Protected: Italians on the Field, Foreigners under the Law? Sport and the Politics of Citizenship

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When Communities Lead: Lessons from Sudan’s Humanitarian Crisis

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Dr Bashair Ahmed, SCMR Research Associate , University of Sussex, and Director of Shabaka.

Three years ago, armed conflict erupted in Sudan between rival military factions, triggering what is now the world’s largest displacement crisis. Over 12 million people remain displaced — nearly a quarter of the population — with famine confirmed in multiple states, genocide, and sexual violence are a grim feature of the conflict. But this anniversary also marks three years of sustained, community-led humanitarian response that, by nearly every measure, has outperformed the formal international system. That story needs to be told.

A System in Freefall

Global humanitarian funding fell 11% in 2024 — the sharpest drop on record. Then in 2025, the US dismantled USAID and cancelled thousands of contracts; the UK cut its aid budget by 39%. For Sudan, this was immediately catastrophic. When US stop-work orders took effect in January 2025, 80% of the 1,460 community-run soup kitchens across Sudan were forced to close, cutting food access for 1.8 million people already facing famine. Sudan has become “a case study” for the human cost of aid cuts.

Where Does Aid Money Actually Go?

The formal humanitarian system is coordinated by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) — a body bringing together UN agencies, major international NGOs, and donors. It sets the frameworks and controls the funding flows. The bulk of money goes to large UN agencies and Western-headquartered NGOs, which subcontract downward, retaining significant fees along the way.

Sudan’s country-based pooled fund — a UN-managed pot of donor money, and the largest of its kind globally at $181 million — directed just 1% directly to Sudanese local organisations. Globally in 2023, only 0.6% of humanitarian funding reached local actors directly. A 2016 commitment — the Grand Bargain — pledged 25% by 2020. Nearly a decade on, it remains unmet. And Sudan is no outlier: less than 1% of humanitarian funding for Ukraine reaches local organisations directly, despite them doing the majority of frontline work.

The Ecosystem Outside the Formal System

What makes Sudan distinctive is the scale and sophistication of what has emerged outside the IASC-led system — with minimal formal support.

Emergency Response Rooms (ERRs) — volunteer-run networks coordinating food, medical care, evacuations, and protection — mobilised within 48–72 hours of the conflict’s outbreak and by December 2024 had reached over 11.5 million people. But they are one part of a wider ecosystem: women-led mutual aid networks, long-established civil society organisations invisible to IASC coordination mechanisms, national NGOs brokering access in areas international actors cannot reach, and community radio stations sustaining information flows where there is no internet. What connects them is not a formal structure but shared foundations: deep community embeddedness, accountability to neighbours rather than distant donors, and the nafeer (النفير) tradition — a Sudanese practice of communal solidarity rooted in centuries of collective cooperation. In many areas, this ecosystem is the humanitarian system.

The diaspora is an essential tier of this ecosystem. Sudanese diaspora communities — estimated at between 4.5 and 8 million people worldwide — sent an estimated $1.5 billion in remittances annually before the conflict, rising to perhaps $2.9 billion when informal transfers are included. When the USAID freeze hit, diaspora donations and Ramadan giving enabled approximately 37% of shuttered kitchens to reopen within weeks — faster than any formal mechanism could respond.

In 2025, the ERRs received global recognition — the Chatham House Award, the Right Livelihood Award, the Rafto Prize, and a Nobel Peace Prize nomination — recognition that reflects the collective achievement of an entire ecosystem that the formal system has consistently underfunded.

What Reform Requires

The IASC framework and the compliance systems built around it — registration requirements, audit formats, reporting templates — were designed for large formal institutions. They systematically exclude the volunteer networks, women’s groups, national civil society organisations, and diaspora actors that have proven most effective. The result: those best placed to help are last in line for funding.

Sudan’s ERR’s have developed a community-controlled accountability system achieving disbursement timelines of two to three weeks — faster than any international mechanism — while maintaining rigorous standards. Research on Syria confirms the pattern: local organisations receive lower budgets and fewer overheads than international NGOs from the same funds, even as they bear more risk. The working paper on which this blog is based proposes four structural reforms:

  • redirecting funding accountability toward community-defined standards;
  • rebuilding intermediary relationships to develop rather than extract capacity;
  •  recentring coordination around community governance authority; and
  • investing in Sudanese-owned knowledge infrastructure.

