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"Vulnerability in Contexts of Flight" - A critical analysis of multiple aspects of vulnerability among refugees

1/12/2021

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By Josef Kohlbacher & Maria Six-Hohenbalken

As Agier (2011, 158) has aptly put it, "all refugees are vulnerable". The concept of vulnerability fulfils a central function: it serves to identify groups that need targeted support and special protection. In its practical application, however, the concept has ambivalent effects. Used as a "label" that establishes unequal power relations, it neglects existing heterogeneity/s within groups and may lead to an underestimation of the groups' capacity to act. In what follows, we present how our recently published volume entitled Vulnerability in Contexts of Flight advances the discussion on this topic.
 
Initially applied to risk and disaster studies, the conceptualisation of vulnerability was subsequently taken up and elaborated on by various disciplines. Owing to its application in politics, as well as in guidelines and indicator systems in International Organizations (UNHCR; WHO), the concept has gained additional weight. On the down side, there are some inherent pitfalls to the multiplicity of approaches, applications and discourses and the resulting centrifugal tendencies. In addition to discordant academic approaches, we have to take tendencies of compartmentalization, pathologization and victimization into account.
 
Vulnerability includes two components: inherent and situational factors. The former refer to aspects that are quasi-inherent to human nature, i.e. a social or affective dependency on other people, basic life needs based on our biological nature, such as those for food supply, physical or psychological integrity, recreation, etc. The latter refer to the need to cope with the challenges of life. By contrast, "situational vulnerability" is context-specific and is influenced by social, political, economic or environmental determinants. These have an inherent temporal component and can be effective in the short, medium or long term. There is a legal definition that stipulates which people particularly need protection. According to Art. 21 of the EU Reception Directive (Directive 2013/33/EU), these are in particular (unaccompanied) minors, people with disabilities, people with serious physical or mental illnesses, pregnant women, single parents, victims of human trafficking, torture or psychological, physical and sexual violence, as well as older people. Furthermore, LGBTIQ refugees are in particular need of protection.
 
Its relational aspects aside, the concept presupposes the vulnerability of refugees as a given characteristic. Yet, the social construction of vulnerability and the mechanisms of creating and/or denying the ability to act need to be addressed from a scholarly and socio-political perspective. This approach brings social environments, framework conditions, networks, institutions, organisations and discourses into focus. It is necessary to investigate the factors that enable, force or deny the ability of refugees to act. Furthermore, the entitlement of all refugees to universal rights and to social participation must be considered. The rights and needs of refugees and their inclusion in the host societies constitute the uniting theme of all the contributions in this volume.
 
In addition to highlighting specific problems pertaining to the vulnerability of certain groups of refugees, this volume presents preventive measures geared to promote resilience - i.e. the ability to cope with extreme life crises - and to prevent the development of clinical symptoms of illness. All the authors aim to make visible and give voice to the concerns of refugees who are by definition "vulnerable", be they women, LGBTIQ, people with mental illness or people who do not fall into these categorisations, such as young men and fragmented families. A further intention is to pursue an inter- or transdisciplinary orientation and to point out the challenges for practitioners in refugee work. The authors illustrate the conceptual issues confronting the endeavour to shift the focus to those people for whom fleeing and being a refugee poses special and additional challenges due to age, gender, illness/health, social contexts, etc. The concept of vulnerability is also a challenge for practitioners in refugee work. We attempt to show that the status of being a refugee does not come to an end with a positive asylum decision. The fragmentation of families, problems in family reunification, the long-term consequences of the refugee experience, political violence and torture are factors that perpetuate individual vulnerability. Vulnerability cannot be captured by legal definitions alone. It is the intersectionality of different factors that brings further vulnerabilities to light.
 
