to make them visible and
open to inspection.
Constraining the Questions Asked
How do we choose what questions we should address in our research? To
some extent this is defined by the coincidence of the interests of the
researcher who undertakes the research activities and the funder who pays
for it. Further constraints are provided by the methodological (can we envisage a scientifically robust way to do the work?), ethical (is it right to do this
research in this way?) and practical (is it feasible in practice to do this
research?) issues that surround any research endeavour. Many of these will
emerge in the tortuous grant application procedures established by donors
and universities, including peer review and clearance by ethics committees.
Moreover, while academic researchers may consider themselves to be independent, the interests they bring to this picture do not arise in a vacuum and
are shaped by currents within academia concerns.
A fundamental concern for any academic enquiry is to add to the growing
body of human knowledge, providing new insights and understanding. The
extent to which we can achieve this will depend on the scope and depth of
our view of existing knowledge. This can be limited by the boundaries of our
field if they are too closely related to policy categories. A critical example is
provided by Stepputat (1999) and echoed by Turton (2005) in the very conception of forced migrants being out of place and somehow intrinsically
related to a place of origin. This makes it much harder for those working
within this field to raise questions about these ‘links between people, places
and identity’ and ‘de-naturalize’ them.
By contending that the distinctions between voluntary and forced migration are
blurred in some cases, or that not all refugees necessarily find repatriation the
most desired solution to their problems, researchers run the risk of preparing the
ammunition for governments or other actors who will not recognize the legitimate claims of refugees or internally displaced persons (Stepputat 1999: 416–417).
If researchers accept these boundaries of the field and steer clear of asking
difficult questions—such as how important are economic motivations and
social networks in the mass movement of refugees—they will tend to confirm
and legitimize the assumptions made by powerful actors, such as states, and
ensure that they remain taken-for-granted. Turton argues that this runs
counter to the very fundamental task of researchers to ‘reflect critically’ on
such assumptions. Moreover, he suggests that by essentializing the links
between displaced people and their ‘homeland’ rather than recognizing homeland as a ‘cultural construct’, research ‘tacitly confirms the nationalist view of
the world which was responsible for creating the so-called ‘‘refugee problem’’
in the first place’ (Turton 2005: 2778).
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By using forced migration, displacement and refugee status as defining
categories, there is a tendency to privilege certain recognizable forms of displacement, leaving others invisible. For example, Hayden (2006) shows how
the migration of Salvadorans has largely slipped out of sight of forced migration studies since the peace accords of 1992, despite the ongoing violence and
the continuity between the causes of migration during and since the war.
Today, those leaving El Salvador are widely understood to be ‘voluntary’
migrants rather than refugees and therefore they are considered to lie outside
the focus of refugee studies.
Holding too closely to policy categories not only makes some outside the
category invisible, but it also tends to privilege category membership as
an explanatory variable for differences between people. We have advanced
from the refugee-centric views of the world in which researchers explored the
situation of refugees in camps and settlements while ignoring that of nonrefugees living outside such managed spaces (Chambers 1986). Comparisons
with the situations of local hosts, permanent residents and other migrants are
becoming more common (for example Evans 2007). However, perhaps not
surprisingly, for those of us working in the field of forced migration studies,
the comparisons tend to be between refugees (or other displaced categories
such as IDPs) and others. The world becomes divided up by categories of
migration and we look for explanations on that basis first, rather than on
the grounds of social class, length of residence, education, and so forth. This
inhibits our seeing the potential connections between forced migration and
broader social, economic and political fields and prevents us from understanding its role in global processes of social transformation. As Loren
Landau put it in his report of the International Association for the Study
of Forced Migration (IASFM) conference in 2006:
Our refugee-centrism (or, more awkwardly, our forced migrant-centrism) also
limits our ability to gain from and contribute to cognate disciplines: sociology,
economics, political science, philosophy, law, anthropology, and media studies.
