 Hello everyone, my name is Lucy Earl. I just want to do an audio check before I launch into my introduction. Could the people online let me know if their hearing was okay? We've just switched it in not using the microphone but using a stand alone. They don't want to, yes, hearing you better. Good, some means that. I'm good to go. So hello everyone and welcome. My name is Lucy Earl. I'm the director of the Human Settlements Group at the International Institute for Environment and Revenue. I also lead the institute's work on forced displacement in towns and cities. Can we have this slide with the panelists? I want to introduce the people who are joining us today. Roe and online to talk about whether or not we can achieve a world without long-term retreat camps. So online we have, actually I should introduce you in the order in which you're going to speak. So actually I'll start with Romela Taysberg. Romela Tanya, who is a professor in the Geography and Planning Department at the London School of Science. We also have Llywodra Llywodra, who has been a club to Romela, who is a professor of migration and development at the University of Oxford, and also we're missing the opportunity here with Llywodra Llywodra Llywodra, who is a professor in South Africa. And then online, up there to be current today, is Kate Mcash, who is president and CEO of the US Committee for Preachies and Immigrants and who's joining us from Washington to see you. So welcome to all of you. I'm going to start off with a bit of discussion about why we're here before we've been referred to our speakers. So that's a bit of an extension for him. So over the last few years we've been working in a consortium of organisations on a project entitled, out of camp or out of site question mark, realigning responses to protracted displacement in an urban world. It's short for that to protracted displacement in an urban world, or PDUM as we call it, and you're seeing here on screen behind me, your website for this project. And it's coming to a close. We've actually just had a day and a half of a symposium where we've discussed findings with other scholars in the field of practitioners. And the reason we started off this project was that we thought there was a focus of funding and attention being predominantly given to refugees in camps around the world. That was where humanitarian funds were flowing. That's where a lot of academic research was being done. And we wanted to realign the focus because, as some people know, the majority of refugees around the world are living in towns and cities. The statistics are slightly unmarrable, but we generally use the team around 60% of refugees who are in towns and cities around the world. The majority of those are in countries in lower and middle-income countries. It's very hard to know this, but there are also people who are internally displaced, and we believe the majority of those people are also in towns and cities. So we haven't crossed an international border, but I've had to leave their homes because of a fear of violence conflict, but also increasingly climate-related events as well. So our project ran for three and a half years focusing on four countries, on Jordan, Kenya, Afghanistan and Ethiopia, and in each country we live in one camp and one urban area. And we compared the outcomes for refugees in those two areas in each country, looking at their well-being and their livelihoods options in their enterprises. And we did see from the start that urban areas will be better places for overall well-being for refugees, and that cities, towns and cities have the potential to give right more dignified existence. So happily, after all this research and thousands of survey responses and interviews, that has largely come out to be the case that it's true that refugees on a number of different ways of measuring their well-being are doing better in towns and cities, but life in cities is all very hard. And in some cases where camps are better funded, the difference between being in a city and being in a camp and in a busy place is also extremely difficult. I'm not going to go into the findings here because I'm seeing them now. We have a website where we are slowly, as we produce many outposts on this project, we'll be uploaded there. So if you're interested in working papers on each of the countries or policy views, you'll find them there. And this project's part of a portfolio of work we're doing, and we're looking at the cost of camps. So the economic cost, which seems to be almost uncapable. a'r hyn am rai gynnwys ar y deolch yn y canfodd, fe'r idea mewn gweithio. Ac mae'r gweithio'n gweithio, a'r gweithio'r gweithio, a'r gweithio'n gweithio'r gyntafol, ac mae'r gweithio yng nghylch yn gwneud bod so many o bwyllwch yn ymgylch yng Nghymru, ond rwy'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gwyllwch yn y gweithio, ac mae'r gwylltiau yn yr ymgylch ac mae'r gweithio'n gwylltiau yn ymgylch a mae gynhyrchu fod yn cael eu gwahau'r ystyried. Mae'r cyfan i'r wyf yn oed i'r cyfan o'i gwych gyrgynwys yn yw eu newid yn teimlo i'r cyfan o'r cyfan o'r cyfan. Ac rwy'n cael ei fyddion yng Nghyrch Cymru a bod yna fe wnaeth ei ddweud o'r cwmhysgol, os ydych chi'n rwy'n gweithio ar y cyfan i'r cyfan i gwych, Cymru gyda'r cefnod Abertaeg yng Nghymru, ac mae'r cyfrifiadauedd yng Nghymru yn y ffeidthog sydd ei wedi'i gwneud, mae'r ll negócio a'r cyfrifiadau a'r bethau. Ac mae yng Nghymru yn ysgrifennig yn ddweud yn y cwysigaf ydyn nhw'n ddweud oepianol o feddwl, ac mae'r cyfarfodydd ydyn nhw wedi hynny'n ddim yn ei kweithgrifennu a'r cyfrifiadau yna. If they're there, they're not receiving humanitarian assistance, they must be doing okay, they must be self-reliant in the terminology of the sector. We found that, actually, there's a wide range of outcomes of refugees living in cities, and some are indeed doing okay, but there are other pockets filled with extreme vulnerability. There's also an assumption, low health, that the refugees who go to cities are different from the ones in camps. They're young, and they're educated, and they tend to be men. We actually personally spoke to exactly the same number of men and women across all our research methods, so we can't, we don't have data on centres of men versus women that we've produced. But certainly we can say that in the refugee population that we look at, there are many people with education in the camps who are generally not able to use it, and there are also some very, many people in cities who have avoided camps, particularly women who may be illiterate, who are extremely poor, where they've chosen not to be in a camp because they feel that they can provide them with life for themselves and their families in the city. A myth, third myth, is that camps act as safety nets and safe havens. We found that, actually, in camps people go hungry on a regular basis, that there's a problem of homelessers in camps where people are mainly for months or years without being registered without shelter. We assume that camps are providing the basis of life, but actually, in many cases, that isn't happening. And finally, a myth, that I get quite exercised about. The idea that camps can become standalone towns or cities, autonomous human settlements that can flourish and become just like any other town or city. And this is very problematic because camps are generally sighted specifically away from industry, away from major sites of where others might be living. They are often in extremely costile terrain, remote border regions, where even subsistence agriculture could be very difficult to achieve. So the idea that somehow, with enough investment, these camps can turn into standalone cities, I think, is a very tall order. So I'm going to just finish talking about this going by saying that we are doing it for an in-city response, so for aid to travel where refugees want to go. Not