Refugee Studies Centre

Film is one of the many ways the Online School in Forced Migration brings different perspectives into conversation.

Participants join a special film night featuring The Wait (2016), followed by discussion and Q&A with Dr Maher Abdul Aziz and Professor Dawn Chatty.

Film can create a different kind of space for reflection, inviting participants to engage emotionally, critically and collectively with stories of displacement and lived experience.

📅 22-26 June 2026
🌍 Online
📝 https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/study/international-summer-school

Don't forget to sign up for our webinar at 5pm today!

Title: 'From making the 'Refugee City' to being ethnically cleansed from it?'

Speaker: Associate Professor Sanaa Alimia (Aga Khan University)

📅5pm-6pm, 3 June

Register here: https://f.mtr.cool/somuuchief

About this talk:
Sanaa Alimia reflects on fifteen years of research on refugee displacement in urban contexts, including both what she got “right” and what she may have missed. Using Afghan refugees in Pakistan as a case study, she shows how long-term residents who helped build cities with their own hands can nonetheless be violently expelled from them.

‘Policies of eviction: making visible the EU border in Sicily’s rural areas’, a new open access article by Dr Maggie Neil in the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01419870.2026.2665709

Abstract:
Across Italy, seasonal workers and others with migratory backgrounds live in informal settlements in rural areas. These settlements offer forms of autonomy and community alongside hardships. Italian and EU authorities frame settlements as “undignified” and mobilise humanitarian reasoning to justify police evictions in the name of creating “legal” hostels. Yet four years of fieldwork in Sicily show that these measures dismantle homes and networks, worsen living conditions, and fail to provide viable alternatives, leading to detention and deportations.

Policies of eviction: making visible the EU border in Sicily’s rural areas Across Italy, seasonal workers and others with migratory backgrounds live in informal settlements in rural areas. These settlements offer forms of autonomy and community alongside hardships. Italia...

Natasha Yacoub (a former RSC Visiting Fellow) has published 'Feminist Approaches to Recenter Humanity in International Migration Law' in The Oxford Handbook of Women and International Law.

It is free to access until 13 June:

Feminist Approaches to Recenter Humanity in International Migration Law AbstractThe constellation of international laws regulating migration, including forced migration, ought to prioritize considerations of humanity, balancing

Some of the most important conversations in forced migration happen at the intersections between ideas and real-world responses.

Our International Online School in Forced Migration brings together participants working across different sectors and contexts, creating opportunities to reflect on how research, policy and practice inform one another.

These conversations often challenge assumptions, deepen understanding, and open up new ways of thinking.

📅 22-26 June 2026
Apply here: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/study/international-summer-school

From making the 'Refugee City' to being ethnically cleansed from it?

Join us online this Wednesday for a webinar with Associate Professor Sanaa Alimia (Aga Khan University)

📅5pm-6pm, 3 June 2026
Register here: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_8zra8rvfThibXSbW84P45w #/

About this talk:
Sanaa Alimia reflects on fifteen years of research on refugee displacement in urban contexts, including both what she got “right” and what she may have missed. Using Afghan refugees in Pakistan as a case study, she shows how long-term residents who helped build cities with their own hands can nonetheless be violently expelled from them.

The Afghan case compels us to ask: how are migrant populations transformed into permanent security threats, and how do 'host' societies become hostile homelands?

About the speaker:
Sanaa Alimia is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the Aga Khan University, London. She is the author of Refugee Cities: How Afghans Changed Urban Pakistan (University of Pennsylvania Press and Folio Books), which won the 2025 AIPS Book Prize and the 2024 Bloomsbury Book Prize. She has held academic positions in the UK, Germany, and Pakistan, held a British Academy/Leverhulme grant, and has worked in the policy sector in Kenya.

Alimia serves in several editorial roles, including with Edinburgh University Press and the collective of Red Pepper magazine. She publishes across academic, policy, and journalistic platforms. She divides her time between Nairobi and London.

