The VULNER project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 870845.
Backround
Vulnerability’ is increasingly used as a conceptual tool to guide the design and implementation of the global protection regime, as illustrated by the 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants (the ‘New York Declaration’) and the subsequent adoption of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (the ‘Global Compact for Migration’) and of the Global Compact on Refugees. However, ‘vulnerability’ lacks a sharp conceptualisation and still needs to be accompanied by a thorough understanding of its concrete meanings, practical consequences and legal implications.
Project Aim
This research project aims to address these uncertainties from a critical and comparative perspective, with a focus on forced migration. It will provide a comprehensive analysis of how the ‘protection regimes’ of select countries address the vulnerabilities of ‘protection seekers’. The select countries are in Europe (Belgium, Germany, Italy, Norway), North America (Canada), the Middle East (Lebanon) and Africa (Uganda and South Africa).
Project Approach
The analysis adopts two different yet complementary perspectives. First, the way the ‘vulnerabilities’ of the protection seekers are being assessed and addressed by the relevant norms and in the practices of the decision makers will be systematically documented and analysed through a combination of legal and empirical data. Second, the various forms and nature of the concrete experiences of ‘vulnerability’ as they are lived by the protection seekers, including the resilience strategies and how they are being continuously shaped in interactions with the legal frameworks, will be documented and analysed through empirical data collected during fieldwork research. Ultimately, the very notion of ‘vulnerability’ will be questioned and assessed from a critical perspective. An alternative concept, such as ‘precarity’, may be suggested to better reflect the concrete experiences of the protection seekers.
Research Consortium: The research consortium is led by Dr. Luc Leboeuf (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology). It comprises the University of Louvain - UCL (Sylvie Sarolea), Martin Luther University Halle–Wittenberg (Winfried Kluth), Ca’ Foscari University in Venice (Sabrina Marchetti), the Norwegian Institute for Social Research (Hilde Liden), and the Centre for Lebanese Studies (Maha Shuayb), as well as a partnership with a Canadian research team led by Delphine Nakache from the University of Ottawa, which includes McGill University (François Crépeau) and York University (Dagmar Soennecken). Population Europe, the network of population experts hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Andreas Edel), will be in charge of disseminating the research results.
Report launch - When vulnerable migrants face the state
“Vulnerable Protection Seekers in Norway: Regulations, Practices, and Challenges” examines the schemes that the Norwegian authorities have introduced, through legislation and administrative practices, to identify migrants' vulnerability. Read the full report here.
The seminar was aimed at researchers, stakeholders and organizations. Watch footage of the launch seminar for the first interim report from the Norwegian project participants.
Themes and focus areas for the research
The project provides a basis for grouping the findings into three themes and focus areas, which this policy brief reviews. The policy brief will be available in English shortly.
Download the policy brief (in Norwegian), or use full screen mode and read below.
Policy brief Norway
See VULNER's policy brief for Norway here.
Media coverage
"Vulnerability is an increasingly important concept in international refugee policy, but Norway lacks a unified policy to ensure the rights of the particularly vulnerable migrants", Hilde Lidén, Erlend Paasche and Jessica Schultz writes. Read the full article: "Norwegian refugee policy creates new forms of vulnerability
