Building "resilience" to insecurity and crisis is high on the European Union (EU) agenda. EU uptake of this buzzword is especially significant with regard to migration and forced displacement. Uncertainty, however, remains about what resilience is, how it translates into practice, and what its implications are. In this article, we analyze EU humanitarian and development policies and provide empirical insight into resilience-building in Jordan and Lebanon. We show that EU resilience thinking highlights strengthening the humanitariandevelopment nexus, responsibilizing crisis-affected states, and framing refugees as an economic development opportunity for refugee-hosting states. We also find that how resilience translates into practice depends on the local context and interests of the actors involved. For the EU, resilience-building is primarily a refugee containment strategy that could jeopardize the stability of refugee-hosting states. We conclude that resilience-building in Jordan and Lebanon may ultimately threaten rather than safeguard the security of Europe. KEYWORDS Resilience; European Union; humanitarian aid; development; migration; forced displacement Almost nine years into the Syria crisis, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) has registered over 5.6 million Syrian refugees (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2019). Although many have made the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean to reach Europe, most refugees remain in Syria's neighboring countries, notably Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. The European Union (EU) has taken up migration and displacement as key security challenges in the 2016 EU Global Strategy for Foreign and Security Policy. In particular, the EU has turned to building the
Little is known about how the idea of ‘resilience’ translates into practice. It has nonetheless emerged as a dominant theme in the governance of crises, such as political instability, armed conflict, terrorism, and large-scale refugee movements. This study draws on interviews with humanitarian and development practitioners in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon working under the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan to explore how resilience is interpreted and translated on the ground. Results suggest that resilience is translated as the economic self-reliance of refugees, and the capacity for crisis management of refugee-hosting states, enacted through ‘localization’ and strengthening the ‘humanitarian-development nexus.’ The prominence of the political and economic context and the power relations between crisis response actors that it generates reveals the limits of what a buzzword like resilience can achieve on the ground. The findings highlight the need for researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to engage in continuous critical reflection on whether the ways in which resilience policies and programmes are implemented actually improve the ability of systems and vulnerable populations to recover from crisis, as well as on the validity of the assumptions and interpretations on which such policies and programmes are built.
Sexual violence has been firmly put on the internal agenda of the humanitarian community. Despite commendable advances in both policy and practice, there continues to be a gap between what is recommended and the reality in the field. In this paper, I argue that, notwithstanding the profound challenges of working in humanitarian emergencies, our understanding of sexual violence in conflict is watered down to such an extent that it impedes effective humanitarian action. First, humanitarians' reductionist approach to sexual violence not only disregards victims/survivors other than the stereotypical but also exempts perpetrators from scrutiny-including the international humanitarian community itself, through whose extensive depoliticisation of sexual violence has erased the link between gender inequality and violence. Second, the international humanitarian community has positioned itself as the white, western, heroic protector of vulnerable women and girls (and not men and boys)-a narrative that not only escalates power differences between humanitarian and beneficiary but also reproduces the subordination of women. Third, an exposé of silences in international discourses about sexual violence in armed conflict shows the humanitarian community's complicity in reproducing systems of gender inequality that allow for sexual violence to occur and remain unaddressed, by refusing to transform the restrictive political environment that ultimately impedes effective humanitarian action. This analysis of humanitarian sexual violence discourses indicates a mismatch between the nature of the issue and the way in which it is understood, leading to ineffective programmes on the ground. Humanitarians' engagement with critical research, as well as researchers' engagement with feminism, may recreate meanings that benefit our understanding rather than impede it.
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