 did my doctorate in Ghana and on Ghana many years ago and I was last here nearly 20 years ago so it's great to be back in Ghana and to see how things have changed and moved on and so on. Let me just start by inviting you to bear in mind this image slightly blurred image of Thomas Moore's utopia which marked its 500th anniversary last year 2016 and just observe that in the in coining the name the term utopia Thomas Moore was having a little joke he because utopia means both no place that is to say an impossible society to attain and also good place so it was having a little pun in the use of that term I'm just bear that in mind when you're listening to me so I don't know can you see these it's a little blurred but anyway this is somewhat maybe a bit boring slide but just reminding you last year of all the summits or at least some of the summits that took place supposedly to address the refugee and migration crisis which are other speakers were have been talking about no less than seven major international summits culminating in the the two summits in the US in September last year and as you know as a as you probably know as a result of that the UN is trying to steer the international community towards what they call global compacts on refugees and migrants and that these are to be agreed by the end of next year 2018 and we're now a year into that process and increasing skepticism I think is taking hold as to whether these compacts are going to have any real effect despite all the energy and effort being put into them nor is there much confidence that the three so-called durable solutions that is to say local integration in the society that refugees move to resettlement in another country further afield or return to their homeland once conflict is over there's not much confidence that the the so- called three durable solutions are up to the task in hand on the scale that's needed we're talking about 65 million people displaced worldwide there are all these various limit limitations on the exercise of the durable solutions which by the way only affect a small proportion or a small proportion of the displaced population are late are able to take advantage of the durable solutions most people displaced are in so-called protracted situations of displacement for years on end and so against this somewhat grim background perhaps and of course the perhaps the political limits are amongst the most prominent recently with the rise of illiberalism in Europe and North America and other places Turkey and so on and so against this background a number of radical not to say outlandish and sometimes bizarre proposals have emerged that attempt to resolve refugee and migration challenges and amongst these proposals are ideas for new nations cities new city states free zones and other kinds of haven for refugees that have been proposed and my colleague Robin Cohen and I have kind of reviewed these sometimes bizarre outlandish proposals and off very often the idea of islands come up in these proposals so I've just put up a few of the examples here I'm going to focus just in the interest of time on the last one this European Africa idea perhaps the most bizarre and entertaining example of of these ideas so this Dutch architect tail do it again proposes to build an artificial island for in between Tunisia and Italy on the shelf there and to form essentially a new nation a new island nation at this point that would accommodate people coming from North Africa on route to Europe neither they would move on or they would stay in this territory in his vision it would have its own constitution its own economy and and and so on and it will be under the protection of the European Union in this idea and he's kind of set up this kind of fantasy island idea I don't know if you can see it but there are components of different cities a bit of Oxford a bit of Timbuktu Casablanca Berlin and Rotterdam and so on bizarrely London Airport which I would not recommend as the best bit of London to have in his composite island but maybe you get get the idea so so these ideas have of course been dismissed by out of hand really by the refugee commentariat the migrant people like us I suppose and indeed islands and enclaves have a very bad press when we talk about migration it brings to mind now room on a silent Christmas Island Guantanamo Bay and so on examples or bringing associations of incarceration containment confinement and so on but we Robin Cohen and I we sort of thought we'd review these different ideas and see if in fact there was anything in them and what we've come up with is a rather different idea a transnational polity which we call Refugia hence the title so Refugia would not be a new nation state located on an island or other kind of singular territory but a transnational polity which we see as emerging from the connections built up by refugees and migrants themselves with the help of sympathizers and it would be kind of confederal in character and perhaps the best analogy is with a loosely connected archipelago not literally an archipelago but a metaphorical archipelago that brings together refugee communities in territories in conflict those neighboring conflicts and in foreign transit countries and refugees in more distant countries of settlement as we see it and we call this an exercise in pragmatic utopianism that's what we would like to call it Refugia would be the outcome of a grand bargain between richer states and emergent countries countries neighboring conflicts and crucially refugees themselves so the constituent territories of Refugia would in effect be licensed or tolerated by the nation states within whose territories they lie the constituent components of Refugia would be self-governing and eventually self-supporting and Refugia as a whole would be governed by a transnational virtual assembly elected by Refugeans from all the constituent components of the global polity there would be mobility amongst the different components of parts of Refugia so some Refugeans might live in discrete territories or spaces others could live side by side with citizens especially in large metropolitan cities moreover and this is a key point the citizens of so-called host territories and societies could become Refugeans if they wish so we envisage people from host societies somehow in the same way that's happening now with volunteer activism and so on joining to make this new community what about the economy well this would be build on the skills of Refugeans in digital commerce and services cultural and creative industries education and other fields Refugeans would pay taxes to the nation states within which they live within whose territories they live I should say but also to the wider Refugia polity and a portion of that latter revenue that contribution to the wider polity would be would provide support to less well-endowed parts of Refugia so there would be a means of cross subsidy among the differently endowed parts of Refugia so the upper shot would be that Refugeans would no longer be primarily the responsibility of the nation states that so-called hosts them but of a more diffuse entity Refugia it would be a pragmatic arrangement which can be seen as a kind of secession by mutual agreement so we see for that for their part states would see it is in their interest to shuffle off the displacement problem