None of this dismantles international humanitarian action. It permanently restructures it.

The Moment Is Now

The global aid system is contracting. And yet Sudan’s community-led ecosystem has sustained millions through three years of catastrophic conflict. This ecosystem also faces active suppression: responders have been detained; authorities have criminalised independent grassroots action; armed factions have sought to absorb community structures into military control. Funders who benefit from this work carry a moral responsibility to resource its protection. When 70.8% of surveyed Sudanese grassroots initiatives identify peacebuilding as their primary post-war role, they are articulating what the international system has struggled to operationalise for decades. The blueprint is here. The moment is now. What remains is the institutional will to act on it.

This blog is based on a working paper, ‘Community-Led Humanitarian Response in Sudan: Evidence, Criteria, and the Case for Structural Reform’ (2026), published by the Sussex Centre for Migration Research. The full paper is available here.

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Introducing the Nafeer Community Knowledge Lab: A New Partnership for Community-Led Knowledge

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Dr Bashàïr Ahmed, Shabaka, and Professor Paul Statham, Editor in Chief, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies

In Sudan, Emergency Response Rooms coordinated the distribution of food and medicine supplies in neighbourhoods to places where international agencies could not access — and built governance structures that outlasted the emergencies that created them. In Yemen, community committees and local solidarity networks sustained civilian life through years of siege and aerial bombardment, filling critical gaps left by the collapse of formal institutions. In Somalia, community-led organisations sustained health and education services through cycles of drought and displacement that formal aid and development systems repeatedly failed to address.

In every case, communities were not just responding; they were acting, and by acting they were learning and generating knowledge. This important contribution is seldom acknowledged. Developing approaches that Indeed the wider crisis and development world has been slow to recognise — and slower still to resource – the emergent approaches generated in situ by communities. 

This crucial knowledge and know-how hardly ever makes it into academic discussions, in scholarly journals, or into policy briefs. Rarely are people from communities who have developed these understandings on the job invited into the rooms and corridors of power where critical decisions about them and that concern their livelihoods deeply — often with consequences lasting decades — are made. That is the gap we want to address through the Nafeer Community Knowledge Lab.

A partnership with purpose

Shabaka and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding with a commitment to advance academic scholarship, debates and knowledge on diaspora humanitarian action, community-led crisis response, and mutual aid networks — that centre on scholars and scholarship from the Global South.

https://www.sussex.ac.uk/about/facts/rankings/development-studiesJEMS is an intentionally a broad church, publishing across all forms of migration, ethnic relations, and diversity from a wide range of disciplines and regions. Over the last decade, JEMS has become one of the largest and highest-ranking scholarly journals in the social sciences. With support of the publisher Taylor and Francis, the journal pursues a globalisation strategy that aims to make academic debates and scholarship on migration and related issues truly global. JEMS has mobilised specific initiatives to better include scholars from, and scholarship on, lesser included and studied regions. So far, this includes initiatives targeting SE Asia, China and Latin America. JEMS is hosted by the Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR), a Centre of Excellence at the University of Sussex, ranked first in the world for Migration Studies in the 2025 ScholarGPS rankings. The SCMR migration centre is affiliated to the School of Global Studies and the Sussex School for Progressive Futures, while the University of Sussex has been ranked 1st in the world for Development Studies for ten successive years (World University Rankings). All this makes JEMS and the SCMR a natural institutional home for the type of engagement and scholarship we envisage.

Shabaka is a practice-oriented research and advisory organisation founded in 2014 in response to a humanitarian ecosystem that systematically excludes crisis-affected communities. Over more than a decade, Shabaka has built deep relationships with diaspora networks, mutual aid groups, and community-led organisations across East and North Africa and West Asia, producing evidence and shaping policy at the intersection of localisation, humanitarian and development action, and decolonial practice.

Its work is both conceptual and applied. Shabaka incubated the Crisis Coordination Unit Sudan — which documented hundreds of mutual aid and diaspora initiatives during the current conflict, and is now an independent organisation. It has established the Diaspora Humanitarian Engagement Group, a peer-learning space for UK-based diaspora organisations coordinating crisis responses. Shabaka has also seen the formation of a medics initiative, the Academy of Medical Education During Conflicts, emerging and evolving into an independent organisation which trains healthcare professionals in conflict settings using simulation-based methodologies. Shabaka has developed the Switchboard app, a platform connecting communities with services and with one another. Each initiative was designed to transition to independent community leadership, reflecting Shabaka’s foundational commitment to strengthening capacity, then stepping back.