all refugees want to be in certain cities, I appreciate that, but many of them do. But the humanitarian community is not following them with aid assistance. And we're suggesting that perhaps there should be more of a focus on the types of work and enterprise that refugees are trying to do despite extremely restrictive circumstances that are supporting them. Then the question arises, if we can move towards supporting refugees outside of camps, can we get to a place where camps no longer exist? Now, I often told that this is a utopian ideal, and perhaps it is, but it's a bit of a dream, right? So the idea to put today's conversation is to think about that possible future, is there a future that we would have without long-term refugee camps? I appreciate it, but in the acute moment of a crisis where large amounts of people are moving from one country to another, they may need to live somewhere temporary. But often camps remain in place for decades, whole generations of people in a group of camps waving on what community emergency phase is. So the questions I have for speakers, and you balance your own questions as long as they may be fit to speak, but I have a few here that I'm going to throw out. So what are the political and institutional barriers to a change and approach by the international community and coasting governance? What evidence could help to sway decision makers from establishing camps in the first place or keeping them open after the end of the emergency phase? How can we challenge the status quo? What are our advocacy options? And is there a way that we can disrupt the current system that incentivises the building of camps? So with that, I'm going to hand over to Pramila to take on some or organize this question and to help us imagine more or less that future without refugee camps. Well, thank you Lucy for that challenge and thank you all for being here today and also to everybody who's online. Thank you also for the invitation to participate in this. I think it's a bit of a tall order because I've been given 15 minutes to talk about whether we can envision an end to refugee camps. In particular, I think this question around political barriers to change the kinds of incentives that are created to put up camps. So I thought on this challenge and I thought 15 minutes is probably not a huge amount of time because you could probably write several books out of this. But I thought perhaps I could offer one way of thinking about some of the political barriers. And so before I begin, I wanted to just preface this with the position and the background that I began this work almost two decades ago, which is from the perspective of housing and urban poverty, which were the things that I was really interested in when I first started this. And I had started actually doing research on something quite different. Looking at these questions around housing and urban poverty, I found my way into looking at questions of displacement. And the housing question was always quite central to what I was interested in. And so that is the lens that I take to thinking about political barriers. And when I first started this work, I was intrigued by precisely the kinds of questions which Lucy has raised, and the challenges that she has brought to us, which is that we can be in fact create this world without camps, can be happy, follow people who are displaced to where they want to go. And the question that I thought of then was, why doesn't that happen? And I came at it from a housing point of view, which led me to this question of citizenship. And working in the Global South, working across two very different regions in the East and South Asia, I began to ask questions around what does citizenship mean in many of these places? What does citizenship offer people in a particular country by way of rights, privileges, their opportunities to engage with governments, to participate in meaningful ways? What are citizens able to do? What are they gaining from their membership to a particular holiday? Or are they even, in fact, aware of the citizenship in a particular country? In this symposium over the last couple of days, we have talked about how within a particular country different populations of people are governed in quite different ways. And even across regions and countries, we see the state operating in quite different ways of people being abandoned or ignored or treated as second class or third class citizens. So we see the variation in citizenship across different populations and across different regions as well. And so the question of social, political, economic and also spatial inequality is central to how we think about these kinds of questions around citizenship. And of course, thinking about the Global South, which is a sort of vast terrain very problematically labelled, which also coasts with large numbers of refugees, especially in camps, in many of the countries that we look at, these are also countries that have a range of different challenges. So there are countries that have high amounts of debt, for example. They struggle with these questions of legitimacy. They can extend control and power with certain amounts of their territory among others. They face high levels of poverty. Within the global economic system, they are treated in very specific ways. So they are seen as sites of extraction, whether that's resource extraction or labour extraction. And in a world which is highly unequal, many of these countries which also carry the highest burdens of refugees are also some of the poorest. They are also racialized in very particular ways within the global system. They are not treated as equals. They are not given a seat at the table as equals. So they are not treated as the partners of so-called global superpower powers. And if you think about it, many of them are unable to afford to give their citizens what some of us may consider to be, you know, somewhat basic resources like water, sanitation, electricity, world and so forth. So many of the countries, when we look at the poor, whether they be urban or rural, they often face very high levels of deprivation, very high levels of destitution as well. So what does citizenship mean in these countries? And you could take some of these questions, you can apply them to the global north as well. So you could look at countries like the one that we're sitting in right now, which is the United Kingdom. And here again, we also see very deep-seated inequalities, very high levels of poverty. We see scarcities that are manufactured by governments, whether they are around housing or whether they are around other issues. There are significant levels of inequality of deprivation in the United Kingdom. For those of you who I know there are several people here who are joining from other places, whether you came here facing a cost of living crisis, which then translates into a food crisis, translates into a housing crisis, energy crisis in one of the wealthiest countries in the world. And again, you could ask this kind of question of what does citizenship mean in this country or in similar countries. So you could say that what you see in a lot of places perhaps is this kind of question emerging about what the citizenship mean, is there a crisis of legitimacy. And you could argue that there's no substantive difference between the conditions of the poor and the non-poor, which includes migrants and refugees. So how do governments create distinctions between the poor on the one hand, and refugees and asylum seekers on the other, especially as humanitarian crises threaten to unsello their authority and then legitimacy further. So how do they construct specific ideas of citizenship against the backdrop of displacement? Now, one of the things that I have heard over and over again in a lot of countries is that they are not countries of asylum, but at the same time they don't