Ali Ali, Michael Collyer, Priya Deshingkar, Anne-Meike Fechter, Melissa Gatter, Linda Morrice, Ceri Oeppen, Judith Townend and Tahir Zaman, SCMR, University of Sussex
Refugee Week has been celebrated in the UK since 1998 around World Refugee Day, June 20th. This year’s theme is ‘Community as a Superpower’ – an immediately attractive title, cleverly capturing many of the ideals that Refugee Week aims to implement. It is also a neat summary of work that researchers at SCMR are involved in at the moment. Themes of mutual aid, collective action and economies of care run through our ongoing research in the UK and beyond. There is often a disconnect between research in different parts of the world, so here we bring together our collective thinking about ‘community as a superpower’.
Refugee week display, 2025
Across the social sciences ‘community’ is a classic example of a contested concept, meaning agreement of an exact definition is never likely to be achieved. Definitions are important, particularly since words with positive associations, like ‘community’ can easily be used to make regressive policies appear acceptable to a public audience. There is a long history of this linguistic evasiveness in policies towards refugees. Debates around ‘community cohesion’ in the UK in the early 2000s demonstrated how apparently laudable government objectives played down very real social inequalities and pushed responsibilities for ‘integration’ onto disempowered migrant-origin communities. The emphasis on ‘cohesion’ was eventually abandoned, but is now resurfacing.
These debates address vital concerns, certainly for academics, yet they make little sense to Refugee Week itself. ‘Community as a superpower’ projects a purely positive understanding of ‘community’ so that’s how we will interpret it here in relation to our research. People everywhere rely on other people to make their lives safer, easier, cheaper or more fun, and refugees are no different. This straightforward insight has been formalised as social capital. For refugees, the sudden disruption of social capital and the difficulties of reconstituting it differentiates them from non-migrants, and even from other migrants with less disruptive mobility. In some senses, social capital, and therefore ‘community’, may be mobile but in other ways the act of becoming a refugee disrupts that community and forces refugees to find new forms of social capital.
One recent research project conducted by members of the SCMR, Protracted Displacement Economies, focused on refugees in situations of long-term displacement in The Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Myanmar and Pakistan. We were particularly interested in the ways in which the development of group connections began to define forms of community. This relational understanding of community helps us understand a particular interpretation of the meaning of community. Community is not a thing that exists before the interactions that create it. It makes no sense to think of community as separate from exchanges and connections within a group of people. It is the very act of exchange that forms a community.
Whilst community doesn’t exist without those exchanges and connections, most refugees are living in neighbouring countries where they are often familiar with and share existing cultural practices of community. Our research with Afghan refugees in north-west Pakistan is a good example of this, particularly in relation to gham khadi: the collective events surrounding an occasion of sorrow or joy, such as a funeral, or wedding. All the residents of a locality (refugees and not) attend gham khadi and support each other emotionally, materially (with money and food), and physically (through the provision of labour). These occasions blur the boundary, even if temporarily, between ‘host’ and ‘refugee’ and create a neighbourly bond of solidarity and care.
In some of the places we researched, such as a settlement in southeastern Myanmar, boundaries between ‘residents’ and ‘people recently displaced’ are not clearly drawn either. Due to decades of violent conflict, intensified by a military coup in 2021, those who had lived in the settlement for years were happy to extend support to newly arrived ones. As some long-term residents mentioned to our researchers, ‘we don’t think of ourselves as displaced people any more’, and from a modest income, such as from a small business, some were able to offer food, building materials or employment to ‘new’ internally displaced people’.
Our research among Somali refugees in Ethiopia also shows that boundaries between hosts and refugees are extremely hazy and complicated, because of shared cultures and histories of displacement. Somalis have a very long history in Ethiopia and are one of the largest ethnic groups. The 1977-78 Ethiopia-Somalia war resulted in the exodus of nearly a million Somalis from Ethiopia to Somalia. Many were forced to return after the civil war broke out in Somalia in 1991. Another large influx followed after 2008 because of drought and conflict and there has been a steady migration ever since. While the government attempts to differentiate between hosts (which includes returnees) and refugees, these identities do not make sense on the ground where Somalis function as a community, supporting each other through the exchange of food, care and credit.
In the US, where asylum seekers and migrants are under increasing threat of deportation under a far-right government, community has become the source of collective resistance. In our research in Chicago and New York City, the two largest sanctuary cities in the US, we find community organising wherever it is needed – in churches, on the streets, and outside immigration courthouses. Using social media to communicate and coordinate, citizens, established migrants, and asylum seekers support and protect each other where local and national government has failed to do so. Some community organisers tell us they are simply upholding the values of their faith, others identify with traditions of mutual aid and racial justice work, and many have backgrounds in union organising. In this context, community finds its power in making itself visible. Where federal immigration agents track asylum seekers, community organisers track the agents, confronting and sometimes deterring them from detaining and deporting asylum seekers on a daily basis. Community does not always succeed, most recently failing to prevent the ‘surprise’ public arrests of asylum seekers by federal agents in Los Angeles and Chicago, but organising continues, with hundreds taking to the streets to challenge the immigration system just as publicly.
