- Date
- Monday 18 Nov 2019, 12:30 - 13:30
- Type
- Seminar
- Spoken Language
- English
- Room
- Room 4.39
- Location
- International Institute of Social Studies
In this Special Migration and Development Seminar, Selma Porobić critically addresses the potential of multilateral efforts to tackle the causes and consequences of forced migration
With a record of over 70 million people forcibly displaced today, it has become a global imperative to address the causative factors, whether they arise from serious human rights violations, the breakdown of the rule of law, severe inequality, totalitarianism, or environmental change.
Using comparative research and in-depth case studies of previous humanitarian efforts and peace-building programmes, this presentation explores the ways in which multilateral actors have responded to mass displacement situations around the globe and assesses their efforts. Selma Porobić argues that insufficient consideration given to the nature of humanitarian situations undermines the effectiveness of development and post-conflict initiatives and contends that it is essential to develop systems for capturing the institutional memory and community-based resources for development across the social sectors.
The presentation will draw from her previous and current research on humanitarianism, peacebuilding and development programmes in the Western Balkans, MENA and Sub-Saharan region. It will aim to inform the potential of the Global Compacts on Refugees framework for implementing the aforementioned humanitarian-development-peace nexus.
Reducing need, risk and vulnerability
In the last two decades, humanitarian, development and peace agencies have been encouraged to work more closely together in order to capitalize on the comparative advantages of each sector. The underlying logic is to reduce need, risk and vulnerability in addressing the layered causes and consequences of mass displacement and secondary movements from the Global South.
The New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants which was signed by UN Member States in September 2016, and the subsequent universal adoption of the two Global Compacts on Refugees (GCR), and Migration (GCM), are testament to the ambition to promote multilateral, transnational, equitable and predictable responsibility sharing. The GCR in particular, underscores the importance of international efforts to prevent and resolve conflict on the basis of the UN Charter, international law, human rights and principle of non-discrimination as well as the need to provide development assistance to countries of origin in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
About the speaker
Dr Selma Porobić holds a PhD in interdisciplinary migration studies from Lund University with specialization in refugee studies from the American University in Cairo.
She holds an International Diploma of Humanitarian Assistance from Fordham University in New York, and has been a visiting scholar at the Department of Development Studies at the University of Oxford.
She was the founding director of the Centre for Refugee and IDP Studies in Sarajevo established by UNHCR, and Head of Research at the Foundation for Women's Empowerment in Bosnia and Herzegovina. She also acted as Project Lead of the Regional Research programme funded by the Swiss government, which employed 28 researchers investigating the long-term effects of war-displacement and protracted socio-political transition in the Western Balkans, and more recently was Head of the Humanitarian Studies Section at Palacky University in Olomouc.
Currently she acts as a Governing Board Member of the Research Network 'Transnational Memory and Identity' for the Council for European Studies, Colombia University, New York and is a member of the Peer Review College for UKRI (UK research councils).
Her research examines the life cycle of the migrant experience and the multilayered causes and consequences of migration.