refowl people. So if we know what the law of reclamo is, which is that you don't return, you put it very gladly, you don't return people by force to places where they have escaped from violence or persecution. So even though you have a lot of countries that do not have laws around refuge, they still offer refuge in very particular ways. They will provide something, they will look the other way, so to speak. So as I said, I came to this question from housing, from that question of housing, to kind of think about how do these distinctions get created with people who are citizens and poor, and those who are refugees and asylum seekers. And one of the lenses that I came to it through was this question of housing. So if you look at the idea of refuge, it's not just a legal right. It's not just a question of, you know, safety per se, but at the fundamental level, the question of refuge is also very much about space. It's a sanctuary space. It is fundamentally a spatial question. So if we think about that question of refuge, it is to provide safe space or shelter from harm, a site of some kind of protection. So what we see in, I think more in the part, is that that kind of shelter then translates into quite problematic ways, right? So it comes in the form of asylum accommodation in this country, and refugee camps and so forth. And so you could make the argument that what the sort of division is, is that you provide those who are coming to you for protection, a kind of a right to housing, a kind of a right to shelter, not housing, but a kind of a right to shelter of sanctuary space, a particular space in which they can live in a specific way. But what do they give up in return? They give up the right to work and they give up the right to mobility. On the other hand, you have the poor in many countries who are often denied the right to shelter. And we see large-scale evictions taking place in countries around the world. We see evictions of informal settlements, land grabs, infrastructure projects, all of which drive people off the land. But they are theoretically given the right to work and to move. So for some who may be citizens, you know, the displacement might become, displacement and resettlement might become sort of continuous and life-long processes as well. So while displacement might be this kind of threat that ties different communities, one of the many threats that ties different communities together, kinship might be another one, different sets of rights are set up in opposition to each other to destabilise what should be solidarities between people due to their shared experiences of poverty, deprivation and abandonment. So asylum seekers are pitted against welfare recipients, for example here in the UK. Refugees are pitted against the poor in countries in different parts of the world. Migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, however problematic those differentiations are, are scapegoaded for scarcities, real or imagined, through this kind of citizenship. And through this is how we sort of see citizenship and statehood of manufacture. So for me, I think sort of camps play a really important role in this, in that they become, as you rightly pointed out, they become prisons for people who are displaced and they become prisons for a long period of time. And they become these kinds of spaces in which people are warehoused for very long periods of time. And one of the ways in which we can see this is to see how this becomes a very visible space to show that differentiation between who's a citizen and who's a non-citizen. To identify that this is in fact the price to pay for protected space. I promise to Lucy that I would try and come up with a positive spin on this. I think it's difficult because I'm a cynic most of the time. But since I was asked to reflect on how we can achieve a world without camps, I'm going to come to this point, which is a point that I made earlier, which is about the Global South. And I pointed out the unequal table about the ways in which the Global South is racialized, is treated as sites of resource extraction and not as people partners, not being given that seat at the table, and yet asked to carry out a disproportionate burden of displacement. And I would suggest that neither, firstly, communities are not necessarily unwelcoming to refugees or asylum seekers in the first instance, not even in this country, contrary to what the government will have you believe. And neither are most governments, neither do many governments, want to be seen as being hostile either, unless again, unless you're this country, I mean in which case you push out a hostile environment policy. More on that later. But they do have concerns over their own well-being, their own scare cities, and their own crises. So I would argue that if we want to have a solution to the problem of camps that we need to move beyond tweaking humanitarianism, and I built on some of the points that were made earlier in the discussions over the last few days to get to the root causes, we have to change the system. We have to create a system in which the global south is seen as being equal, as being partners, but those as places that can and should in fact have the right to be in charge of their own futures, to be in charge of their priorities rather than dictating those to them. Because just as, to me, in a way it almost sort of cascades down the sense of powerlessness, and this sense of this sort of a punitive system in which those countries who are unable to have that seat at the table, also in turn then cascade that powerlessness down to those who are seeking hospitality for them. So perhaps with the kind of role we can have in the camps, but I think this is a huge William project. I'll travel in there. Thank you, Roland. So we are going to take questions after the three speakers have finished. So hold on to your thoughts and we're going to turn now to Laura. All right, thank you, Lucy, and thank you very much for the invitation to be here. I'm sitting in this easy chair collection of a smoking jacket and a pipe. But I'm trying not to speak in this big evening tone. I'll keep it a little short and interesting. I think this is a really fascinating question of whether we should have camps or not. And I'm thinking, in my response, which I think will echo many of the themes that our relations brought up and also surfaced in the opening comments. I'm taking a lot of inspiration in addressing this question from colleagues who would consider themselves abolitionists scholars. Scholars often dedicated to abolishing prohibitions on sex work, prohibitions or on prisons particularly. And I think that the comparison with prisons is obvious here. Camps are a place where people have constrained lives. One of their mantras is we need to stop those things which are killing us or killing people. And while camps are not murder sites, usually, they're not sites of extermination. They're not concentration camps in that sense. Keeping people in camps for long periods is a way of killing them. It kills their possibility of their future. It kills their agency, their chance to dictate where they go in life. And it can ultimately be a form of kind of cultural destruction or isolation as we've seen. Cocks is hard and something is happening there. So from the, you know, I take that first point. I take two other points from the abolitionists. The first is we don't necessarily have to have a fully thought out alternative before we say we should get rid of something. We know it's bad. We know this is terrible. We know that it's killing people if you buy that argument. So we should be fighting to get rid of it. But the third thing I take from them is that we shouldn't fixate on that object per se. So the people who fight against prisons say, yes, prisons are terrible, but the point is not to just get rid of them or to reform