As such, the forced migration field lacks a compelling research agenda or means
of accumulating knowledge. Rather than progress through slow cycles of knowledge, every wave of scholarship (and every IASFM gathering) risks largely
reiterating the studies of its immediate predecessors. At worst, our scholarship
is driven by faddish concepts, questions, and methods drawn from the policy
world (Landau 2007: 347).
Constraining the Objects of Study
What or who should be the object of our research in the field of forced
migration? This is the subject of heated debate, most recently conducted in
this journal in 2007 (Hathaway 2007; Cohen 2007; DeWind 2007; Adelman
and McGrath 2007). The different views might be crudely described as follows:
a) the purist position of James Hathaway calling for the term ‘refugee studies’
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to be reserved for research into the situation of refugees defined by the UN
Convention on the Status of Refugees; b) the broader purist position of
Roberta Cohen, which insists that internally displaced persons (IDPs)
should be brought into the picture; and c) the integrationist position of Josh
DeWind, which suggests that we must take a broader view to consider not just
the persecuted individuals but also the process of forced migration in the
context of the social and political circumstances that create it.
The trouble with both the ‘purist’ and ‘broader purist’ positions is that they
focus attention on particular categories of people who are considered to be in
need of international protection. For example, the origins of the study of
both refugees and IDPs arose from a concern about highlighting their particular situations, defending their rights and bringing them into the sight of
international policy action to improve their situation. As a result we too often
end up with studies which look at people, such as refugees and other forced
migrants, who are the object of policy concern (or we feel should be) and are
subject to interventions from external actors, whether legal, social, economic
or other forms. While most researchers would take it as given that these
people are active agents rather than passive objects, this notion of agency
rarely extends to their self-definition. Hence research is often circumscribed
by the policy categories rather than the sociological (analytical) categories.
While the former may be of great importance to people, as they are associated with access to rights and resources, it is the latter which may have
more substantial meaning in peoples’ lives and resonate with their perspectives and behaviours (for example, see the discussion on analytical categories
in the case of Afghans in Pakistan in Novak 2007: 571).
Not only is the focus exclusively on the particular individuals who fall
within the refugee or other forced migration category, it is also too often
on the interface between these populations, governments, UNHCR and other
aid actors. It seems that the concern with policy relevance encourages
researchers to focus on areas where policy has a direct influence on people’s
lives. In Africa, this tends to steer us towards the realm of aid programmes.
This privileges the worldview of the policy makers in constructing the
research. While this may seem important for ensuring that we are being
‘relevant’ rather than engaging in self-indulgent academic exercises, it presupposes that these policy makers or practitioners are the actors who will
improve the situation of forced migrants. This is a dangerous assumption.
Time and time again, studies of migration, both forced and voluntary, have
shown that policies are failing. Over many years, the evaluations of humanitarian action with refugees have identified common failings and come up with
similar policy recommendations—e.g. poor co-ordination, limited participation of primary stakeholders, and lack of impact assessment. There is a vested
interest for aid agencies to highlight their own activities, the whole reporting
and evaluation system is geared around it, but it is not at all clear that
they are the main actors as often as they like to think (Bakewell 2000b).
Despite this, much research into forced migration continues to be based on
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the needs of these bodies or else to critique their work. By steering our studies
by the light of states, UN bodies, donors, advocates, NGOs and other institutional actors, we immediately cast into the shadows the agency of the
individuals and households who have no easily observable institutional
form. As a result, many of the messy informal interactions of different communities as they move, settle and establish new places and make their way in
the world (or fail to make their way) remain invisible to many researchers
working in the field of forced migration.2
Constraining Methodology and Analysis
In a critique of the methodologies commonly used in the study of forced
migration, Jacobsen and Landau (2003) argue that too often research has
failed to maintain appropriate standards of transparency, replicability and
representativeness, resulting in flawed policy conclusions. Moreover, they
argue that the failure to use robust methods has helped to undermine the
credibility of refugee research and its potential influence on policy. They
have helped to stimulate a vigorous debate about the most appropriate methodologies for research among forced migration (for example, Rodgers 2004;
Landau and Jacobsen 2005), and this has been taken up in special editions of
both the Journal of Refugee Studies and Refugee Survey Quarterly in 2007
(Schmidt 2007; Voutira and Donà 2007; Mackenzie et al. 2007; Bakewell 2007).