Asylum seekers ‘shop’ for fresh groceries at a community food pantry designed to offer the experience of a market in Little Village, a Latino neighbourhood in Chicago. Photo by Melissa Gatter.
A recent research trip to Syria provoked further questions around community in processes of mass displacement: the communities that refugees left, those that have been destroyed, and the community that is transformed as a conflict ends. Areas that opposed Assad-rule were punished with sieges, starvation and bombardment. The desolate landscapes of Jobar and Qaboun neighbourhoods in Damascus or al-Yarmouk camp, are witness to the ghosts of community-capacity. In the case of Syria, what does return – and the language of community cohesion – mean when the elements that comprised those once thriving communities no longer exist or have been scattered? The echoes of mass displacement continue to sound as Syrians from across the country are relocating to the capital, Damascus, seeking out new opportunities.
The once small town of Azaz, in the far north of Syria close to the Turkish border, is now thought to have 300,000 residents. Its proximity to Turkey meant that it was not bombed by the Syrian Airforce, and thus a relatively secure area with economic opportunities that led to a rise in real estate prices. Economic ties to Turkey were evident during our visit – the currency used was the Turkish lira. A Turkish post office building, where salaries could be collected by employees of Turkish NGOs, stood alongside new mosques mimicking Ottoman architecture, a Turkish language institute, and many new residential buildings. Since the toppling of Assad, we heard that many people are returning to their former homes elsewhere and that housing costs in Azaz have fallen significantly. A new university, established with support from the Turkish humanitarian organisation IHH, is also seeking to relocate to Damascus. What will happen to communities in Azaz, and Damascus, and elsewhere in post-Assad Syria remains to be seen.
It is sobering to consider communities that refugees have been forced to leave, but also an illustration of the fragility of community. Where community is not continually remade it is threatened. The University of Sussex is a University of Sanctuary – not a status to be complacent about but a continual effort to engage in this work of community: maintaining scholarships for asylum seekers, providing ESOL lessons for refugees and trying to ensure the University is a welcoming place for everyone. Experiences such as our recent visit to post-war Syria remind us what is at stake and why this is so important. People who have seen their communities destroyed deserve to be made welcome. Our research around the world enables us to bear witness to the power of an inclusive community. The process of welcoming itself can be the beginning of a new community. This is what we celebrate during Refugee Week. If you are in Brighton and Hove this week, please join us.
Community as a Superpower – Research in action.
Ali Ali, Michael Collyer, Priya Deshingkar, Anne-Meike Fechter, Melissa Gatter, Linda Morrice, Ceri Oeppen, Judith Townend and Tahir Zaman, SCMR, University of Sussex
Refugee Week has been celebrated in the UK since 1998 around World Refugee Day, June 20th. This year’s theme is ‘Community as a Superpower’ – an immediately attractive title, cleverly capturing many of the ideals that Refugee Week aims to implement. It is also a neat summary of work that researchers at SCMR are involved in at the moment. Themes of mutual aid, collective action and economies of care run through our ongoing research in the UK and beyond. There is often a disconnect between research in different parts of the world, so here we bring together our collective thinking about ‘community as a superpower’.
Across the social sciences ‘community’ is a classic example of a contested concept, meaning agreement of an exact definition is never likely to be achieved. Definitions are important, particularly since words with positive associations, like ‘community’ can easily be used to make regressive policies appear acceptable to a public audience. There is a long history of this linguistic evasiveness in policies towards refugees. Debates around ‘community cohesion’ in the UK in the early 2000s demonstrated how apparently laudable government objectives played down very real social inequalities and pushed responsibilities for ‘integration’ onto disempowered migrant-origin communities. The emphasis on ‘cohesion’ was eventually abandoned, but is now resurfacing.
These debates address vital concerns, certainly for academics, yet they make little sense to Refugee Week itself. ‘Community as a superpower’ projects a purely positive understanding of ‘community’ so that’s how we will interpret it here in relation to our research. People everywhere rely on other people to make their lives safer, easier, cheaper or more fun, and refugees are no different. This straightforward insight has been formalised as social capital. For refugees, the sudden disruption of social capital and the difficulties of reconstituting it differentiates them from non-migrants, and even from other migrants with less disruptive mobility. In some senses, social capital, and therefore ‘community’, may be mobile but in other ways the act of becoming a refugee disrupts that community and forces refugees to find new forms of social capital.
One recent research project conducted by members of the SCMR, Protracted Displacement Economies, focused on refugees in situations of long-term displacement in The Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Myanmar and Pakistan. We were particularly interested in the ways in which the development of group connections began to define forms of community. This relational understanding of community helps us understand a particular interpretation of the meaning of community. Community is not a thing that exists before the interactions that create it. It makes no sense to think of community as separate from exchanges and connections within a group of people. It is the very act of exchange that forms a community.
