Refugee Politics and Conflict Management: Two Processes Out of Sync?

This talk builds on the case of refugee displacement following Syria’s lethal conflict in 2011 as a complex field of power where multiple players have diverged and competed on the cross-cutting issues of displacement and conflict. Fakhoury focuses specifically on the policy entanglements between the European Union (EU) and key regional refugee-hosting states that have taken in about 5.5 million Syrian refugees. In this presentation, she will explore situations of governance complexity that illustrate how the politics of refugee governance became entangled with the politics of managing the Syrian conflict, spelling out various contradictions and dilemmas for the European Union’s proclaimed CM strategy.

Tamirace Fakhoury is Associate Professor of International Politics and Conflict at the Fletcher School. Her research is about the dilemmas of peace, inclusive governance and democratization in post-conflict societies, the politics of refuge and migration in conflict-affected areas, and the multilateral policies of actors such as the European Union and the United Nations in conflict and cooperation. She is interested in teaching, research and policy approaches accounting for the political agency of states and societies that may have been perceived to be on the margins of power in the international system.