That commitment to facilitating rather than controlling makes the Nafeer Lab a natural extension of Shabaka’s practice. The partnership between Shabaka and JEMS rests on a shared commitment to building the conditions in which scholars from under-represented regions contribute to — rather than merely feature as subjects of — global conversations about the crises that affect them.

This is not a symbolic handshake. It is a practical commitment to shifting who gets to produce, publish, and shape knowledge about communities navigating crisis.

What we’re building together — starting with the Red Sea corridor

In its first year, the Lab will focus on Sudan and the broader Red Sea corridor—from Northeast Africa to the Arabian Peninsula. This is where the need is most acute, where Shabaka’s networks run deepest, and where some of the most significant and under-documented community-led responses of the past decade have taken place.

We call our early collaboration within the Nafeer Community Lab, the Red Sea Researchers Network. Through the Red Sea Researchers Network initiative, we aim to bring visibility, legitimacy and resonance to knowledge and understandings this region. To achieve this goal we will mobilise joint events bringing scholars and community activists together, initiate special issues as an opportunity structure for scholars from the region, and provide support in research and publication.  

Researchers from across the Red Sea corridor will have structured opportunities to support their pathway to publication in JEMS. Early-career scholars will receive academic mentorship to navigate publication pathways. Joint events — panels, convenings, and international forums — will bring researchers, practitioners, and policymakers into the same room. And hands-on capacity support, from academic writing guidance to dissemination of published work, will be available to scholars working in and on crisis-affected contexts.

JEMS retains full editorial independence throughout. Rigour is non-negotiable. What we’re changing is access, not standards.

Why this matters — and what it won’t fix

Communities on the frontlines of crisis — whether conflict, climate, economic collapse, or displacement — are uniquely positioned to be producers of knowledge. Community-led responses are often the most agile, trusted, and effective. Yet, research documenting them rarely reaches the journals and policy spaces that shape how future responses are designed and funded.

Part of the problem is structural. Researchers working in or near active conflict zones often lack adequate institutional support for writing-time, editing, and translation that can lead to publication. Global South scholars are usually under-represented and less present in mainstream academic debates, not due to abilities, but because existing structures privilege authors from elsewhere.

This partnership is one small baby step towards changing that infrastructure. While we recognise that the challenges facing communities in crisis are enormous, and our collaboration will not resolve them. But if we can help ensure that the knowledge communities are already generating reach the people and institutions with the power to act on it, we believe that this initiative is worth doing.

A lab that aims to grow

The Nafeer Community Knowledge Lab takes its name from a Sudanese concept of collective action — a call to come together, to show up, to contribute what you have. Sudan is the starting point, but the Lab’s ambitions extend well beyond it. Through new partnerships and collaborations, the aim is to expand across regions and communities over time, so that more voices — from more places — can shape the knowledge that influences crisis and development responses, globally.

As it grows, the aspiration is for the Lab to relocate — to Sudan, or another relevant Global South location — when conditions allow. We believe that infrastructure for producing knowledge should sit closest to the communities it serves. That is our direction of travel.

What comes next

Over the coming year, the Red Sea Researchers Network will launch through a founding membership and first convened meeting, while discussions on a first Special Issue proposal focussing on the region will begin.

This is the start of something. It will be shaped — as it should be — by the communities whose knowledge it is designed to serve.

The Nafeer Community Knowledge Lab is a partnership between Shabaka and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies (JEMS) hosted by the Sussex Centre for Migration Research at the University of Sussex, UK. For more information, please contact Paul Statham (paul.statham@sussex.ac.uk) or Bashàïr Ahmed (bashair@shabaka.org).

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Displaced Before the Strike: Evacuation Warnings and Anticipatory Displacement in Lebanon

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Hucen Sleiman, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

As of 9 March 2026, around 700,000 people are displaced across Lebanon, fleeing bombardment in the south, Beirut’s southern suburbs, and parts of the Bekaa Valley to seek refuge further north. This is the latest wave in a crisis that has repeatedly emptied towns since late 2023. But behind these numbers lies a less visible pattern: in many cases, displacement begins before the bombs fall, triggered not by destruction itself but by the anticipation of it, communicated through digital evacuation warnings.

