Brown Bag Lecture \ Beyond Humanitarian Aid: Is there a role for civil society to resolve refugee crises? A case study of Rohingya refugees

According to the UNHCR (2022), almost 90 million people are forcibly displaced worldwide. This is an alarming figure but the forecast on refugees and displacement is rather bleak as it is estimated that by May 2022, more than 100 million people will be forcibly displaced worldwide by persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations or events seriously disturbing public order. Officially, there are 27.1 million refugees and 83% of them are hosted in low and middle income countries. In theory, although several international treaties and conventions (e.g. UN Declaration of Human Rights, Global Refugee Compact etc.) mention the rights and wellbeing of the refugees, the reality is most often refugees are living a substandard life in congested makeshift camps. While humanitarian support from wide ranging actors play an important role in providing some basic needs support, international aid or humanitarian assistance by no means can offer a dignified and sustained solution to the refugee crises. Based on his research experiences, in this Brown Bag Lecture, Palash Kamruzzaman will focus on the Rohingya refugee crisis as a case study and share his views on the potential role(s) of civil society towards a dignified and sustained solution to the crisis.

Palash Kamruzzaman is a Senior Lecturer in Social Policy at the University of South Wales (USW), UK. He is also the Director of the Centre for Social Policy at the USW. As the Principal Investigator (PI), he recently completed a study that looked into the experience of violence and loss of dignity among the Rohingyas in Bangladesh and Internally Displaced Persons in Afghanistan (the study was funded by the British Academy). He has active research projects in Bangladesh and Jordan that are exploring the perceptions of host communities that are sheltering refugees from Myanmar and Syria He is currently a fellow in the project “Forced Migration and Refugee Studies: Networking and Knowledge Transfer” (FFVT) at BICC.

To participate in the event, please register under the following link:
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The talk on 16 August 2022 is taking place in the framework of BICC’s Brown Bag Lecture Series “Displacement and Development” which aims to interlink conflict and displacement studies on the one hand and development respectively humanitarian aid-oriented analyses on the other. It takes place in cooperation with the project “Forced Migration and Refugee Studies: Networking and Knowledge Transfer” (FFVT), funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

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