them. It's A, to try to address the systemic issues that lead people into prison, whether that is inequality, whether it's racism, whether it's conflict or targeting specific groups by the police. But it's also looking at what happens afterwards, right? Or what kind of other systems are in place so that if prisons weren't there, that people would be taken care of in an appropriate way. That we would be able to keep people safe. It's not just about getting rid of them and letting anything happen. And I think that's where we need to address this issue, right? Have we moved or thought through what would need to happen before and what would need to happen now? If we start thinking about what would need to happen before so that we wouldn't have people who were displaced. Well, that was the project of the UN in 1945. We haven't got there yet, right? Of solving the world's conflict, solving the kind of inequality people fighting for freedom, fighting for oppression, fighting for whatever it is, self-determination, fighting for domination, that's still there. It's likely, given the way the world is going, prices over environment, prices over inequality, we're going to see more violence in the future. We are seeing rising nationalism. We are seeing ethnic conflicts that have been subdued for years resurfacing. Conflict is not going away, and as long as there's conflict, there will be displacement. As we've seen in the last few years, more displaced people have been in any time since World War II. So we're not doing a very good job of addressing those causes of displacement. And are we doing a job of creating other places for people to go? And that's a lot of what your work has been, and it's about going to cities, right? If there are other camps, there could be somewhere if they're displaced, and that will be maybe rural areas, small towns, large cities. And are we there? Are we at a point where we can say, without camps, these people will be safe? And I think for many of the reasons that Romulan just discussed, we're also not there yet. And that's where our work needs to be. Right now, where we are, people don't have rights often when they move to cities. So they enter the realm of the urban poor, who remain, and they are just as marginalized as the urban poor, but without even the benefits often of citizenship, whether it's formal or informal, where their rights to be there are recognized. We're also looking at a situation where an abolition of camps, as you mentioned, transformation of camps into cities, is not about protecting people, right? It's about keeping people, it's done in a way that's about extracting resources from the international community, and still keeping them effectively in a prison, just a prison that we call something else. So if you take the camps in Northern Kenya, that they're trying to convert into cities, these are cities that will be in a desert. They're cities that barely supported pastoralists before, but never could imagine, no one could imagine could support half a million people living densely together. Keeping them there, saying that you're giving them housing, but only if they stay there, is basically an alternative form of camps under the name of prisons. And this fits the broader language of self-reliance I think that we see within the UN, or the language of resilience, which is basically shifting the responsibility for care from institutions and states to individuals. And without camps under the current situation, that's what will happen. And we see that over and over again with the discussions of urban refugees, that they can take care of themselves. So why do we need aid? Anyway, it's really an exclusivity, so we don't have the money, but these people ourselves are reliant, they're resilient, they can take care of themselves. That may be true in some instances, but that should always be a choice. So are we at a point where we can really imagine a world without camps? Is that the right thing to even be pushing for? A world without the kind of camps that we have, which are killing people, which keep them in prison effectively for generations sometimes, which are in effect a form of genocide for some groups because it is denying them the right for humanity, and it's an assault on their culture and values. But are we able, and can we imagine a way which we can address these other issues? Can we stop conflict? Probably not. But I do think we can think about how do we reform camps internally and the abolitionists would hate me for saying that there's a way of reforming. But I think the real work to be done before we can abolish camps is precisely the kind of work that many of us have been doing now. I was thinking through how do we create suitable a politics in which people can be settled elsewhere, can actually be free and live their full lives. From those outlines some of the challenges to that, rooted in citizenship, rooted in administration, rooted in resource scarcity, but I think that's really where the fight is, and until we figure out that, we still actually will probably need camps. Thank you. Sorry. You're less simple than I imagine you might be. I can be similar. Let's save that for later. So now it's turned to the discussions online. I'm hoping that you'll be able to hear our conversation up until now. The floor is yours. Can you take us up off mute and give us your views on this topic? Good afternoon. I'm sorry. The connection is not very good. So I missed a lot. But as always, when you become the last speaker, you tend to repeat what other people say. So forgive me for that. Thank you, Lucy, for organizing this conference. As some of you may not know, the US Committee for refugees and immigrants, we are not a government agency, have been working on this issue for many, many decades. In fact, we started our advocacy since 1969, and then we spent about 15 years talking about refugee warehousing. We presented the case, the UNSCR gathering and other international gathering. We didn't get any traction. In fact, some of them criticized USRI being threatened talking about refugee warehousing. How could you say refugees are a warehouse? I'm very glad to hear that the previous presenter actually looked at camps as a prison, which is an open prison perhaps. So what I wanted to just do is, since we were talking, just repeating about camps, who are these people living in camps? And we know that they are refugees. But we need to also realize that some of these refugees have been in this camp since 1968. I mean, if you go to eastern Sudan, you have three generations of refugees in a camp. And then if you go to Algeria, you have Sarah Harrowy refugees since 1975. We have also a camp in Kenya since we keep talking about Kenya and Edab and Kakuma. We have refugees since 1991. So this camp, as we talk about it, is not really a camp. It is an open prison with no rights, no right to own a business, no rights to go to education, no rights for free movement. So we have to properly define these people who have been, I just give you a few examples of the long-term refugee camps. And some of them I visited, some of them actually I lived as a refugee myself. So the growing refugee number, I mean, as according to UNICEF, is exceeding over 100 million refugees and IDPs. I mean, this is probably this country if we decided to put them in one location. Thank God they are in different location, even though their condition is probably the same. Again, unfortunately, given the verification of global conflict, including terrorism and the upsurge of refugees and playing violence, the fundamental human rights enshrined in the 1951 convention relating to the status of refugees as a protected instrument that includes the right to work, to practice provision, to run business on property, to move about freely and to choose their place of residence and have been wealthily and steadily ignored. Also