Warnings before bombs

At 11:47 PM on 3 October 2024, a satellite image of Haret Hreik in Beirut’s southern suburbs began circulating on WhatsApp. A red circle roughly 500 metres in diameter marked several apartment blocks, a mosque, and a cluster of shops. The image, originally posted on the Israeli military’s Arabic-language X account, ordered residents inside the marked area to evacuate immediately.

Within hours, the screenshot had spread across neighbourhood groups. Families compared maps, called relatives, and debated whether their building fell inside the circle. By morning, the buildings were empty. The strike came two days later.

Map produced by the author based on evacuation warnings circulated on social media during the 2024–2026 escalation in Lebanon. The diagram reconstructs the structure of typical warning maps indicating a targeted building and an evacuation radius in Haret Hreik, Beirut.

Scenes like this repeated across South Lebanon and Beirut during the 2024–2025 escalation, and again in March 2026. Between late September and early November 2024, the Beirut Urban Lab documented more than one hundred announced strikes targeting over 160 buildings, with warnings posted shortly before bombardment and rapidly recirculated through messaging networks.

These warnings are often presented as humanitarian precautions intended to reduce civilian casualties. But they also have another effect:they compel people to leave. A red circle on a phone screen can trigger hurried packing, late-night departures, and sudden decisions about where to go. Displacement begins with the warning, not only with the explosion.

What displacement looks like

The movements produced by these warnings rarely resemble the large-scale displacements that humanitarian statistics usually capture. Instead, they are smaller, closer, and often repeated.

Many families do not leave the neighbourhood at all. In Beirut’s southern suburbs, residents frequently evacuate their apartments but stay in the same building’s basement, a neighbour’s ground-floor flat, or a relative’s home nearby, waiting to see whether the strike will happen.

In southern villages such as Meiss al-Jabal or Kafr Tibnit, some residents move only a few hundred metres, relocating to the edge of the village just outside the marked radius rather than leaving the area entirely.

These movements are also cyclical. As warnings circulate, families who had returned home may leave again within days. During the 2024–2026 escalation, many households kept bags packed, keys within reach, and phones nearby, ready to move if another warning appeared.

This kind of mobility does not fit easily into the usual categories of displacement. People may not cross administrative boundaries, register in shelters, or appear in official counts. Yet their lives are repeatedly interrupted, their routines suspended, and their homes treated as places that might have to be abandoned at any moment. Even without immediate destruction, evacuation warnings create a persistent sense of insecurity and fear. As anthropologist Stephen Lubkemann has shown in other conflict settings, wartime mobility is often fragmented and localised, shaped by conditions that do not amount to permanent flight but still fundamentally reorganise everyday life.

Why this matters for displacement research

These patterns matter because not all displacement looks the same, and contemporary conflict often produces forms of mobility that fall outside the categories through which displacement is usually measured, including short-distance or repeated relocations  

First, many of these movements remain statistically invisible. Humanitarian figures tend to count people who enter collective shelters, cross districts, or register for assistance. They often miss those who stay with relatives a few streets away, move temporarily within the same village, or return home between strikes. The International Organization for Migration has repeatedly noted the difficulty of capturing dispersed, short-term, and informal displacement in Lebanon, where families frequently rely on personal networks rather than official shelter systems. As a result, a significant share of wartime mobility never appears in the numbers that guide humanitarian planning.

Second, invisibility has concrete consequences. Even short-distance displacement can disrupt work, schooling, healthcare, and access to land. Children may miss weeks of classes, farmers may be unable to reach their fields, and daily routines may be suspended for long periods, even when families remain within the same locality. When such movements are not recognised as displacement, they often fall outside the scope of assistance and policy response, despite producing real social and economic strain.

Third, evacuation warnings raise difficult questions about responsibility. Military authorities present warnings as measures intended to reduce civilian casualties. Yet when warnings repeatedly compel people to leave their homes without offering any guarantee of safety, they also function as a form of governance. By designating certain buildings or neighbourhoods as temporarily uninhabitable, warning maps reorganise how civilians move, where they stay, and how they plan their lives under threat.

In this sense, warnings do not simply inform. They actively reshape everyday life by producing conditions in which people must live in anticipation of possible destruction.

Not only Lebanon

Lebanon is not the only place where displacement begins with a message on a phone.