The Contributions in Detail
Monika Mokre deals with the vulnerability of young male refugees. She pursues two analytical goals. Firstly, she shows that discourses on the vulnerability of migrants and the hazards they face do not contradict but complement each other. Secondly, she elucidates the specific gender reference of these discourses, which in effect exclude young refugee men from support services. Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek's contribution is dedicated to the emergence of the vulnerability paradigm and its implementation. Although the term is omnipresent in international as well as national discourses, there is as yet no consensus on to whom and how the term is applied. The author presents the different definitions and approaches based on an inherent or a situational understanding of vulnerability and discusses the legal instruments of operational refugee protection. Sabine Bauer-Amin and Maria Six-Hohenbalken focus on transformations in the family relationships of refugees from Syria. Experiences of flight cause ambivalences and phases of liminality with regard to spatial and temporal factors. The authors use examples from interviews with refugees from Syria to show how family structures, which are anyhow constantly evolving, change in the context of flight. Refuge not only causes a fragmentation of families, but also promotes their denucleation, which as a major consequence leads to efforts to maintain family relationships on a larger scale despite considerable spatial distances. Josef Kohlbacher analyses the resident mobility of refugees from Afghanistan within Austria in the field of tension between determinants of vulnerability and the structural integration opportunities on the housing market. Most refugees prefer to live in an urban setting. As a result, those entitled to asylum, tend to migrate to Vienna. However, this hardly corresponds to a realistic assessment of the real opportunities on the urban labour and housing market, which is analysed in the article. Lena Siemers deals with the situation of Nigerian women who have become victims of human trafficking and forced prostitution. In the course of psychosocial counselling in 2018 and 2019, the author supported numerous trafficked persons and learned about their fates. On the basis of the experience of a young woman sold into prostitution via Libya to France and then to Germany, she describes the practices of human trafficking and the numerous mechanisms of sexual exploitation and oppression young women from Nigeria are exposed to. The text by Serdar Arslan, Cécile Balbous and Magdalena Mach from Queer Base Vienna is dedicated to LGBTIQ refugees, and their specific problems between vulnerability and self-empowerment in the Austrian asylum system. LGBTIQ are exposed to various forms of discrimination, especially to social and institutional racism. In particular, they find themselves in the difficult situation of having to perform their sexual orientation within a normative framework that offers no space for otherness. This contribution examines the socio-political (and legal) situation of LGBTIQ refugees from a perspective grounded in activist practice. Klaus Mihacek and Martin Stepanek of the Psychosocial Centre ESRA (Hebrew for “aid”) analyse the requirements of psychosocial care models for the treatment of trauma sequelae in the context of flight and migration. In psychotraumatology, "trauma" is understood as a physical and psychological reaction to situations of extraordinary threat or of a catastrophic scale that would trigger profound despair in almost any person. The authors describe the requirements that arise for the psychosocial care of migrants, asylum seekers and refugees. Thomas Wenzel and Reem Alksiri from the World Psychiatric Association, Scientific Section on Psychological Aspects of Torture and Persecution and CEHRI (The Centre for the Enforcement of Human Rights International) reflect on the many aspects of torture and human rights in an interdisciplinary framework. They emphasise that safeguarding such essential human rights as protection from torture and care for survivors and relatives hinges on an interdisciplinary cooperation bringing together health professionals, lawyers and cultural anthropologists and offering public support for those affected. Ursula Trummer and Sonja Novak-Zezula of the Center for Health and Migration (Vienna) discuss aspects of “irregular migration”. How to offer health care for persons who have migrated to Austria without a valid legal status? Their contribution analyses the results of a study conducted in four EU member states on the economic costs of care for these migrants, comparing primary care and emergency hospital care. The volume includes interviews with two experts on refugee work. One is with Peter Sarto, who works for the Office of the Ombudsman for Children and Young People (Kinder- und Jugendanwaltschaft, KJA), which also attends to the needs of minors living in socio-pedagogical institutions. In the second interview, Ali Gedik reports on his experiences in caring for unaccompanied minor refugees. 
 
The overall aim of the volume is to critically discuss the concept of vulnerability and to provide an overview of the theories associated with it. Of particular concern are the emergence of vulnerability, its differentiations in the context of flight and migration, the danger of instrumentalization, as well as its practical implications. Vulnerability in Contexts of Flight offers conceptual and functional perspectives on this complex phenomenon and provides an overview of the specific practice-related tasks confronting the respective experts. In the context of flight, vulnerability occurs in many different forms, and the resulting consequences for refugees are just as diverse. We plead for a critical reflection on the social and legal framework and its impact on the perpetuation of vulnerability of refugees in the host societies. In politics, the great potential and skills of refugees tend to be overlooked. Institutionally, sustained efforts need to be made to promote and develop the agency of refugees, not only for their own benefit, but also for the benefit of the host societies.
 