not in the 1951 convention in the last 70 years, the international community, the UN agencies have made refugee camp policy a long-term strategy of containment in a country of first asylum. This policy of containment has successfully keeping refugees in open prison for several generations with no viable future. However, the new generation of refugees have rejected this in human practice and decided to pursue alternative solution by taking long treacherous trails in search of freedom. A refugee camp doesn't have freedom enshrined in it. The host country doesn't provide freedom. So this new generation of refugees decided to pursue or dating there is a possibility of getting a freedom to live or treated as a human being. Once again, the international community responds to this influx has been the policy of denying refugees the right to live a normal and decent life. Some of them actually, as we speak, are forcibly returning them to first country of asylum bartering them with other countries for financial gain. In my opinion, this practice is unlawful, morally indefensible and I dare to say it's a crime against humanity. The ongoing and sometimes hostile domestic and international dialogue around national security, fear of nationalism and terrorism have increased the media spotlight on refugees and immigrants as a threat to national security. But what refugees are doing is they're making self-determination. Rather than just spending 60 years, 40 years, 30 years on refugee camps, they decided the current refugee migrant choosing to leave refugee camps where there are no opportunity to work or get an education. They are leaving an urban area now and host countries as well are fleeing to other nations. This is a de facto rejection of the system that we have been running for over 70 years and the policy of containment that put people in a very, very difficult situation. Currently there are many active refugee and immigrant led organization addressing the real need of uprooted people. The collective and increasingly organized voice representing untapped and perhaps previously undervalued resource and resettlement field. So my view on this very topic is that the containment of refugees, whether they are in an open refugee camp or an urban setting is we have failed to come up with a solution. Increasingly NGO, government groups and other entities and private non-profits and sector are becoming multinational organizations. The population they represent are becoming more diverse, linguistically, ethnically and racially. The diversity of this of refugees and IDPs probably give us a different perspective that we haven't seen since 1951 or since 1950 where UNSCR was established. The other challenge we have is categorizing people as easier refugees or migrants. It's a simplistic, it's inaccurate and even harmful. So it's identified as refugee, flinger of poverty or not granted the same privilege if there is any privilege of being as refugees. You know, once weren't more sympathetic than the other and in some cases the level of refugees or migrants is used to propel political argument and deny rights under the convention by endorsing refoulement. As we see recently in different countries, mostly in European countries the idea of refoulement to other third world countries is continuing and we are not really seeing any advocacy when it comes to this practice. Speaking of sympathy, I think the other thing we are struggling as collectively the advocates globally is the selective outrage of certain refugees has become normal. Some refugees are more refugees than others. As we have seen recently some genocide are worse talking, taking action are very concerning. So this practice of selective outrage is also harming the global refugee system and the system is at tipping point. The anguish can also be misused by well-intended advocates. For example, many of the policy were already referred to burden sharing. As far as I'm concerned, I don't believe that a human being can be a burden to another human. But rather I think we should actually refer it as responsibility sharing. If my data is correct almost 86% of all refugees IDPs are in the global south for country, not in Europe, not in the United States. So the advocate often fall prey to this tendency to consider refugees and migrants as vulnerable, suffering, defenseless. This reinforce the concepts of uprooted people as weak and helpless, overlooking their many assets as well as denying the decision-making power. In the United States people say, this is a country of refugees and immigrants. Well, if refugees and immigrants are a burden to any society, I believe that the United States will be the poorest country in the world. Again, this inherent assumption is more difficult to combat. So I believe that part of the challenge we have is we stop actually seeing ourselves of the people trying to advocate. We sometimes make a statement that refugees who have been a refugee come for 68 years somehow are protected. Protected for what? Are they protected for poverty? Or education? What are we protecting them for? Of course, when they go to urban slum like Islay and other places I know including in Ethiopia that we have a growing number of refugees very much with no rights. They are at the mercy of the local police. Whenever they want, they put them in prison. Sometimes they don't have the right work. So victims of human trafficking, sex trafficking, labor trafficking. So again, this system, this international system that a lot of scholars have been spending their time researching and writing is missing the human aspect of the suffering. We have refugees come hidden from the media because the media doesn't necessarily see this unless it has some geopolitical impact. We have Rohingyas and refugee camp when and flooding and people are dying. We notice that a couple of refugee camps were burned down because of conflict and many of them are still missing. So I think we need to really give it a humanitarian aspect. That aspect has to be based on freedom. Freedom is a key. Do human being have inherent freedom to live as a human being regardless of their legal status, whether they are immigrants or IDP or asylum seekers? I don't believe that for the past 70 years that what we practice can continue. We need to come up with a new dynamic freedom-based approach to migration. Otherwise, we'll continue to come up with a very simple solution. Okay, let's do this. By the way, not all camps are the same. We need to be different because some camps do have resources. If you go to the camp in Jordan and the camp in Dadob is not the same or in Kakuma, or if you go to the Shamelbar refugee camp which I visited and did a documentary it doesn't actually exist. About 25,000 people actually perished and nobody knows. We need to come up with a new approach to migration. We have to think in terms of a self-determination approach of refugee resettlement. The idea that we have a new policy where we don't even want to have asylum seekers goes through the process of making a case for their asylum application. We consider infiltrators not people who need asylum. I think the global refugee system in my view is a historic post-war. The so-called refugee crisis is a fundamental cause of refugee warehousing. We have been warehousing people. The second generation, how many of them died? How many of them are still living? We have no data to show because their condition as long as we keep them as long as they are contained so they don't have to go to developing countries it seems to be a simple policy decision that has been practiced for many, many years. Again, as I said, being the last speaker I'm sure I'm repeating what the two panel said but I will end here and hopefully we'll have a robust discussion. Thank you Lucy. Actually you said quite a lot of different things to the previous speakers because I'm sorry that