In Gaza, residents often receive phone calls or text messages ordering them to leave buildings before strikes, a practice documented by organisations such as Amnesty International.

In Ukraine, air-raid alert applications send constant notifications that structure daily routines in cities under threat.

In Sudan, local Telegram and Facebook groups circulate informal “danger zone” maps that compel people to move before fighting reaches their neighbourhoods.

In each case, the warning arrives before the violence, and civilians move in anticipation of threat. In each case, there are implications for the ordering of space, the legibility of the disruptions of armed conflict, and for how responsibility for this displacement is framed.

Conclusion

The hundreds of thousands displaced across Lebanon today include those who fled bombardment, but also those who left because a warning appeared on their phones. Evacuation messages circulated through social media have become part of how contemporary conflict reorganises space, compelling civilians to move before violence occurs. These anticipatory displacements are often small, repeated, and difficult to measure, yet they profoundly disrupt everyday life. Paying attention to them shifts how displacement is understood: not only as the result of destruction, but as a condition produced through the management of threat itself. In this sense, war displaces not only through what it destroys, but through what it makes people expect.

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When “return” does not last: internal displacement in Lebanon from 2024 to 2026

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Cristina El Khoury, postgraduate researcher University of Geneva and former SCMR Visiting fellow, 2025

9 March 2026: 700,000 people are displaced across Lebanon.   
 
Behind this number lies a familiar yet devastating pattern: families leaving southern towns in the middle of the night, carrying what they can, uncertain when (or whether) they will return. Since late 2023, hostilities along Lebanon’s southern border have repeatedly emptied villages and towns. After a fragile ceasefire in November 2024 allowed thousands to go back home, renewed escalation in early March 2026 has once again triggered large-scale internal displacement across the country. 

A crisis that keeps returning 

In southern Lebanon, displacement has become cyclical. Families flee bombardment, find temporary refuge elsewhere in the country, return home after a ceasefire, and then leave again when violence resumes. The latest wave of displacement follows renewed military escalation affecting southern Lebanon as well as parts of Beirut’s southern suburbs and the Bekaa Valley. Airstrikes, artillery exchanges and evacuation warnings have forced civilians to flee districts such as Tyre, Bint Jbeil, Marjayoun and Nabatieh, often with little time to prepare. 

Traffic in Beirut, one of the main destinations for families displaced from southern Lebanon.  
Internal displacement often takes place within urban spaces rather than in formal camps. Photo by the author (February 2025)

The scale of displacement increased dramatically in early March 2026. Within less than a week, humanitarian organisations reported hundreds of thousands of people leaving their homes. By 6 March, 300,000 people had already been displaced within less than 100 hours as evacuation warnings and attacks intensified. A few days later, Lebanon’s Minister of Social Affairs reported that around 517,000 displaced people had been registered on the government’s emergency relief platform. Of these, more than 117,000 people were hosted in approximately 538 collective shelters across the country. As of 9 March, 700,000 people were displaced.  

Yet official shelter figures capture only part of the crisis. Many displaced families rely on informal arrangements, staying with relatives or friends or moving between temporary accommodation. This dispersed pattern reflects a defining characteristic of displacement in Lebanon: rather than large camps, displaced populations are spread across host communities. The current escalation builds on an already fragile situation created by previous waves of conflict. During the major escalation of late September 2024, internal displacement in Lebanon reached unprecedented levels, with around 1.2 million people estimated to have fled their homes. 

Although the ceasefire reached on 27 November 2024 allowed many families to return during the following months, return did not necessarily mean recovery. Entire neighbourhoods had been damaged, infrastructure remained partially destroyed, and unexploded ordnance made some areas unsafe. By late February 2025, the International Organization for Migration reported that 949,571 people had returned, yet nearly 100,000 remained displaced. 

In other words, the post-ceasefire period did not resolve displacement; it merely changed its form. The renewed escalation in 2026 therefore affects communities that had only recently begun reconstructing their lives. 

Moving north: how displacement unfolds across the country 

Internal displacement in Lebanon rarely takes the form of large, centralized camps. Instead, it unfolds through a dispersed pattern of mobility that stretches across multiple regions of the country. As violence intensifies in the south, families typically move northwards, relocating to Beirut, Mount Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and in some cases further north to cities such as Tripoli or districts such as Akkar. 
 