 
References
 
Agier, Michel 2011: Managing the Undesirables. Refugee Camps and Humanitarian Government. Cambridge.
 
Kohlbacher, Josef; Six-Hohenbalken, Maria 2020: Vulnerabilität in Fluchtkontexten. ISR Forschungsberichte 53. Wien: ÖAW Verlag.

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MMag. DDr.Josef Kohlbacher,  born 09-05-1958 in Lilienfeld (Lower Austria); graduations in social and cultural anthropology, sociology, German philology, history and Egyptology at the University of Vienna; 1984-1987 researcher at the Vienna Museum of Anthropology (Dept. India and the Himalaya regions), field work in Northern and Central India and in Egypt; since 1988 senior researcher at the Institute of Urban and Regional Research of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, since 2006 deputy director; main research interests: labour and housing market integration of immigrants, municipal integration policies, interethnic relations in urban neighbourhoods, residential segregation, refugee studies.

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Dr. Maria Six-Hohenbalken is Deputy Director of the Institute for Social Anthropology at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and Lecturer in the Department for Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna. Her fields of interest include political violence, migration, refuge, memory studies, transnationalism and diaspora studies, and historical anthropology. She coedited Memory and Genocide: On What Remains and the Possibility of Representation (2017) with Fazil Moradi and Ralph Buchenhorst. Her latest publication is “Silencing the Periphery—Dealing with a Fateful Past in Transnational Spaces" in Archiv Orientální 12(20). Email: maria.six-hohenbalken@oeaw.ac.at
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Spaces of Transregional Aid and Visual Politics in Lebanon*

11/23/2020

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By Estella Carpi

… Everyone was there and wanted their logo to be known… it’s a brand. And in the July 2006 war [of Israel on Lebanon] there were definitely more international brands than ever.
(Author’s interview with the Manager of the Social Development Centre, Office of the Ministry of Social Affairs, ash-Shiyyah, Beirut, October 30, 2011)

The visuality of symbols, buildings, and icons can powerfully mark spaces and make such spaces political, culturally oriented, spiritual, and even human. In times of crisis, it is particularly employed to exhibit the presence of humanitarian work. However, such a visuality can take different forms, and humanitarian logos are only one means of expression. Humanitarian logos communicate to the public that the labelled organizations are there assisting the needy, alleviating their predicament, witnessing human suffering, or rescuing lives. During the years I spent researching aid in Lebanon (2010-2020), people have often spoken of the ‘war of logos’ to emphasize the competition between different humanitarian actors intervening in crisis-stricken areas. 

In such areas, where migrants and refugees often reside, new local understandings of physical space have arisen. However, aid-marked spaces across Lebanon are not only relevant in the time of war or post-war. In this blog post, I show how they can become stable hubs of human trust and reciprocity, a normal part of everyday life, inviting dwellers to rethink these spaces of coexistence. Aid, therefore, going beyond official humanitarianism, turns out to be a politics of space, changing people’s perceptions of the places they have known for long and inducing them to rethink their spatial margins.