you weren't able to hear the apologies for some of the audio problems that we're having. I guess I feel that actually in the room we've got two quite different approaches here. We have Romula saying, what did you tell us? We're beyond tweaking the humanitarian system and I had Lauren suggest that we should have a world without the type of camps that we have now which would suggest some tweaking. Sorry. We talked about in the last few days our being principled but also being pragmatic. Pragmatically, what could we do differently in the current world of living in and looking at Romula with any kind of planning at all or asking Lauren how we might have changed the incentive structures possibly around camps. But I've got to also give you the opportunity to respond to each other and what you've just heard. Can I put some new Lauren first? Right. I think right now we're in a situation where camps are there's an incentive for everyone to have camps. That's how if you're a local South Country it's how you play a domestic political game and how you extract resources from the international community. And I think donors can play a huge role in shifting that, right? Not an unwillingness to continue to support camps as they are and a willingness to invest in systems that may incentivise other forms of settlement. So we've talked a lot over the last few days about how could you invest in urban systems on the condition that refugees live there and we monitor their conditions so that we make sure that they're not heading into a sort of ghetto-living existence that they'll never escape from. So I think those are things that you can do and some of those can be done without a big political fanfare. They can be done through development aid. We don't have to have a campaign about ending camps or about integrating refugees into host societies which will have a political backlash. You can do this by simply shifting donor funding moving some of the money out of extraordinarily expensive and wasteful humanitarian systems into systems where we're mainstreaming. We're doing urban planning in a place like Ethiopia or in many other countries. Urban planning means planning for displacement and migration. That's what we need to see. And then you have cities that are perhaps better able to absorb. Then it becomes more ethical to say let's close the camps because these people will have other places to go to. I think some of those kind of practical shifts can happen. Obviously very granular work in each city understanding the politics, understanding what's possible there but I think at the donor side, since it is donors that are effectively driving encampment, shifting aid policy, humanitarian policy, global humanitarian policy trying to not attack but to address the UNHCR who also likes camps because it keeps them in charge and trying to shift some of the ways in which they are assessed and funded could really change some of the benefits that currently exist for camps and open up the possibility to explore at least other long-term possibilities. Can I ask, very crud, Leilann, to be... I mean this is a very crude framing of this question but are you suggesting that we tell donors that happy urban refugees won't migrate to your countries? And if you keep them in camps that not only do they suffer but the rates of migration will be higher? Because one of the things that drives the encampment of refugees is also this highly racialized migration policy that the donor countries have which is that they don't want... they don't want people from certain parts of the world coming to them and this spreading of prices then moves money in certain directions to keep people away from their shores, right? So keeps them in camps and so forth. So that's really... I think I've said this before and I will repeat this again and I agree with this donor as well. I think this idea of having a freedom-based approach to migration is absolutely what we need and camps are absolutely not the solution. And the idea that we can turn this around and we can say that this is an opportunity for cities to renew themselves and again there's a really nice point that is going to remain which is that they shouldn't be seen as work because they're not. It's not a very... to view anybody, nobody should be labeled in that way but we do have these kinds of racialized migration policies in place. So coming back to this kind of a pragmatic question then is that the messaging that we then get across to the donors? Can I just add... So again, we have to be very practical. I'm going to share my own experience. I was a refugee when I was 17 years old and was in... after living in a camp for a couple of months I got a job, you know. And I got a job and I became self-ception. Of course, whatever restriction at that time in terms of curfew and other I have to... But the idea that UNS here is no longer is controlling my life is as soon as I got a job, you know, I have my own early, yeah. So rather than being, you know, as a recipient of the handouts or a burden of UNSCR or the donor agencies I get my freedom. At least if I'm a human being I can work. I can support families. I can raise children. That idea has to be enshrined in whatever policy we can. Freedom is key, you know. But if we keep saying it's a prison, well, prison doesn't have rights, you know. Prisoners cannot just leave the camp. They have to stay there. They can't open business, you know, because they're a business for whom, you know. So the idea should be always, you know, do people have, you know, God-given rights, you know, that freedom, you know. You know, people don't choose to become refugees for the sake of, you know, it's not, you know, some kind of tourism, you know. So whether in Ethiopia, I mean, you know, the Somalis in Kenya are hardworking. They open business, you know. Somalis wherever they go, whether in Kenya or in Minnesota, they're very successful. Because they have the right to work. They have the right to make a decision. Self-determination. If they want to go to school for 20 years, they have the right to. So the idea that a camp which nobody even discussed it in after, when in 1951 discussion, nothing, no, not even in the document that says refugees should be a warehouse for generation. I mean, imagine yourself or your family being a refugee camp for 50 years or 40 years. When I was in Dadaab, I met this young man, you know. He was born in Somalia, but he left when he was 11. So at Dadaab, he grew up there. He got married with someone who was actually born a refugee camp. So his three children, all of them are, had never been. But they're just sitting there. So I think the solution is refugee issues has to become a humanitarian issue. I mean, and the other idea, what we are, I'm sorry to say this, forgive me, but we have this selective humanity. Selective humanity is no humanity at all. Some people are human. We care about them. We react quickly. For some, we just don't think that they exist. And that is a practice I think we need to fight. And I think the solution is whether this housing issue or education issue should be based on freedom. God given freedom of every human being. Can you imagine all of us? I mean, at least I was a refugee. I'm not sure about it. Can you imagine being a refugee camp for 20 years, 30 years of yourself and raising family? I think that's what the debate needs to be. Look, I met refugees when I went to Kenya about five, six months ago. Some of them are not registered by anybody. Nobody knows them. They're afraid. Sorry. Thank you. You're getting a lot of, you're getting support in the chat. Particularly on the question of selective humanity is no humanity at all. A very powerful message. I did want to not let Lauren off the hook, though, make him answer Romney's question. I was a little afraid he would help in this debate when I'd have to ask the questions. Thanks. I