Refugee Political Participation

If the 82 million displaced people across the world (UNCHR Global Trends 2020) formed a country, it would be the 20th biggest in the world. But they are not a country.

Apart from experiences related to poverty, destitution, insecurity, and violence, refugees experience exclusion from the political community and rights of citizenship.

The RPP projects overall aim is to transform how scholarship and policy conceives of refugees by placing their politics in the centre of the enquiry, and studying how their voices are and can be recognised and empowered in a political context.

It will be the first interdisciplinary and critical scholarly study of refugee participation bridging work in political science, critical legal studies, and socio-legal studies.This project will bring together Will Jones, a political scientist who has conducted pathbreaking work on algorithmic decision-making and digital identity in the refugee regime, with Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen, Director of the interdisciplinary Nordic Asylum Law and Data Lab at the University of Copenhagen, to conduct the first systematic study of refugee participation.

This ambitious project innovatively combines political science, law, and data science to understand how refugees can and could be included and empowered in the refugee regime as it is transformed by the digital revolution.We propose to conduct the first interdisciplinary and critical scholarly study of refugee participation.

This will contribute to scholarship in three key respects. Empirically, it will provide multi-sited knowledge of this important-but-understudied issue.

Conceptually, it will move beyond uncritical activist or institutional approaches by applying rigorously theorised work from political science and law.

Methodologically, it will move beyond existing work by pioneering an analytical framework integrating multiple disciplines.