​After the arrival of refugees from Syria (2011), the aid coming into Lebanon from the Arab Gulf increased, involving both in-kind assistance (i.e. food and school material kits) and cash-based programmes. Traditionally, Islamic charity work objects to iconic politics, adducing Prophet Mohammed’s hadith “the left hand does not see what the right hand gives” (la ta‘lamu shamaluhu bima tunfiqu yaminahu). However, some Arab Muslim philanthropists provide humanitarian aid by making their relief provision visible and, at times, even displaying their own face, their national flag, and their logos. Individual philanthropists in the Arab Gulf often opt to show the national flag and the faces of charity founders.
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Aid distribution by Khalaf Ahmed al-Habtour Foundation (United Arab Emirates) in an Akkar village, North Lebanon. March 2019.
​During my most recent fieldwork for the Southern-led Responses to Displacement project in North Lebanon, many Syrian refugees emphasised that they do not support the politics of some foreign governments in the Syrian conflict and, at times, are reluctant to accept the donations. A Syrian refugee friend told me in Bebnin in the spring of 2019, “We’re using the plates with the Saudi logo to show you we are given this stuff… but we normally don’t like using them as we don’t think Saudi politics helped Syrians in any way…”.
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Saudi Arabia NGO’s plates for Syrian refugees. Bebnin, Akkar. March 2019.
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Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s symbol on jumpers. Kweishra, Akkar. April 2019.
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School bags distribution from Saudi Arabia. Al-Bireh, Akkar. March 2019.
​NGOs and UN agencies from the ‘global North’ similarly use logos to mark their humanitarian space, although the space is often shared with other humanitarian actors. I often met refugees who stressed how ephemeral and punctuated (appearing, disappearing, and reappearing over time) humanitarian assistance is: humanitarian logos always remain there, while aid workers show up to provide help only once in a while. Beneficiaries generally interpret logos negatively, as a sign of an increasingly prominent humanitarian-business nexus where assistance needs to be branded to be funded and supported. Yet some refugees I spoke to view the logos positively, as they visually convey the politics that relegate their lives to the margins and make their living conditions precarious and unjust. Such acts of ‘self-visibilization’ enable people in need to battle against the discriminatory and unequal politics of some aid providers.
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UNICEF’s and Solidarités International’s logos on the toilet of an informal tented settlement (one for more than a hundred people) in an Akkar hamlet. March 2019.
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UNHCR tarp covering construction material in front of al-Bahsa new mosque in Akkar, North Lebanon. March 2018.
​Logos also inform us about the cooperation between humanitarian agencies which, generally, we would not associate with each other, such as Polish Aid and Australian Aid co-funding a dispensary for Syrian refugees and vulnerable local residents in the village of al-Bireh in North Lebanon.
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Ophthalmology clinic in Bireh, Akkar. March 2019.
​Spaces of aid are usually remembered by the nationality of the funders, whose logos - often displaying their national flag even for non-governmental funding - are placed on street signs, entrance gates, and indoor walls.
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Turkish government-funded clinic in Kweishra, North Lebanon. March 2019.
​In the sign above it is evident that the funding for what is commonly known in Kweishra (Akkar) as the “Turkish hospital” (al-mustashfa al-turki) is a donation from the Turkish state to the Lebanese state. However, the local residents and Syrian Arab refugees point out that only Turkmen Syrian refugees and a small number of Turkmen Lebanese have access to this clinic.
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The Kuwaiti NGO “The Doors of Goodness Foundation” (jama‘iyyat mu’assasat abuwab al-kheir), assisting Syrian refugees, shows the national flag. Halba, North Lebanon. February 2019.
Beneficiary communities sometimes speak about humanitarian symbols with criticism and question their aid and service provision. A Syrian refugee woman from Homs who relocated to a border village in Lebanon highlighted that rent and medications were the primary needs of her family and community in Lebanon. At a time when e-food ration cards[1] had not been introduced yet, she told me with sarcasm, “I came from Syria to get packages of bread in Lebanon… I don’t give a damn about their ‘grains of hope’: it’s 2,000 Lebanese Lira… I can pay for it. Why don’t they provide medications and cash for rent instead? They provide what is easier for them” (Wadi Khaled, January 29, 2013).
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Mercy Corps bread distribution in Wadi Khaled, Akkar. November 2012.