mean, I think that, well, just to build on what Alexander has just said, I mean, I also would share the idea of a kind of universal humanity and one in which people have the maximum life choices to where they want to go. But I think we also have to recognize that we are in a deeply unequal, deeply racialized world in which there are power dynamics and we, to get to that broader humanity, we have to think through how do we dismantle those broader structures and we can't just push them away as much as we'd like to. And in this way, I think there's a, to your point, like how do we talk to donors about this? Because they are afraid of the black and brown invasion that's been planned. I mean, they don't mind the Ukrainians. They don't want the Afghans. They don't want the Africans, right? So what do we do about this? And they think keeping them in camps is the way to keep them out of Europe. And to the extent that keeping people poor is a very effective way of keeping them from migrating, that works, right? But what they haven't seen, and I think somehow, is that camps all around the world are also the sites of radicalism. Right? To put people without hope in a place just in the same way that ghettos or elsewhere, where people live without hope, become a site of radicals, sometimes liberatory, but often quite the linearian movements. And that's what we've seen, for example, coming out of Modemken, right? It's, Alshabab is part of what's grown out of those camps where there's generations of people who have not seen another way to make a difference. And that is perhaps more dangerous to Europe, to the United States, than a few thousand migrants who might make it there. And I think those kind of discussions perhaps can help shift the incentives more than do it for them, because particularly they don't care. Thank you. I think we can now turn to some of the questions. I think we can open up questions in the room. There are sources of questions in the chat that will come to you in a moment, see if anyone in the room would like to pose a question to one of our speakers. Or disagree. No one brave enough. Ah, there we are. Please, let's know who you are and you may need the roaming mic. So, have on one second. Thank you. I'm the person in charge from NSE. I wanted to ask a question that may be useful to you about the framing of the question. It says, how can you see the world without long-term refugee camps? I guess I wanted, if there's an assumption there that in the short-term, there are oscillations. I just wanted to tell you why the long-term, there are no camps at all. I mentioned that at the start. Oh, sorry. I was saying that there are obviously times when you have large amounts of people crossing order where temporary solutions aren't needed to protect people from the elements. This point was more about the long-term when we've gone past the emergency phase and we move into the care and maintenance and the warehousing. The point at which it can no longer be described as an acute crisis. And that it's clear that the humanitarian should have taken a step aside that they don't or they can't. So that's why we're talking about that. That's why I put the long-term in to avoid people saying, what would you do if 100,000 people suddenly crossed one border? That's why it's there. It's a caveat. Can I add something? I think one thing we learn because of the Ukraine crisis. So when thousands of Ukrainians decided to come to the EU countries, would you put them in the refugee camp? We just say, we'll come. We have three years. We have a right to go to school. We have to work. No problem. So somehow we recognize that these are not just 20,000 people. It's massive. Poland in other countries, Germany. All of a sudden they became immediately accepted. But they have freedom to bring the kids and go to school without any requirement. For me, that was a wonderful thing that we have seen in the last 70 years. So the idea of embracing these newcomers, these strangers just through society and people are opening doors and there is no legal barrier. They can drive. And then to the doubt, I said no, these are unwanted. Perhaps less human. Or when they come from Libya going to Italy or Britain or France, we used to have a camp in Paris for African refugees. It's called the jungle actually. Imagine that selectivity. And that selectivity is what bothers me a lot. Easier when we saw that camp in Paris for African refugees, we were quiet. Yeah. And we're still quiet when Britain and others decided send them to Uganda or sometimes Wanda or we have not accepted it. So this idea is we have to sort out these things before we come to a permanent solution in what UNSUR and other called durable solution. So again, that practice is yes, I mean here, I mean the United States was in two weeks. We get temporary protected status for Ukrainian, which is a wonderful thing that we did. But for others they waited for years. And while we're taking the Ukrainian to the US at the same time, we're just deporting Haitians also. So you see that this and then again the silence is what's really difficult. And when that happened there was no outrage that even my own agency were very happy that the Ukrainian got two weeks TPS status how wonderful it is. The Afghan are coming in God bless America that they are coming which is wonderful. As you know that we have resettled over 3 million refugees that we chose and we selected for camps. But if you are coming from Honduras, Guatemala or El Salvador, a completely different process. So again this advocacy of selective outrage some refugee pain is more painful than the other one is more easy or expected. Thank you. So those of you can't see the chat. But in the chat we've got some support from Haiti camps and a request to acknowledge some of the positive aspects of being in a camp. So I'm going to read some of these out so you can see how you feel about these points being made. So one example here what would you say to the refugee stories, success stories to fashion refugees in India and mind and the role of refugee organisation and agency in creating successful communities although recognising that they face issues of citizenship and deprivation. Interestingly, the context in which Romola has been working so she may have to answer all these questions. Thank you for the presentations. A question here about community support and grassroots cooperation inside Palestinian refugee camps and how we can work on the problem without using the social value of community which is unique to the camp. A question also a point about how camps can increase housing stock which can be a benefit for refugees and hosts. And I'm going to stop there. The social world that evolves inside a camp and the positives of that that we've seen actually in our research. The idea of camps is increasing housing stock and there's a specific question around success stories of Tibetan refugees in India which I'm not familiar with. So I'm going to hand this over to people who might know more about those issues. OK I'll start with a two-in-one question first. I probably do preface this for those who are not familiar with the Indian context. India is not a signatory to the refugee convention and does not have a national refugee law. So as a result the country also exercises very different attitudes towards different groups of refugees and there are a lot of refugees in India lots of different refugee groups in India there are Afghans, there are Tuetins, there are Chin there are Bohinia there are stateless people from Pakistan there are various groups of people who have come to India in search of refuge and scholars in India will often talk about India and I was thinking of India as a country when I said countries don't will say that we're not a country of asylum but at the same time they say oh we don't refile people this is one of those countries