Locating research on forced migration issues from academic institutes and think tanks is an ad-hoc exercise. These information products are not always catalogued or indexed in library collections, thereby making them more difficult to monitor than journals or more mainstream publications. Unfortunately, several forced migration-specific endeavors to comprehensively survey ongoing research programs and projects ended up being discontinued after a couple of years (e.g., UNHCR’s Refugee Research Network (REFLINK), the ICAR/UNHCR Postgraduate Network, the European Migration Information Network’s Research Directory, among others).
Directories for identifying relevant institutes are more prevalent than actual listings of current research projects and products. But these are also quite difficult to maintain over time. ReliefWeb offers a directory of organizations that can be filtered by organization type; selecting “academic & research institutions” provides a fairly lengthy listing. Once an individual organization is selected, the user is presented with a profile of products from the organization that reside elsewhere on ReliefWeb’s site - helpful but invariably incomplete. A complementary resource is FMO’s organizations directory; while it allows filtering by country and organization type, its profiles only provide a web address and contact details. The IDP Research Network has produced a database with information on researchers, projects, and publications. However, results from a recent search suggest that the information is not very current.
Another type of resource: ID21 is a development research reporting service that summarizes recent research produced by the UK research community. It includes a “conflict and emergencies” and a “human rights” sub-heading under the “Global Issues” category, where the following titles are described:
- Can river communities benefit from resettlement? by Thayer Scudder
- Exploring the causes of armed conflict in Africa, by Chris Huggins et al.
- Poverty reduction in difficult environments: learning from humanitarian NGOs, by Charlotte Laurence
At this time, no similar resource is available for forced migration generally. Once upon a time, the Refugee Studies Centre (RSC) published The Directory of Current Research on Refugees and Other Forced Migrants, but only one or perhaps a few editions were ever issued. This would be a worthy project to re-initiate.
One objective of this blog is to track down and report on recent research papers. To this end, I used ReliefWeb’s and FMO’s directories to identify around 20 research institutes in Europe, North America and Africa that regularly publish working papers. Some examples of recent titles include:
- Entrenched relations and the permanence of long-term refugee camp situations, Sussex Migration Working Paper, no. 28 (2005), by Rebecca Napier-Moore
- Evidence on Attitudes to Asylum and Immigration: What We Know, Don't Know and Need to Know, Centre on Migration, Policy and Society Working Paper, no. 23 (2005), by Heaven Crawley
- ‘There are no Refugees in this Area’: Self-Settled Refugees in Koboko, Refugee Law Project Working Paper, no. 18 (Nov. 2005), by Moses Chrispus Okello et al.
Posted in Publications.