Whatever the merits of their general case about the mixed quality and
impact of much research into forced migration (Landau 2007), it is disturbing
if it is taken as a call to allow policy friendliness to become a metric for the
selection of research methodologies. As Schmidt has recently argued, research
questions must determine the methodology; otherwise, there is a danger that
focusing on a particular set of methodologies recognized by policy makers
may limit the research questions we can ask. For example, if we want to
understand how networks operate in aid organizations, snowball sampling,
which is heavily criticized by Landau and Jacobsen, may be entirely appropriate (Schmidt 2007). Developing a thick understanding of the ‘policies and
processes through which global and local bureaucracies reach decisions’
(Landau 2007) is likely to require ethnographic methods which may struggle
to pass the tests of replicability and representativeness. Of course, researchers
should make every attempt to ensure that their work is as scientifically sound
and robust as possible; the primary test should be whether its quality is
accepted in the academy rather than among policy makers.
A focus on policy categories can also have an undue influence on the
analysis of empirical research findings. Even if we step outside policy categories in order to gather data, it may be necessary to return to policy definitions in our analysis of the data in order to present findings which make sense
to decision makers. For example, if a research project explores the protection
for people forcibly displaced, it is hard to see how it can become ‘relevant’
unless it is presented in terms of bureaucratic categories for the people
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(such as refugees or IDPs) and using notions of protection that are acknowledged by policy makers (such as that provided by the state rather than any
community or informal forms of protection). This is not to say that the
research cannot challenge such categories and concepts, nor to deny its potential utility, but the critical issue is that the status quo as it is seen by policy
makers becomes the frame of reference.
This may make other insights invisible: for example, we may not see the
common institutions of informal protection which are shared across the
whole population of both forced migrants and hosts. An alternative analysis
which starts from the perspective of the forced migrants (or some other
population group) or from the perspective of other academic fields outside
the forced migration field may generate a very different picture.
Common-sense concepts of society and professional social science discourse
reinforce and complement each other nicely—which adds to the plausibility of
both and assures that sociologists of immigration have an audience in the wider
public . . . However, the prize for such cohabitation with common sense
is analytical fuzziness . . . A breach with common sense might make it more
difficult to convey sociological insights tel quel to the wider audience, but it
may make these insights more powerful (Wimmer 2007: 7).
A Case Study of Self-settled Refugees in Africa
I want to turn now to explore how these self-imposed limitations on forced
migration research play out in the case of a specific area of enquiry—the
settlement of refugees in Africa. I start from the observation that the majority
of research into refugee settlement in Africa is focused on those who are
within the purview of UNHCR policies, rather than self-settled refugees.
As a result, the latter are often rendered invisible. I draw on my own efforts
to challenge the categories of aid and look at forced migration through
different lenses using the case of Angolans settling in Zambia, where the
self-settled refugee population significantly outweighed that of the formal
settlements. As I show below, my attempt to step beyond the categories in
order to understand more about the lives of both Angolans and Zambians
living in the borderlands raised its own difficulties.
The debate about how to manage large numbers of refugees has rumbled
on for many years (Crisp and Jacobsen 1998; Black 1998; Stein 1987; Smith
2004). There appears to be consensus among most actors that refugee camps
are undesirable, but questions revolve around whether there is an acceptable
alternative—acceptable not only to refugees, but also to host governments,
donors and other key stakeholders. Sadly, the answer seems usually to be no,
and establishing camps still appears to be the first response to refugee and
other displacement crises in most parts of Africa. Once established, camps
and settlements seem to generate their own capacity for institutional survival
and have helped to sustain protracted refugee situations (Crisp 2003);
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for example, the oldest settlement in Africa, Mayukwayukwa Refugee
Settlement in Zambia’s Western Province, was set up over forty years ago.