where simultaneously they don't not have a national refugee law but also they also don't refile people in theory we can get into that later I think the Tibetan question is complex I think for several reasons one is that Tibetans are given certain privileges in India in comparison to other refugee communities in the country they're treated differently to other refugees in the country and there are many NGOs that have made this point as well and there are geopolitical issues at stake particularly the ongoing conflicts between India and China Tibetan question is a significant role in it that's just the Tibetan refugee question I also want to turn the spotlight in a slightly different direction because I think that people have a tendency to look at Tibetans as a successful community as a community that's done really well without realising the hardships that the community has gone through as well they having had the privilege and I will highlight the point of privilege of working with starting to work with the Tibetan community in India they simultaneously are given a lot of support from different local governments and state governments but at the same time they also face a lot of difficulties negotiating on a lot of different things they also face racism in the country again these are not kinds of questions that often come up in relation to some of these places but they also face a lot of different kinds of issues within India which I don't think are adequately discussed so I think we need to be a little bit careful when we talk about the success of Tibetan communities because that success comes in very particular ways because of geopolitical calculations you can look at other communities in India who are also refugees in the country and you can ask why have they not benefited in the same kinds of ways just for again the Palestinian camp question I think the question is a really good question in that that you do have that there's a social value to the community that is that exists over there but I feel like I kind of wonder like is it presuming that that social value wouldn't exist if the camp wasn't there do we need to have a camp in order to have a community I think that's the question that I would ask so this question about the housing stuff and it's based on a part of our research in Jordan specifically looking at how construction is actually camp has eased the cost of rent in Amman and if the camp hadn't been built there would have been more pressure on the city and rents would be even more perhaps unful of them than they are already but I appreciate the point that someone in the room has just made that why would we have spent that money on that extremely expensive camp what could we have done with those resources if we had put them into a city if we thought about using when planning approaches whereby you might look at where city planners were thinking the city might expand in future you could have put some housing there instead rather than choosing to put a camp in the desert at great expense and on top of that actually at incalculable expense so in a different research project we've been looking into just trying to find out what has been spent on wash in zatterie camp just one sector on water sanitation and it is not possible to find that out it seems that nobody knows and we've been spending months even years actually digging trying with available data that's in the public domain including on the transparency initiative the IAT transparency around aid and yes you catch a notice cynicism I think we don't even know what's being spent on camps and so this question about what could you do with the money if you invested it somewhere else it becomes impossible to answer and I think that's one area where I think we need to take forward new research and new advocacy so that we rather than thinking about camps as reducing rents in cities we think about spending that money more wisely more sustainably do we have a question in the room yes Alison I might have to repeat it to make sure that the online people can hear but having a go with the people online if you can't get Alison Brown please let me know Sorry Alison Brown, I'm from the University of Ireland I wonder if you could talk about concentration rather versus dispersal one of the issues about camps is that they are concentrated and in fact it might be easier to absorb populations new incoming populations in protracted displacement if they're dispersed of course if they're dispersed then they use the benefits of social support but that might actually make the absorption of new populations unlikely to become in protracted displacement easier but in some context not when it's a small community with a large number of people moving in but in some context that dispersal might be a way forward because I do not see that we can renegotiate in 1951 convention at the moment with geopolitics as it is so we've probably got to think of pragmatic approaches responses I mean I think you're right but I think like many good sense options with humanitarianism the practical is not the pragmatic that's what makes sense but it doesn't help navigate the politics of it which is to keep people from dispersing we don't want competition in the labour market we don't want competition in housing and we don't want these people culturally infecting our body the political incentive is often to concentrate even though the humanitarian and the practical one obviously is to let people choose and actually to facilitate their choosing where they want to go but that's something we've known for a long time and that's something that we saw with Icarat 2 where this whole zone of the country where Liberians coming to Cochubar for example they can settle anywhere, let them go will provide support wherever they end up but politically they just couldn't last it just didn't work and so that's I think is the challenge is saying what are the politics of this right it's not just what is good for the refugees it's what is good within the calculus the political calculus of the place where the refugees go I just wanted to also quickly respond to the comment about the cultural social values and I think there has to be a distinction here I mean we can look at for example hip-hop and say we love it and we're saying we endorse racism or ghettoization of black and segregation which comes out of that history so the fact that there is solidarity is something we can celebrate but we can also I think is wrong when I was saying solidarity might have emerged in different forms and solidarity that is emerges to fight a battle against injustice maybe the real choice, the real better option is to try to address that injustice and indicate that there are so many solidarities in camps it comes about and they can be quite destructive not all solidarity is social capital can be quite negative rather than say well we need to protect that and use that as an excuse for preserving to say what give birth to that and if that is unjust in its beginning whatever else comes from it cannot be really celebrated I wonder if that's not the best moment to end actually with Lauren's wise words and to thank everybody including my wonderful speakers and wonderful speakers thank you Inder, Romula Lauren apologies for the problems with the connection we have been in this room for two days without issue sorry that something happened I think maybe the whole of the UK went home and put their kettles on or something and they keep a cup of tea and the internet crashed sorry about that but I think there is good to be recording and I think we should probably think about blogging about these issues as well and carrying on the conversation online and in person where we can thank you to the people in the room it's wonderful to have to see you here thank you to everyone online and yeah tune in to another IID debate soon thank you thank you