to be managed by the displaced themselves while the displaced and those seeking an alternative to illiberal societies would relish the prospect of a self-managed new society that they create themselves now I guess I know what you're thinking what the hell is this guy from Oxford going on about utopias and islands and transnational polities and some what what you know what on earth is this all about so it's utterly utopian in the sense of it's impossible right so now I'm going to strain your credulity further and suggest to you that Refugia already exists and it exists in the in prefigurative highly imperfect form especially in the transnational practices of refugees and migrants themselves and let me try to make the case for this argument so so in countries that have long hosted large numbers of refugees and will likely do so in the future some of them we've been already mentioned Jordan Turkey Lebanon Iran Pakistan in Middle East and South Asia Kenya Ethiopia and Uganda in Africa amongst many others in these these places refugees have established tenuous communities against the odds of challenging conditions and poor prospects and as you know we've again we've already heard these people these populations have links with more fortunate kin and friends in global cities further afield not just in the neighborhoods of New York London Berlin Toronto and so on but also in emergent countries places like Istanbul Cairo Nairobi Johannesburg Delhi Bangkok and so on many others in the emerging so-called emerging world where people diverse ethnicities and backgrounds are thrown together indeed in some cases the diasporic populations in metropolises outside the homeland are as large or larger than the populations in the so-called homeland so for example one population that I know one diaspora that I know quite well that and can Tamil diaspora in Toronto the Tamil population is at least double that of Jaffna which is the capital of of the Tamil part of Sri Lanka the cultural capital if you like so and one could say that this of many that the center of gravity of many diasporized populations is of this kind so in other words these despot diasporic communities already inhabit the kind of transnational space that we envisage as refugee so taken together people in these dispersed locations constitute mutually supportive transnational communities through their transnational connection their diasporic connections transnationalism is what displaced and dispersed people do to make a life worth living as for governance several diaspora groups have created transnational bodies that could serve as partial models of governance for refugee and in some cases they've held transnational virtual or transnational elections to feed into these representative bodies so again taking the Tamil case the Tamil the Tamil diaspora has set up what they call it a transnational government of Tamil elam that's the name for their homeland and that is involved elections in say about 15 countries where there are substantial Tamil populations held electronically and electing an assembly of Tamils worldwide as for finance I've already made reference to remittances by refugees to their troubled homelands and regions in effect a formal global redistribution of wealth akin to taxation I suppose in a way kind of redistribution which Sean referred to proto-refugee also exists in the realm of culture seen in the transnational mobility of art music dance dance language and support and a little example here if you remember the refugee team was recognized at the Rio Olympics in 2016 a very modest step in the big picture but a tacit recognition of a body of people outside the nation state outside of a nation-state affiliation and we can find many other examples of the way in which refugee is prefigured the ideas of refugee cities sanctuary cities free havens there are miniature examples which are I'll just highlight a couple of these one is the notion of a city of refuge in Barcelona now of course in turmoil but its progressive mayor set in motion a series of measures to welcome refugees so then we can go down to the to the miniature or the micro level to with some very interesting developments so for example the arch is fine pronouncing it correctly a small depopulated place in southern Italy where at the invitation of progressive minded mayor about 450 migrants drawn from more than 20 countries including many African countries have been housed in accommodation actually abandoned apartment blocks there so they now make up about a quarter of the villages total population and have breathed life into what was a declining depopulating community also significant are what have been or cross cross ethnic and cross national affinities that have emerged among people on the move and a couple of Greek scholars Dimitri Papadopoulos and Nikos Tzianos have come up with the idea of the mobile commons to describe this and by this they mean activities which bring together migrants and refugees drawn from different nationalities and ethnicities into to form ephemeral community so examples include the gatherings of refugees and migrants at choke points that to form temporary settlements with the help of supportive citizens such as the the jungle camp at Calais now defunct Ventimiglia on the France Italy border or Idomani camp on the border between Greece and Macedonia these communities that formed ephemeraly at these choke points of on the migration routes while often squalid and libel to demolition and arrest state oppression and so these kinds of community creation and reproduction through mutual aid among migrants on route aided by concerned host citizens we suggest constitute imperfect prototypes of refugee and another another small example Hotel Oniro is a an abandoned hotel in Athens that was occupied by activists and migrants and is now home to about 200 refugees who manage it themselves with the help of those activists citizens and perhaps appropriately that the word Oniro derives from the Greek to dream so back to utopia so camps and communities in countries neighboring conflicts neighborhoods in global cities transnational political practices and money transfers emergent communities and act activities in disparate locations on route initiatives by citizens and community groups all a fragments in disparate locations that taken separately don't seem to promise much but in the aggregate we suggest they add up to something like refugee a imperfectly prefigured and consolidating them into a common transnational polity might prove to be a way out of the current impasse so in our vision our utopian vision our pragmatic utopian vision refugee year will come about incrementally and cumulatively by the collective activity of refugees and sympathetic citizens organizing in the interstices of the nation-state system and in the international migration governance architecture so refugee will be essentially self-organized and self-managed requiring neither political nor cultural conformity but simple agreement on principles and deeds of mutual aid so critics will no doubt dub this vision utopian in fact they already do and we accept that jibe of you like that with the qualification that refugee year embodies this pragmatic utopianism which squares the apparently contradictory and at times antagonistic interests of host states and refugees so Viva Refugia