Regardless of the efforts of states to ensure that refugees stay in such formal
settlements, the effectiveness of their policies relies on refugees keeping to the
rules, and in many cases they do not. Refugees often make strenuous efforts
to remain outside the formal systems of protection and support which would
require them to live in a camp or other prescribed location. Many thousands
of refugees in Africa are living outside the formal camps and settlements and are
unassisted by UNHCR, but there are no reliable estimates of the proportion
(Crisp 2004: 6). UNHCR’s own statistics suggest that 30 per cent of all refugees
in Africa are not assisted (800,000 of 2.6 million), while 52 per cent of persons
of concern (i.e. including internally displaced people, asylum seekers and
returned refugees) in Africa are described as living in ‘rural/dispersed’ or
‘various’ locations outside camps, settlements and urban areas (UNHCR
2007: Tables 1 and 12). Given the difficulties of defining, identifying and counting refugees (Crisp 1999), such figures can only be taken as an indicator that
there are significant numbers of people who could be regarded as forcibly
displaced and who are making their own way outside the formal aid system.
Focusing on the ‘Invisible’ Self-settled Refugees
The process of fleeing from violence, crossing borders and establishing a
viable livelihood in exile independently of such formal systems is therefore
common, but there has been relatively little research into how it occurs.
Despite the large numbers of people involved, a disproportionate emphasis
of research into forced migration in Africa is focused on the experience of
refugees in camps and settlements. As a very rough measure of the level of
research interest in these self-settled refugees, we can compare the number of
hits yielded by searching for terms such as ‘refugee self-settlement’ or ‘spontaneous settlement’ compared with those for ‘refugee camps’ in bibliographic
databases. For example, on the ISI Web of Science, the former has twenty
two hits compared to 393 for camps; in CSA Illumina the corresponding
figures are 79 and 1,926; and among theses and dissertations catalogued on
ProQuest UMI, the respective hits are eight and 260.3 Most research which is
explicitly focused on refugees in Africa is still on refugee camps or other
formally recognized refugees.
This should not be surprising. When you are looking to influence policy
makers, it is normal to focus on the areas where their policies are having an
effect, for better or worse. Both UNHCR and donors often want to improve
their work, and its outcomes for refugees and host communities, and may be
willing to facilitate academic research, much of which can be very critical of
their policies and actions. However, if they do support academic research
(and that is by no means guaranteed, see Harrell-Bond and Voutira 2007),
it will be for studies that are most clearly related to their realm of aid
interventions and official categories of refugees. Looking through this
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policy lens can offer significant practical advantages. The process of research
is much simpler where refugees are easily identified as objects of intervention,
providing a readily available sampling frame and people located in a discrete
location. In many cases, these might be the only refugees who are formally
acknowledged. Therefore, research which is formulated as a study focused
on refugees will tend to be steered towards the formal settlements or other
settings where refugees will be officially recognized.
Such advantages are lost if the researcher turns to the areas where none of
these agencies is actively engaged with the refugee population. Research may
be actively discouraged where governments claim that all refugees are to be
found in official settlements. By settling themselves among local host populations, self-settled refugees have placed themselves outside the world of aid
interventions and any practical protection provided by host government.
They merge with the host population or other migrant groups and become
invisible to those looking for refugees. This raises the questions of whether
the refugee category is salient for them or useful for the analysis of their
situation.
This was a critical issue that I faced in field research in the borderlands
of Northwest Zambia and Angola (Bakewell 2000a). The study arose from
the contrast between the assumptions of UNHCR and governments that
there would be a ‘spontaneous’ mass movement of refugees returning to
Angola and the picture—presented by Hansen and others—of refugees completely settled in Zambia with very limited interest in returning to Angola
(Hansen 1990; Mijere 1990; Williams 1993). With these two contrasting pictures in mind, I set out to investigate the current views of people living in the
border villages and to see how they corresponded to those anticipated by the
plans for external intervention. I was interested to understand the experiences, the circumstances and the perspectives of those who had been forced
to move. I wanted to look into the situation of self-settled refugees, but how
could I identify these refugees in practice?