Family and social networks play a crucial role in shaping these movements. Many displaced households initially seek refuge with relatives or friends living in safer areas. However, as displacement persists and the number of displaced families grows, the capacity of host households to provide accommodation quickly becomes strained.  
 
Public infrastructure therefore becomes an essential part of the emergency response. Schools, community centres and municipal buildings are frequently converted into collective shelters to host displaced families. During the escalation of 2024, hundreds of public schools across Lebanon were repurposed as emergency shelters, and similar arrangements are once again emerging in 2026 as municipalities attempt to cope with the increasing number of displaced households.   
 
This dispersed pattern of displacement also creates uneven pressures across the country. While southern districts experience rapid depopulation as residents flee ongoing violence, central and northern regions must absorb sudden population inflows. Municipalities in Mount Lebanon, Akkar and cities such as Tripoli have therefore become key receiving areas for displaced populations. 

Unlike camp-based displacement contexts, Lebanon’s urban and socially mediated displacement makes it harder to monitor needs and coordinate humanitarian responses. Displaced families are scattered across apartments, temporary shelters and host households, creating a less visible but highly complex displacement landscape. 

The ripple effects of displacement 

Beyond the immediate humanitarian emergency, internal displacement produces far-reaching social, economic and environmental consequences. 

One of the most immediate effects concerns education. During displacement crises in Lebanon, public schools are often repurposed as emergency shelters for displaced families, interrupting the academic year for thousands of students. In a country where the education system is already struggling with the consequences of economic crisis and institutional instability, repeated school closures risk widening learning gaps and increasing the likelihood of long-term school dropout. 

Displacement also severely affects livelihoods. Many families fleeing southern Lebanon depend on agriculture and small-scale rural economies tied to the land. As hostilities intensified, farmers were forced to abandon olive groves, tobacco fields and other crops during critical cultivation and harvesting periods. Agricultural production has therefore been disrupted not only by direct damage caused by shelling but also by the absence of farmers who are unable to safely access their land. 

The environmental consequences of conflict further complicate prospects for recovery. Bombardments have damaged agricultural land, irrigation systems and water infrastructure in several southern districts, while unexploded ordnance poses serious risks for cultivation and reconstruction. These environmental impacts may significantly delay the possibility of safe return. 

Finally, host communities across Lebanon face increasing pressure as they attempt to accommodate large numbers of displaced people. Municipal services such as housing, water supply, waste management and healthcare are already under strain in a country experiencing one of the most severe economic crises in its modern history. The arrival of hundreds of thousands of displaced families therefore places additional burdens on local infrastructure and public resources. 

The long shadow of displacement  

The Lebanese case illustrates how internal displacement can evolve from a temporary humanitarian emergency into a recurring condition shaped by cycles of violence and fragile recovery. Families flee, return after ceasefires, and then find themselves displaced again when hostilities resume.  Yet the significance of displacement in Lebanon goes beyond the number of people forced to move. As this crisis shows, displacement reshapes territories and societies in lasting ways – interrupting education, destabilizing agricultural livelihoods, and placing new pressures on already fragile urban infrastructures. In this sense, internal displacement in Lebanon is not only a consequence of conflict but also a process that gradually transforms the social and spatial landscape of the country. 

For many of the 700,000 people currently displaced, the central question is therefore not only when they will return, but whether the next return will finally be able to last. 

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Damned if you do, damned if you boat

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Dr Ceri Oeppen, Co-Director of SCMR

Two days ago, the British Government announced it would halt student visas for nationals of Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan (and for Afghans, skilled work visas too). 

The Government claims that students from these countries are conducting “visa abuse” by arriving in the UK on a student visa and subsequently applying for asylum.

Mahmood delivering a speech at the Institute for Public Policy Research in Westminster on Thursday. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA

We need to unpick statements from the Government’s announcement, illustrating why it’s hypocritical, unfair, and misleading.

The government’s announcement

“Tough action is required as asylum claims from legal routes have more than trebled since 2021”

Both the current Labour Government and previous Conservative Governments have repeatedly (in speech and practice) penalised asylum seekers for arriving via so-called ‘illegal routes’, notably via the ‘Stop the Boats’ discourse.  Meanwhile, the UK Government’s current asylum and returns policy describes safe and legal routes as, “the right way for refugees to enter the UK and benefit from our protection” (Home Office, 2025).

Given their wish to prevent people claiming asylum via ‘illegal’ routes, if three times more people are claiming asylum after arriving through legal routes, shouldn’t they see this as a win? 

