Linking Popular Initiative and Aid Agencies: The Case of Refugees

Promoting male refugees’ mental health after they have been granted leave to remain (refugee status)

“…Qualitative methods are well suited to research with migrants and with refugees in particular, as they allow them to give their direct opinion, rather than this being filtered by stakeholders (Harrel-Bond and Voutira, 2007;Mazur, 1987). Listening to 'the refugee's voice' means in fact developing 'a refugee centred perspective' where the diverse narratives told by participants are organised to tell their direct collective story (Dona, 2007).…”

A Study of the Experiences of Integration and Settlement of Afghan Government-Assisted Refugees in Halifax, Canada

“…Th ey are even ultimately viewed as misleading because institutions interested in absorbing or rehabilitating refugees impose their own defi nitions of relevant facts, needs and goals in a way that the institute can 'handle them'". 26 Harrell-Bond and Voutira detail the almost surreal bureaucratic and administrative obstacles in gaining "access" to refugees, whom they call "invisible actors," placed in their way by UNHCR and government authorities: " It is the problematique of studying these refugees which was the main stimulus for writing this paper, but our concerns with the general problems of accessing refugees for research purposes and disseminating the fi ndings led us to include a more general discussion of the challenges raised in the context of accessing the 'refugee' as a persona, as a person, and as a public perception, within spaces that are visible and identifi able, but largely inaccessible to researchers for a variety of reasons." 27 Yet while the GARs live in Halifax openly, ostensibly free from institutional control, accessing and recruiting participants for my study proved one of the most challenging phases of my study.…”

In praise of dependencies: dispersed dependencies and displacement

“…Similarly, ‘refugee dependency syndrome’ was a widely used term and the object of inquiry in the 1980s (although earlier discussions of it exist), when the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and other refugee‐serving agencies recognised that fewer and fewer refugees were repatriating, and that millions continued to reside in camps without immediate prospects of ‘solutions’. Some blamed refugees themselves for their apparent dependence on aid; as the decade progressed, however, more and more aid workers and academics began to blame the strict structure of assistance, which left little room for refugees to state their preferences and needs and thus encouraged passivity among aid beneficiaries (Mazur, , pp. 15–16).…”