By definition, self-settled refugees stayed outside the formal settlements, and
were living with non-refugees. Therefore, it was difficult to identify them by
location. In this remote area of Africa, where the border cut across the ethnic
groups (mainly Lunda–Ndembu) and other distinctions between people were
too subtle for an outside observer to recognize, ethnicity and language were
no reliable guides to nationality or refugee status. The presence of the
Zambian state was very limited and many refugees moved without notifying
the state administration (although their presence was known to local chiefs).
Many people were able to cross the border and settle without any formal
papers. Thus, identity papers were no reliable guide to people’s status.
In the course of the interviews, it was possible to ask about people’s
origins, their movements and how they came to be in the area, but it was
very difficult to verify the responses. If I had focused on those who willingly
described themselves as refugees, I would have faced a significant bias as
I would have neglected those who rejected the term. Moreover, where
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people had actively avoided the Zambian authorities in order to stay outside
the camps (Hansen 1982), it was likely that many people would avoid being
identified as the subjects of research focused on refugees. Such circumstances
raise enormous problems of trust—why should people trust a researcher who
insists on referring to them as refugees?
As noted above, snowball sampling techniques are commonly used to
identify refugee respondents in such circumstances. In the case of self-settled
refugees, where the refugee identity may be highly sensitive, asking someone
to pass on the details of another refugee is inappropriate; there may be no
consensus on what the term refugee means. In the setting of north-west
Zambia, where the power of rumours and gossip is significant, one informant
could have many reasons for suggesting that another person is a refugee.
Therefore, in any contact with people, it was never straightforward to establish whether one is talking to a refugee or not.
Escaping the Refugee Category
Similar conditions prevail in other parts of Africa, raising comparable
challenges for researchers looking for the ‘invisible’ self-settled refugees
(Hovil 2007: 604). However, before getting too caught up in the problems
of identifying individual self-settled refugees, it is important to ask if it is
necessary to do so in order to address the particular research question. There
is a danger of falling into the trap of assuming that a certain set of problems
or experiences are the exclusive domain of refugees. This can too easily lead
us to ascribe particular problems to a person’s identity as a refugee, when it
may be more closely related to other aspects of their identity which might be
shared with other ‘non-refugees’ in the local population: membership of an
ethnic group, length of residence, income level, level of education, and so
forth. The challenge is to identify where refugee identity may be salient in
creating a different set of social interactions.
The ethnic group formation perspective calls for non-ethnic units of observation
which make it possible to see whether and which ethnic groups and boundaries
emerge, are subsequently transformed or dissolve—rather than to assume their
existence, relevance, and continuity by binding the observational apparatus to
such groups and communities (Wimmer 2007: 26).
In order to achieve this, it was necessary to gain an equal understanding of
the experience of non-refugees. The focus of my research in the Zambian
borderlands was on the repatriation of Angolan refugees in North West
Zambia. The research questions arose from an interest in what motivates
return among self-settled refugees. However, I quickly realized that my first
step should be to put to one side the term repatriation, loaded as it is with
connotations of return and resumption of normality. It was then possible to
look at issues of migration and its causes without a priori privileging factors
normally related to repatriation, giving such issues a prominence they may
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not warrant to the exclusion of others. In order to abandon the idea of
repatriation and approach the question of people’s movement with fewer
presuppositions, it was also necessary to avoid restricting my consideration
only to refugees. If I was to question the assumption that the process of
repatriation was automatic for refugees and then I only looked at the movement of refugees, I would have been half way to making that assumption
before I had started. If I was to consider refugees as ‘normal’ people, I had to
include other ‘normal’ people in my study. Looking at refugees in isolation
from the context of their hosts would run the danger of seeing every aspect of
them as a reflection of their (presumed) refugee status. Refugees’ movements
may be interpreted as repatriation, because they are refugees, in a context
where there are identical movements by others that would be looked on as
economic migration.