Further details for all our events can be found here: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events

Did you miss the Annual Elizabeth Colson Lecture with Jeffrey Kahn? You can now listen to it on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/refugeestudiescentre/jeffrey-kahn-colson-lecture

About this talk:
Deportations are a means of formally severing relation between subjects and the body politic. The plausibility of deportation as a lawful, ethical act depends on a host of juridically constituted rules concerning what a polity is, who its members are, and under what conditions one can be excised from it. In this talk, Jeffrey will argue that the legal machinery of deportation is one of the key sites in which we can see how law operates as an expressive, world-constituting embodiment of ethical commitment and a technology of abandonment – a form of state-authorized “letting die” that differs from intentional sovereign violence. In the United States, the implementation of the Convention Against Torture and the removal of Haitians with criminal convictions to Haiti provides a chilling opportunity to explore the limits of these practices of severing relation. Approaching this jurisprudence through an anthropological lens, this talk will examine how law creates ethical geographies of connection and how its modes of severing relation insulate states from responsibility for state-sanctioned violence.

One of the distinctive features of the International Online School in Forced Migration is the opportunity to explore specialised themes in great depth.

Alongside shared core teaching, participants also join optional modules that allow them to engage with specific issues, themes and areas of interest.

Recent optional modules have included topics such as colonial histories and displacement, Palestinian refugees, psycho-social support, and reconstruction.

Join us in June:

📅 22-26 June 2026
📝 https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/study/international-summer-school

Image: Salah Darwish via unsplash

The European Convention on Human Rights and migration – where are we now? Don’t miss our second event tomorrow, a public seminar with Sir Tim Eicke KC

📍Oxford Department for International Development
📅5pm, 27 May 2026
Registration is not required

About this talk:
Sir Tim, former judge in respect of the United Kingdom on the European Court of Human Rights (2016-2025), will reflect on the Court’s recent case-law on and its overall approach to the situation of refugees, and migrants more generally. He will situate these reflections in the increasing criticism – whether well-founded or not – and calls for “reform” of the Court’s approach – in particular to Articles 3 and 8 ECHR - “in the context of the contemporary challenges posed both by irregular migration and by the situation of foreigners convicted of serious offences, taking duly into account in particular governments’ fundamental responsibility to ensure national security and public safety”

About the speaker:
Sir Tim Eicke K.C. is a barrister practising from Essex Court Chambers in London. He was called to the Bar of England and Wales in 1993 (Northern Ireland in 2025) and appointed Q.C. (now K.C.) in 2011.

From September 2016 to September 2025, Sir Tim was the judge at the European Court of Human Rights elected in respect of the United Kingdom. He was knighted “for services to the protection of Human Rights in Europe” in the 2026 New Year’s Honours List.

Further details of these and all our events can be found here: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/events

Where possible recordings of RSC public seminars are made available after the event. You can browse our seminar recordings here: https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/podcasts-and-videos

Two public seminars tomorrow! First, Professor Michelle Pace will present her book - Unwelcome to Denmark: The Paradigm Shift and Refugee Integration.

📍Oxford Department for International Development
📅 3.30pm-4.30pm, 27 May 2026
Registration is not required

About this talk:
Denmark’s increasingly harsh migration regime has reshaped not only the lives of refugees but the wider fabric of Danish society. Drawing on policy and legal analysis, lived experiences, and institutional perspectives, the book reveals how this harsh migration regime reverberates across public services, workplaces, and communities. In this talk Michelle will critically interrogate the tensions between a nation’s humanitarian commitments and its political desire to project un-welcomeness, and reflect on what such a system means for democracy, cohesion, and the future of integration in Denmark.

About the speaker:
Michelle Pace is Professor in Global Studies based in Roskilde, Denmark. A political scientist by training, her interdisciplinary research and teaching focuses on the intersection between European / Middle East / Critical Migration / Democratization and Peace & Conflict Studies. Her book Un-welcome to Denmark. The paradigm shift and refugee integration (with Sarah El-Abd) received a Carlsberg Monograph Fellowship in 2021.

Dr Frowin Rausis will join as a discussant. Frowin’s research examines the global diffusion of (i)liberal asylum policies, the role of international organisations in migration governance, as well as cooperation and contestation in migration diplomacy.