New local understandings of physical space have arisen in areas newly inhabited by migrants and refugees. For instance, in the economically disadvantaged district of Dinniye, local residents told me they used to identify the Emirs’ Castle Hotel (Funduq Qasr al-Umara’) as the luxurious holiday resort for tourists from the Arab Gulf. From 2012 onward, with the arrival of Syrian refugee families, local people conceptualised the area as a hotspot of “relief for the left-behind” (al-ighatha li’l ma‘zulin), where refugees collect aid provided by the Arab Gulf and are temporarily accommodated. 
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Aid distribution for Syrian refugees at the Qasr al-Umara’ Hotel, Dinniye, Lebanon. April 2019.
Aid-marked spaces across Lebanon are not only relevant in the time of war or post-war: they can remain stable hubs of human trust and reciprocity, a normal part of everyday life. The Beit Atfal as-Sumud in the Palestinian refugee camp Shatila in Beirut’s southern suburbs[2] represents a point of call for Palestinian dwellers, providing education, play activities, and medical support and referring beneficiaries to other NGOs and specialistic services. During my visits since 2011, I realized the employees are more trusted than the United Nations Refugee Works Agency (UNRWA)’s services.[3] The Beit is the spatialization of the most effective aid in the neighbourhood, as known by other migrant and refugee groups who inhabit the area.
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Entrance of Beit Atfal as-Sumud in Shatila, Beirut. September 2011.
​A large number of Syrian refugees in rural and peri-urban Lebanon reside in informal tented settlements (ITS) built on pieces of land on the side of public roads, which they need to rent from landowners, rent apartments or occupy empty depots in urban settings. Sometimes, families who were not even acquainted to each other before arriving in Lebanon end up living in the same household to be able to share expenses and make ends meet. A Lebanese resident from the city of Halba contended, “Once we know in which buildings the refugees live, we tend to avoid those areas.” We thus see new borderscapes (Lebuhn, 2013) in the making, where new margins, although not physically marked, emerge in the environment.
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Building rented to Syrian refugees. South Lebanon governorate. July 2016.
Some spaces are neither marked by NGO logos nor emerge as official spaces of aid provision in the public sphere. Yet, within local communities, they are understood as places where aid is likely to be given. Hairdressing and beauty salons for Ethiopian migrant workers became important points of call to weave support networks and exchange resources between Lebanon and Ethiopia or other African countries. Indeed, in Bourj Hammoud[4], African migrant workers from different national backgrounds said they frequent the same places where it is possible for them to gather information and seek support from other social groups or their countries of origin, beyond their own national belonging.
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Ethiopian hairdressing salon in Bourj Hammoud, Beirut. February 2019.
​Football in Lebanon is known to be an activity people are passionate about, a way of connecting them to the world outside, and also a reason for gatherings and social mingling. National flags of other countries are often used to show support to national football teams. However, during my research in Lebanon, I realized there is sometimes a more complex story about the different national symbols exhibited in public space. A Lebanese Armenian family in Bourj Hammoud told me how they not only support Brazil in football world leagues, but they also cherish the generosity of their relatives who resettled in Brazil in the 1970s and sent material and moral support during the Lebanese civil war (1975-90). Showing the Brazil flag outside their balcony became a way to show their gratefulness. 
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Brazilian flag outside the balcony of a Lebanese Armenian family in Bourj Hammoud, Beirut. February 2019.
​Similarly, a taxi driver, in the municipality of Minieh in North Lebanon, spoke of Argentina not only as his favourite football team in the world leagues, but also as the place which welcomed and supported him, his family and friends during the 1980s. After returning to Lebanon after the end of the civil war, he still preserves his childhood memories of Argentina and hopes his own children will get to know the country at some stage.
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Sticker of Argentina on a taxi cab in Minieh, North Lebanon. April 2019.
​Humanitarian aid, ultimately, turns out to be a politics of space. It changes people’s perceptions of the places they have known for long and induces them to rethink their spatial margins. Moreover, the material manifestations of aid are not exclusively to be found on logos and brands that indicate distribution spots or offices. Symbols, material objects and shops can give rise to different aid imaginaries. While those who believe in a no-profit humanitarianism commonly criticize the logo-marked bond between aid provision and business, alternative spaces of aid do not need to be marked by logos, as they are the result of entangled stories, personal relationships, and transregional trajectories of human support. Intimate memories do not need logos to have their presence acknowledged; it is generally in people’s mental spaces that they are preserved. 
Notes