This approach highlighted some issues which I might have otherwise missed.
It became clear that there was a significant number of Zambians who were
looking to Angola as a potential destination. Movement was a normal part of
life and many thought there could be future opportunities there, including
natural resources and jobs in reconstruction and mineral extraction (diamonds
and oil). Many people predicted that Zambia’s Western and North-Western
Province would be depopulated by people leaving for Angola and some were
concerned that many Zambians could move as well (Bakewell 2000a). While
there are no accurate figures for the number of people who have moved from
North-West Zambia into Angola since the end of the war in 2002, it is certain
that Zambians have been included among them, with press reports of Zambian
passing themselves off as Angolans to be ‘repatriated’ (SAMP 2007) and deportations of Zambians in eastern Angola (Angola Press Agency 2007a, b).
The approach taken also encouraged me not to limit my analysis to refugees and non-refugees. For example, on first sighting, it was easy to see that
Angolans who had arrived in the last ten years had not attained positions of
leadership in authority structures of headmen. However, this could also be
observed among others who had moved into the area from other parts of
Zambia. The stranger/outsider aspect seemed to be important but it was not
clear that this was reserved only for those who had come from Angola. The
approach raised a question which has stayed with me as a researcher interested in issues of forced migration: what is distinctive about the forced
migrant or refugee in any given context?
Stepping Back into the Refugee Discourse
However, such an approach introduced other problems. First, it did not help
narrow the scope of the study. I deliberately went to an area of Zambia in
which it was widely reported that many Angolans had settled over the years.
Beyond that, I took the approach of finding a community in which I could
stay and tried to interview as many people as possible there, asking the same
questions about origins, migrations, livelihoods, contact with Angola, and
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intentions to move. I did not distinguish people on the basis of any presumed
refugee status.
But I was still working with a concern to make my findings relevant to
policy makers; therefore, I felt it was important to include some refugee
‘markers’ in my questions so I could make some plausible association
between what I was observing and how states and aid agencies saw the
world. In this particular case, this was quite easy as I was enquiring about
people’s migrations and reasons for moving. Many reported that they came
from Angola because of the war. I ended up using an operational definition
of Angolan refugee as a person who satisfied both of the following criteria:
- was either born in Angola or had spent a considerable period of her/his life
in Angola; and
- either had run from the war or, having left for other reasons, was unable to
return to Angola because of the war.
This enabled me to categorize those who responded to my questions. In some
cases the categorization would not coincide with that given by the formal
legal definitions, as used by UNHCR and the government, and in most cases
it would not match their formal records. However, I was confident that any
of the people I had included as refugees for the purpose of my analysis would
have been able to present themselves as such to the authorities if they so
desired. Likewise, those excluded could show themselves to be Zambian.
Therefore, despite trying to avoid the policy categories, I returned to them
in the end.
I worked with two principles in mind. First, it seemed important that the
use of any categories could be explained to the people involved in the study.
Hence, if the analysis categorized people as ‘refugees’ (for example), the basis
on which people are included and excluded in the group must be clear.
I attempted to fulfil this principle in practice by concluding my research
with a workshop in the community where I was based to explain my analysis
and findings. Second, the categorization should be held lightly and used for
illustration, challenging or endorsing labelling, rather than to provide information for bureaucrats; e.g. the number of self-settled refugees. It must arise
from the data rather than framing the data collection.