Whilst community doesn’t exist without those exchanges and connections, most refugees are living in neighbouring countries where they are often familiar with and share existing cultural practices of community. Our research with Afghan refugees in north-west Pakistan is a good example of this, particularly in relation to gham khadi: the collective events surrounding an occasion of sorrow or joy, such as a funeral, or wedding. All the residents of a locality (refugees and not) attend gham khadi and support each other emotionally, materially (with money and food), and physically (through the provision of labour). These occasions blur the boundary, even if temporarily, between ‘host’ and ‘refugee’ and create a neighbourly bond of solidarity and care.
In some of the places we researched, such as a settlement in southeastern Myanmar, boundaries between ‘residents’ and ‘people recently displaced’ are not clearly drawn either. Due to decades of violent conflict, intensified by a military coup in 2021, those who had lived in the settlement for years were happy to extend support to newly arrived ones. As some long-term residents mentioned to our researchers, ‘we don’t think of ourselves as displaced people any more’, and from a modest income, such as from a small business, some were able to offer food, building materials or employment to ‘new’ internally displaced people’.
Our research among Somali refugees in Ethiopia also shows that boundaries between hosts and refugees are extremely hazy and complicated, because of shared cultures and histories of displacement. Somalis have a very long history in Ethiopia and are one of the largest ethnic groups. The 1977-78 Ethiopia-Somalia war resulted in the exodus of nearly a million Somalis from Ethiopia to Somalia. Many were forced to return after the civil war broke out in Somalia in 1991. Another large influx followed after 2008 because of drought and conflict and there has been a steady migration ever since. While the government attempts to differentiate between hosts (which includes returnees) and refugees, these identities do not make sense on the ground where Somalis function as a community, supporting each other through the exchange of food, care and credit.
In the US, where asylum seekers and migrants are under increasing threat of deportation under a far-right government, community has become the source of collective resistance. In our research in Chicago and New York City, the two largest sanctuary cities in the US, we find community organising wherever it is needed – in churches, on the streets, and outside immigration courthouses. Using social media to communicate and coordinate, citizens, established migrants, and asylum seekers support and protect each other where local and national government has failed to do so. Some community organisers tell us they are simply upholding the values of their faith, others identify with traditions of mutual aid and racial justice work, and many have backgrounds in union organising. In this context, community finds its power in making itself visible. Where federal immigration agents track asylum seekers, community organisers track the agents, confronting and sometimes deterring them from detaining and deporting asylum seekers on a daily basis. Community does not always succeed, most recently failing to prevent the ‘surprise’ public arrests of asylum seekers by federal agents in Los Angeles and Chicago, but organising continues, with hundreds taking to the streets to challenge the immigration system just as publicly.
A recent research trip to Syria provoked further questions around community in processes of mass displacement: the communities that refugees left, those that have been destroyed, and the community that is transformed as a conflict ends. Areas that opposed Assad-rule were punished with sieges, starvation and bombardment. The desolate landscapes of Jobar and Qaboun neighbourhoods in Damascus or al-Yarmouk camp, are witness to the ghosts of community-capacity. In the case of Syria, what does return – and the language of community cohesion – mean when the elements that comprised those once thriving communities no longer exist or have been scattered? The echoes of mass displacement continue to sound as Syrians from across the country are relocating to the capital, Damascus, seeking out new opportunities.
The once small town of Azaz, in the far north of Syria close to the Turkish border, is now thought to have 300,000 residents. Its proximity to Turkey meant that it was not bombed by the Syrian Airforce, and thus a relatively secure area with economic opportunities that led to a rise in real estate prices. Economic ties to Turkey were evident during our visit – the currency used was the Turkish lira. A Turkish post office building, where salaries could be collected by employees of Turkish NGOs, stood alongside new mosques mimicking Ottoman architecture, a Turkish language institute, and many new residential buildings. Since the toppling of Assad, we heard that many people are returning to their former homes elsewhere and that housing costs in Azaz have fallen significantly. A new university, established with support from the Turkish humanitarian organisation IHH, is also seeking to relocate to Damascus. What will happen to communities in Azaz, and Damascus, and elsewhere in post-Assad Syria remains to be seen.
It is sobering to consider communities that refugees have been forced to leave, but also an illustration of the fragility of community. Where community is not continually remade it is threatened. The University of Sussex is a University of Sanctuary – not a status to be complacent about but a continual effort to engage in this work of community: maintaining scholarships for asylum seekers, providing ESOL lessons for refugees and trying to ensure the University is a welcoming place for everyone. Experiences such as our recent visit to post-war Syria remind us what is at stake and why this is so important. People who have seen their communities destroyed deserve to be made welcome. Our research around the world enables us to bear witness to the power of an inclusive community. The process of welcoming itself can be the beginning of a new community. This is what we celebrate during Refugee Week. If you are in Brighton and Hove this week, please join us.
Events to celebrate Refugee Week 2025 in Brighton and Hove are listed here: https://brighton-and-hove.cityofsanctuary.org/refugee-week-2024-2
Posted in Migration Comments, Migration Research