[1]
 At the outset of the Syrian refugee influx into Lebanon (2011-12), many of the ‘global North’s’ humanitarian actors were reluctant to provide cash assistance to refugees, preferring to prioritise the delivery of food, medical, and other items. In 2013 e-food ration cards began to be distributed to refugee households, replacing the old food vouchers. Also, over the last few years, especially after the 2015 Lebanon Crisis Response Plan, NGOs and UN agencies agreed on reducing the delivery of in-kind assistance in order to enhance cash assistance. Nowadays, Arab Gulf funded NGOs in Lebanon mostly provide material aid, such as mattresses and food, and, during Ramadan, iftar baskets and dates.
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[2] Established in 1984 after the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacres.

[3] UNWRA services are seen as decreasingly sympathetic with the Palestinian cause.

[4] An independent municipality located at the East of Beirut, historically marked by the Armenian forced migration, and today populated by different migrant groups.


* 
This research has been conducted in the framework of the project "Analyzing South-South Humanitarian Responses to Displacement from Syria: Views from Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey", funded by the European Research Council under the Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation agreement no. 715582".
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Estella Carpi is a Research Associate in the Migration Research Unit (Department of Geography) at University College London, where she works on Southern-led responses to displacement from Syria in Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan. She received her PhD in Anthropology of Humanitarianism from the University of Sydney in Australia (2015). After studying Arabic in Milan and Damascus (2002-2008), she worked in several academic and research institutions in Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. She is an instructor of Humanitarian Studies and Anthropology of the Middle East at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. She is the author of Specchi Scomodi. Etnografia delle Migrazioni Forzate nel Libano Contemporaneo, published in Italian with Mimesis (2018). Estella is a 2020-25 Global Young Academy Member. She can be contacted at: e.carpi@ucl.ac.uk.  

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Thinking of Environmental Migration through Translocality and Mobilities

10/30/2020

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By Daniela Paredes Grijalva and Rachael Diniega


Environmental Migration: From Threat to Everyday Experience
Millions of “climate refugees” fleeing drought on their way to Europe or Pacific islanders left with no sovereign territory as sea level rises. Does this sound familiar? Certainly such imagery representing the “human face of climate change” has been successful in gaining public attention to urge immediate action. At the same time, national security policymakers and think-tanks in the receiving countries tend to perceive such mass migration as a threat. Following this securitization logic, nation-states see the need to protect themselves against it. 
 
Migration scholars have countered such “alarmists” by classifying the phenomenon as a routine and integral aspect of a complex web of migration experiences. (Non-)migration decisions range from forced to voluntary, and most movements initiated by environmental changes or disasters will be short-distance, temporary, or within countries. As framings of environmental migration have gained in fluidity and scope, the nuances have been illuminated further through multidisciplinary research spanning the social and natural sciences. We argue that environmental migration demands more refined attention, particularly from the viewpoint of policymaking, in order to move from a logic of protection against migrants to one of protecting them and their human rights.
 
Securitization paints a simplistic picture. We argue that two particular concepts--translocality and (im)mobility--point towards new directions in understanding the fabric of human-environment relations. We have both begun our doctoral projects researching different aspects of this issue in Morocco and Indonesia. In this essay, we set out to illustrate our preliminary findings on how to expand our conceptualization of environmental migration. Only by capturing the everyday yet complex realities of migrants themselves can we lay a foundation for expanding measures geared towards the protection of human rights that accurately address their situation.
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Fig. 01: Rural town in the Middle Atlas Mountains, Morocco
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Integrating Translocality into Environmental Migration
The existing research on environmental migration has widened the conceptual spectrum beyond such dichotomies and categorizations like forced or voluntary, the number of “climate refugees,” and the singling out of isolated reasons for migration. However, strict divisions persist, two of which can be addressed by the concept of translocality. First, current research on climate change and migration primarily focuses on the question of how climate change will affect human migration and emphasizes the urgency for mitigating climate change. Second, in part due to the concept of a unidirectional flow of environment to migration, studies also assume divisions between origin and destination and prioritize rural-to-urban migration.
 