Student visas are one of the few ‘safe and legal’ routes available for people from countries affected by conflict.  Whilst a student visa is clearly not designed as a protection mechanism, UNHCR has identified it as an important complementary pathway to protection, a ‘win-win for refugees and host communities’, encouraged by the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees.  Fellow SCMR Co-Director Tahir Zaman, and I, wrote more about this for IOM’s journal, Migration Policy Practice.

More importantly, for an individual fleeing conflict and persecution, a student visa is one of a vanishingly small number of ways to travel to the UK in a regular, safe, manner; without putting themselves in danger crossing the Channel in a small boat (see also, Naimat Zafary’s recent SCMR blog about desperate journeys from Afghanistan). 

“Britain will always provide refuge to people fleeing war and persecution, but our visa system must not be abused”   

UK asylum grant rates for Afghan nationals have fallen from 99% to 38% between 2023 to 2025.  This is not because the situation in Afghanistan has improved.  Indeed, for the kind of young people who might be interested in studying abroad – particularly women – it has got worse.  For anyone familiar with the situation in Afghanistan it’s not at all surprising that most Afghan students in the UK find the idea of returning to Afghanistan a dangerous prospect; and with limited other options (including shorter graduate visas), decide to seek asylum.  

It is not ‘abusing the system’ to apply for asylum after you arrive in the UK – it is a human right, protected by international law.  A right with the very peculiar requirement that you must be physically present in the country where you wish to seek asylum.  It’s clearly better for everyone if you arrive in a safe and legal manner, on a visa.      

“The Government has also pledged to open new capped safe and legal routes as an alternative to dangerous small boat crossings”

The Government has done this but, in Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood’s own words to parliament, “the numbers [arriving via these routes] will be in the low hundreds”.  Clearly this does not even begin to address the needs. 

These aren’t the only numbers I have issue with in the Government’s announcement.  They make ‘interesting’, and varied use of either percentages or whole numbers, in their statement, according – I assume – to the message they want to convey.  For example, in the opening they say, “Asylum applications by students from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Myanmar and Sudan rocketed by over 470% between 2021 and 2025”.  This emotive language – ‘rocketed’, ‘470%’ – doesn’t tell us how many students from these countries applied for asylum.  Even Colin Yeo – a leading immigration barrister and founder of the Free Movement immigration law website – couldn’t fully work out exactly what this 470% increase represents in total numbers, although he points out that in 2025, 227 Afghan student visas were issued, so even if most subsequently apply for asylum, we are not talking huge total numbers.

There’s more to say on how the announcement uses numbers to convey their message, e.g. “asylum support … costing more than £4 billion a year”; “supported at public expense, including over 6,000 in hotels”, but I’ll leave that for another time.  Suffice to say, the cost of the asylum system, and the misuse of hotels as temporary accommodation is certainly not the fault of asylum seekers, however they arrived!

What next?           

This is the first time the UK government has issued a blanket ban on visas for specific nationalities.  This is an extremely concerning development, one which paves the way for further use of (actual and threatened) visa bans for countries that do not cooperate with the Government on – for example – return agreements.

It’s also a further blow to UK universities who have already seen massive drops in international student numbers due to increasing financial maintenance requirements, changes to graduate routes, restrictions on dependent visas, and threatened caps on numbers of visas for students from certain countries (e.g. Pakistan, Nigeria, Sri Lanka).

Most significantly, the hypocrisy of stopping people from conflict-torn countries obtaining visas to travel through ‘safe and legal routes’, whilst also heavily penalising those who arrive via so-called ‘illegal means’, is appalling. Earlier this year, I wrote about how migrants’ manner of arrival is becoming a (racialised) proxy for ‘good’ and ‘bad’ immigrants .  But this latest announcement makes it clear that even those arriving via ‘safe and legal routes’ are apparently unwanted too.  Whilst officially the language and slogans of the ‘hostile environment’ and ‘stop the boats’ may have been dropped by Labour, it is clear that the spirit of hostility, and the Kafkaesque array of obstacles put in the way of those seeking safety, continues apace.

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The Bitter Duality of Winter: Kabul’s Snow and the Frozen Dreams of an Afghan Child

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Dr Naimat Zafary, Department of International Development, University of Sussex.