However, this still raises difficult ethical issues. While I may hope that
communicating my research in the policy arena may make a difference to
the lives of the people involved, of course it is impossible to know how the
findings will be used. Even if the language of the bureaucrats is only adopted
with provisos and adaptations, these qualifications may be forgotten in the
abbreviated story picked up by policy makers. It also raises the danger that
the research process can draw attention to people and undermine their position. I tried to avoid this by discussing my findings within the community and
asking their views on dissemination. In practice, those I spoke to were enthusiastic for information about the situation near the border to be known in
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town; however, I could not claim with confidence that this amounted to
adequate informed consent:
We claim to have obtained informed consent. However, that is not possible for
every bit of information we collect. Nor, communication being difficult at best,
can we be assured that, despite our strongest efforts, people really understand
what we are going to do with the information they entrust to us when we
ourselves do not always know this at the time we begin our fieldwork and
obtain ‘informed consent’ (Krulfeld 1998: 24).
Perhaps by going back to the refugee discourse in my analysis, I undermined
all the good work of stepping out of it. This is a dilemma put by Greta
Uehling:
The anthropological study of refugees has been predicated on the same system
of classification as international law, raising a question whether anthropological
discourse contributes to the construction of refugees as powerless . . . On the one
hand, by using the category unquestioningly, anthropologists risk contributing
to a discourse that is replicated at the international level. On the other hand, by
abandoning it altogether in favour of alternative social scientific terminology,
anthropologists risk speaking only to themselves (Uehling 1998: 131).
Despite such questions about the utility of the refugee category in the borderlands of North-West Zambia, I arrived in the area with this category as part
of my conceptual framework. I abandoned the category ‘refugees’ from the
outset in favour of the much broader category of social actors whom I
referred to as ‘villagers’ but this ‘frontstage’ behaviour did not stop me
keeping the refugee category ‘backstage’ (Schmidt 2007: 94–95). Is it incumbent on us as researchers to bring to the fore any such underlying, backstage,
concepts, such as ‘refugee’, ‘irregular migrant’, ‘extremely vulnerable individual’ (see UNHCR 1999), that we may have in mind? I think the answer must
be no. Through the process of research, we expect our thinking, our conceptualizations and the categories we use to develop and change. Whatever
we hold at the start of the process is incipient and needs room to grow. This
is not to argue that we should be undertaking covert research. I learnt a great
deal through conversations and debates about people’s understanding of
the term ‘refugee’ in Zambia, but I did not refer to individuals as refugees,
nor differentiate between them on that basis.
An Oblique Approach to Forced Migration Research
This case study illustrates that stepping outside policy categories can cast
new light on the situation of ‘invisible’ populations of forced migrants and
those among whom they live. In this particular case, for example, it revealed
very clearly the widespread de facto integration of Angolans into Zambian
villages, despite the Zambian government’s consistent refusal to accept the
integration of refugees as a possible durable solution. It also showed that
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many of the critical concerns for people in these borderlands, such as access
to markets, were common to all the residents, whether Zambian or Angolan.
There is no denying that this study in Zambia was initially framed by
policy questions about people described by the category ‘refugee’. However,
it attempted to analyse the process of cross border movement through
the lens of the broader social process of migration rather than the refugeefocused notion of repatriation. While the choice of field site may have been
steered by the reported presence of self-settled refugees, the refugee category
did not limit the selection of respondents within that study area nor determine the questions asked. It only came back in for analysis where it
seemed necessary to relate the findings back to policy categories in order
to challenge them.
This can be described as an oblique approach to research, which addresses
Turton’s paradox that putting policy concerns at the focus of research may
make the findings less relevant to policy. Of course, working in the situations
of poverty and extreme deprivation that are associated with forced migration,
researchers are concerned to ensure that any practical implications of
their work are utilized. However, the point here is that if the research sets
out to be policy relevant, it may be prove to have less to say about either
policy or practice. By putting aside policy relevance and stepping outside the
categories, we may be able to get a sideways look at policy and practice from
a new angle.