Broadly defined, the concept of translocality examines the environment and migration as part of the integrated socio-ecological system (Greiner & Sakdapolrak 2013). Rather than looking at migration as a sudden or new phenomenon driven by singular or multiple factors, it assumes that migration (or mobilities) also occurs as a natural part of life trajectories. The existing movements have an impact on the environment, which also in turn affects future migration decisions and perceptions of climate change. They are intricately linked. Thus, translocality integrates the human-environment nexus to examine how environmental factors influence mobility and how mobility itself influences the environment. This directly counters the security narrative that environmental change in place A automatically leads to migration to place B, end of story. Rather, there are ongoing migration pathways and mobilities that occur parallel to or in conjunction with environmental changes and create them. 
 
Translocality also upends the strict categorization of origin, transit, and destination by facilitating the study of multi-directional connections and the mutual (re-)shaping of communities. It challenges the assumption that environmental change is only happening in the place of “origin”, often coded as rural or domestic, versus the destination, often connoted as urban or international. A singular place is connected to others translocally through multiple types of simultaneous mobilities. More often than not, people are not only moving from a location; they are also moving to it or passing through. The localities in question may be rural, semi-urban, or urban. And, returning to the earlier point, each of these location’s environments is affected by each type of mobility and has its own environment that factors into mobility decisions and trajectories.
 
Translocality thus is a concept that can illuminate the complexity within the environment-migration web. It offers further insights into the ways in which migration has an impact on the environment and moves away from the boundaries of origin, transit, and destination. 
 
Towards an Environment-(Im)Mobility Nexus
Looking at the nexus of environment and migration has too often been framed as a matter of international border crossings by people affected by some environmental crisis. While this is certainly a significant part of the issue, we argue that focusing on the physical movement of people per se obscures the numerous other relevant facets. For instance, it does not allow to adequately understand how the populations in question and the environment mutually constitute each other. What is more, it might project a migrant subjectivity on people living translocal lives. 
 
Migration studies have established that there are multiple factors driving migration and that it may also take multiple trajectories.  The (im)mobilities approach builds on these findings and expands the scope of study to include the circulation of ideas, things, and people in everyday life. It further attempts to problematize the notions of forced and voluntary migration by applying anthropology’s holistic view of lived experience. Using mobilities as a concept, ethnographic research has revealed how people, places, things and ideas become connected across time and space. 
 
While notions of mobility are abundant in anthropological inquiry, sociologists and geographers have led the way for a mobilities turn in the social sciences. Anthropologists have in turn pointed out that the very same processes shaping mobility also produce immobility and exclusion (Cunningham & Heyman 2004). Critical anthropological approaches questioning notions of boundedness and sedentary biases—which privilege non-migration--have expanded our perception of human movements. 
 
The analysis through the perspective of regimes of mobility on a global scale can illuminate the forces at play (Glick Schiller & Salazar 2013). The regimes are embedded in particular environments and in social structures and articulations of power at different levels. Thinking of environmental migration in these terms could help us frame the movement of people in the context of environmental change in relation to power asymmetries from the start. What is more, this framework could help us understand how ideas of environmental change and ideas of migration circulate across translocal networks. 
 
Moving Away from Securitization to Human Rights
We feel that it is paramount to gain a holistic understanding of the social and the environmental questions involved in migration. Ultimately, however, the issue of environmental migration is about people, as SarahLouise Nash (2018) reminds us. While it has been important to gain public attention, there is the apprehension that high-profile discussions may instrumentalize statistical projections to inspire fear. Will a translocal and mobilities lens on environmental migration enable us to understand the ways in which people exercise their human rights? Will such a conceptualization shift the debate away from hardline positions advocating securitization and restrictive migration policies? 
 
