Transnational blindness: international institutions and refugees’ cross-border activities
The Dollo Ado refugee camps, located close to the Ethiopian-Somali border, have been a major focus for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR)’s attempts to build livelihoods for refugees and the host community. The context presents an analytical puzzle: despite the importance of cross-border acti...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Journal article |
| Language: | English |
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Cambridge University Press
2021
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| _version_ | 1826285745259675648 |
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| author | Betts, A Omata, N Sterck, O |
| author_facet | Betts, A Omata, N Sterck, O |
| author_sort | Betts, A |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | The Dollo Ado refugee camps, located close to the Ethiopian-Somali border, have been a major
focus for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR)’s attempts to build livelihoods for
refugees and the host community. The context presents an analytical puzzle: despite the
importance of cross-border activity to refugees’ socio-economic lives, such transnational
activity has been institutionally invisible to and hindered by the international agencies seeking
to assist them. The article explores how and why refugees’ cross-border activities have been
systematically ignored by international institutions. As a theoretical starting point, it draws
upon the post-development literature, and notably the work of James Ferguson, which explores
how international institutions frequently misunderstand the agency and strategies of their
subject populations. However, contra Ferguson’s predominantly Foucauldian methodological
and epistemologically approach, the article adopts a mixed methods approach, and emphasises
the agency of aid workers, bureaucratic politics, and political economy in its account of the
disjuncture between international institutions’ state-centric livelihoods programmes and
refugees’ own cross-border economic strategies. |
| first_indexed | 2024-03-07T01:33:25Z |
| format | Journal article |
| id | oxford-uuid:9454fdc9-279a-4218-81e1-2d5e8868060d |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-07T01:33:25Z |
| publishDate | 2021 |
| publisher | Cambridge University Press |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:9454fdc9-279a-4218-81e1-2d5e8868060d2022-03-26T23:38:50ZTransnational blindness: international institutions and refugees’ cross-border activitiesJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:9454fdc9-279a-4218-81e1-2d5e8868060dEnglishSymplectic ElementsCambridge University Press2021Betts, AOmata, NSterck, OThe Dollo Ado refugee camps, located close to the Ethiopian-Somali border, have been a major focus for the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR)’s attempts to build livelihoods for refugees and the host community. The context presents an analytical puzzle: despite the importance of cross-border activity to refugees’ socio-economic lives, such transnational activity has been institutionally invisible to and hindered by the international agencies seeking to assist them. The article explores how and why refugees’ cross-border activities have been systematically ignored by international institutions. As a theoretical starting point, it draws upon the post-development literature, and notably the work of James Ferguson, which explores how international institutions frequently misunderstand the agency and strategies of their subject populations. However, contra Ferguson’s predominantly Foucauldian methodological and epistemologically approach, the article adopts a mixed methods approach, and emphasises the agency of aid workers, bureaucratic politics, and political economy in its account of the disjuncture between international institutions’ state-centric livelihoods programmes and refugees’ own cross-border economic strategies. |
| spellingShingle | Betts, A Omata, N Sterck, O Transnational blindness: international institutions and refugees’ cross-border activities |
| title | Transnational blindness: international institutions and refugees’ cross-border activities |
| title_full | Transnational blindness: international institutions and refugees’ cross-border activities |
| title_fullStr | Transnational blindness: international institutions and refugees’ cross-border activities |
| title_full_unstemmed | Transnational blindness: international institutions and refugees’ cross-border activities |
| title_short | Transnational blindness: international institutions and refugees’ cross-border activities |
| title_sort | transnational blindness international institutions and refugees cross border activities |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT bettsa transnationalblindnessinternationalinstitutionsandrefugeescrossborderactivities AT omatan transnationalblindnessinternationalinstitutionsandrefugeescrossborderactivities AT stercko transnationalblindnessinternationalinstitutionsandrefugeescrossborderactivities |