By staring too hard at ‘refugees’ or ‘forced migrants’, we fail to see their
‘normality’; we make them exceptional and exclude them from our ‘mainstream’ theories, and cast them as passing through a liminal period. Paper
after paper describes the particular situation of refugees and takes for granted
that this situation is associated with their status as refugees. Moreover, they
frequently fail to connect to the wider processes of globalization, social
transformation and human mobility, and continue to obscure the structural
causes of forced migration (Castles 2003: 27). As a result, the study of forced
migration remains out on a limb. Instead, we need ‘always to think of forced
migrants as ‘‘ordinary people’’, or ‘‘purposive actors’’, embedded in particular social, political and historical situations’ (Turton 2003).
The term refugee has become synonymous with a violation of human rights.
But if we become fixed on this notion of violation, we will fail to recognize the
ways in which refugees are actively building their world (Uehling 1998: 124).
Conclusion
I have argued that studies arising too closely from policy concerns can tend
to skew the basis for research, constraining the questions asked, the areas of
study, the methods used and the analysis. Such research often produces
narrow, short-term answers to its (limited) questions, which then contribute
to the development of inappropriate policies (Castles 2003: 26). While it is
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easy to criticize the failures of different actors engaged with forced migrants,
in these days of ‘evidence-based policies’ the policy makers can often refer to
a raft of research which underpins their position. This extends to migration
policy more generally: for example, neither social scientists nor policy
makers anticipated that migrant workers in Northern countries would
remain permanently and establish new transnational communities (Castles
2003: 20).
In the particular case of self-settled refugees, researchers are binding themselves by the constraints of formal ‘refugee’ definitions and bureaucratic
categories, leaving a large number of people invisible: outside their knowledge
and excluded from consideration in policy and planning. Hence, academic
researchers have generated volumes of advice to UNHCR about how to
improve its policy in Africa but far less understanding of what people actually do when they flee violence. The critiques of camps are well developed,
but there is little written about the alternatives, such as self-settlement and
local integration. We have very limited knowledge about how self-settled
refugees negotiate their position in different contexts and we are nowhere
near being able to show in what circumstances self-settlement may be a
better alternative—and for whom.
Of course, at the level of policy the refugee category makes a profound
difference. Erika Feller of UNHCR declares ‘refugees are not migrants’, citing
some very good reasons for this case (Feller 2005). She is right that there is an
essential difference between refugees and other migrants; the former have a
special place in international law, which many, including me, would argue
needs to be preserved. However, when we turn away from UNHCR and
others’ policy agenda, do we need to identify (label) particular people as
refugees or migrants in order to understand the process of movement, integration and so forth? In contexts where the rule of law and the bureaucracy
to enforce it reaches deep into the daily lives of people, such a category may
be relevant in many interactions. It may then be close to a social category
that marks out people in multiple ways and may have explanatory power.
However, in many parts of Africa, for instance, where the arm of the state
struggles to reach, such bureaucratic categories may have little day to day
salience. It is other aspects of life that divide and unite people.
Those of us interested in forced migration in Africa and elsewhere need
to step outside these categories, to challenge the ‘practical knowledge’ that is
taken for granted. By increasing the efforts put into policy irrelevant
research, I believe we can help build new knowledge with tremendous practical relevance that can bring change to people’s lives and cast light on the
invisible situation of those living in the shadow of bright policy lights.
1. Here I am focusing on humanitarian labelling with the objective of ‘inclusion of
refugees’ which Zetter has recently contrasted to bureaucratic labelling by states in
order to ‘legitimize the exclusion and marginalization of refugees’ (Zetter 2007: 189,
emphasis in original).
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2. They may be much more visible to other social scientists who are working outside
the confines of the forced migration field and looking at populations that include
refugees and displacement people among their number.
3. Searches for (refugee and spontane or self-sett) and (refugee and camp) in
the social sciences databases on http://portal.isiknowledge.com/portal.cgi and
www.csa.com, and among interdisciplinary theses and dissertations on http://
www.il.proquest.com/proquest, 16/06/08. Of course, these searches will only capture research that frames people as refugees; in many cases there may be other
studies of the same populations that do not use this ‘refugee studies’ lens.
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MS received January 2008; revised MS received August 2008