The human rights community has connected the impact of climate change on human rights and human migration since the advocacy of Small Island Developing States to the Human Rights Council in the 2000s. Human rights narratives on environmental migration often focus on the gap within international protection instruments. They refer to the fact that the Geneva Convention of 1951 does not include environmental factors as grounds for refugee status. In short, there are no legal “climate refugees.” Some actors like the International Organization for Migration, the UN Human Rights Council Special Procedures, and specialized organizations on internal and disaster displacement have raised awareness on the need to consider existing guiding principles and regulations for internal displacement. The acknowledgement of environmental migration in the landmark Paris Climate Agreement COP21 and the Global Compact for Migration reveals an evolving consensus among international actors in the highest levels of climate negotiations and international migration governance respectively. What exactly a human rights-based approach means for environmental migration, however, remains an ongoing task.
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Fig. 02: On the move in Eastern Indonesia
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Our Projects
The relationship between everyday translocal (im)mobilities, climate change, and human rights is understudied. Both migration and environmental studies show us that the underlying reasons are complex and difficult to pinpoint. At the same time, against this backdrop, it is important to consider that there are ongoing debates at a conceptual and a practical level on the rights of this diverse group of people in international law. By adopting the lens of translocal mobilities, our projects will contribute to identifying which rights are exercised or restricted.
 
For the case of the Central Sulawesi populations displaced during the triple disaster of September 2018 (earthquake, soil liquefaction, and tsunami), a security-based analysis would focus on how to regulate the lives of hundreds of thousands of displaced people to keep order in the relocation sites. Our proposed framework, by contrast, suggests the necessity of investigating how mobilities are shaped by at times long-lasting translocal networks across our field sites. In terms of human rights, the most pressing issues are access to health, housing, and decent work in a sphere not governed by sedentarist rights-granting schemes.  
 
To understand the effect of migration on the environment in Morocco, a securitization approach would emphasize the importance of regulating migration to minimize harm to the environment (and thus prevent further environmental migration). The approach highlighting translocal mobilities, by contrast, would reveal how migration and environmental change interact in non-linear mechanisms and thus which environment- and migration-related human rights are of key concern. This would build a foundation for the inclusion of human rights and local environmental changes in the study of translocal mobilities, allowing us to gain an understanding of which human rights advocacy paths best fit the realities on-the-ground.
 
Final Remarks
To tackle the urgent and multidimensional issue of environmental migration both for policy and academia, collaboration across disciplines is essential to do justice to affected peoples. We wish to move beyond a migration management or securitization view towards a path that listens to people’s stories and asks questions about the realization of human rights. We suggest that cross-disciplinary inclusion of these framings of translocality and mobilities into each of our research projects will add much-needed perspectives for an ethically grounded representation of the people we meet and the realities of their everyday lives. Whether tackling displacement in Indonesia or the effects of migration on the Moroccan environment, translocal mobilities provide a useful framework of analysis and synthesis disentangling the underlying complexity of our dissertation projects. These representational descriptions could then contribute as a lens for developing a human rights-based approach for environmental migration.

 
References

Cunningham, Hilary, & Heyman, Josiah (2004). Introduction: Mobilities and Enclosures at Borders, 11:3, 289-302, DOI: 10.1080/10702890490493509.
 
Glick Schiller, Nina, & Salazar, Noel B. (2013). Regimes of Mobility Across the Globe. In Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39 (2), pp. 183–200.
 
Greiner, Clemens & Sakdapolrak, Patrick. (2013). Translocality: Concepts, Applications, and Emerging Research Perspectives. Geography Compass 7(5), 373-384.
 
Nash, Sarah Louise. (2018). Between rights and resilience: Struggles over understanding climate change and human mobility. In: Labonte, M; Mills, K (Eds), Human Rights and Justice. Philosophical, Economic, and Social Perspectives; Routledge, London. ISBN 9781138036789.
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​Daniela Paredes Grijalva is a researcher and DOC Fellow at the Institute for Social Anthropology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. For her PhD project in anthropology at University of Vienna she will investigate how (im)mobilities relate to environmental change in Indonesia. In the past she has worked on social protection, migration, human rights and gender. Read more about her work here.  

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8217-9803 

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​​Rachael Diniega is studying for her PhD in Geography as a project assistant at the Research Platform Mobile Cultures and Societies, University of Vienna. She will be conducting multi-sited research in Morocco on the effect of translocal social remittances on the environment. Her interests build from an international background in sustainable development and human rights. Read more about her work here.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7324-4749 

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