Last week, Kabul was transformed into a landscape of pristine white. The Afghan capital, Kabul, , draped in a heavy blanket of snow, sparked a wave of nostalgia and celebration across social media. Citizens shared vibrant photos and videos, echoing the centuries-old proverb: “Let Kabul be without gold, but not without snow.” 

The snowfall was uncharacteristically widespread. It reached into the eastern provinces—regions that rarely witness such a winter spectacle—bringing families out of their homes to marvel at a phenomenon that usually symbolises life, agricultural fertility, and a brief respite from the country’s hardships. 

Kabul – Photo by Mohammad Mehdi Rezai on Unsplash

However, beneath this picturesque surface lies a devastating contrast. While families in eastern Afghanistan were celebrating the snow, one of their own was fighting for his life against it. 

A Heartbreak on the Border 

As the snow fell in the East of Afghanistan, a harrowing video began to circulate among Facebook users, grounding the festive atmosphere in a grim reality. It featured a young boy, barely 12 or 13 years old, who was discovered by a group of Afghan rescuers on the treacherous border between Iran and Turkey. 

The footage is difficult to watch. The boy, small and frail, was found half-frozen, his legs turned a bruised, stony black by severe frostbite. He could barely whisper his name or identify the  smugglers who had abandoned him. In his innocent, wide-eyed gaze, viewers saw a reflection of the profound humanitarian crisis that continues to push Afghanistan’s youth into the mouth of danger. 

For the rescuers—men searching for their own missing relatives—finding the boy was a moment of bittersweet relief. For the boy’s family, the joy of the winter snow likely vanished the moment they saw the images of their son, immobile and broken, thousands of miles from home. 

The Anatomy of a Desperate Journey 

This teenager’s plight is a vivid illustration of a traumatic journey driven by a volatile cocktail of intersecting issues. At the heart of this struggle is extreme poverty, where families facing the immediate threat of starvation begin to see migration not as a choice, but as a final, desperate investment in survival. This financial despair is further compounded by widespread unemployment, which strips the youth of any tangible future prospects within their own borders. Underlying these economic pressures is a persistent state of political instability, leaving many living in the constant shadow of insecurity and injustice. 

These children are sent on paths that would break grown adults. They navigate illegal crossings, rely on smugglers who can be ruthless in their pursuit of profit, and face increasingly hostile anti-migration policies in transit and destination countries. When a child falls in the snow, unable to move, his final thoughts are likely of the parents and siblings he may never see again. Conversely, back home, the silence of a disconnected phone becomes a deafening source of agony for the family left behind. 

A Plea for Change 

The story of the “frozen boy” is not an isolated incident, but it should be a turning point. While the boy was eventually rescued and shown in a subsequent video receiving shelter, his journey back to health—and potentially back to his hometown—will be marred by the physical and psychological scars of his ordeal. 

To the Families: We must speak honestly within our communities: No dream of a better life is worth the sacrifice of a child’s life. The dangers of these journeys are not merely risks; they are often death sentences. We must prioritise local alternatives—such as community-based vocational training or small-scale local cooperatives—that keep our youth rooted and safe. The gamble of the “black road” is a game where the house always wins, and the stake is our children’s lives. 

To the International Community: When a refugee finally reaches a new land, the citizens and government of that country must understand the sheer weight of the journey. These are not just “migrants”; they are survivors of a gauntlet of hunger, cold, and injustice. 

To prevent children from being pushed into the frozen shadows of our borders, the global community must uphold its fundamental obligation to protect human life. This commitment requires an immediate end to violent border “push-backs,” a practice that callously forces vulnerable groups into even more dangerous and unmonitored mountain terrain during the height of winter. Instead of deterrence through displacement, the world must invest in humanitarian corridors—secure passageways that recognize the inherent dignity of the human person as a priority over the technical legality of their status. Only by prioritising the sanctity of life over the fortification of borders can we ensure that no child is ever forced to navigate the “Death Road” in a desperate search for safety. 

We celebrate the snow in Kabul because it promises water for the crops and beauty for the soul. But we must never forget that for many young Afghans, that same snow is a cold shroud. We can only hope that this boy’s story is the last of its kind—that no more children will be buried in the frost in a desperate search for safety. 

A life is a heavy price to pay for a chance at a future. It is a price no child should ever have to carry. 

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The views and opinions expressed here are solely those of the individual authors and do not represent the Sussex Centre for Migration Research (SCMR).