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What role do research and researchers play in reforming the global governance of international migration? Whereas research has played a role in identifying and systematizing the weaknesses within migration’s global governance systems, it has an extremely limited ability to shape actual reform. Effecting reform rather depends on political opportunity. However, the presence of researchers is often used to legitimize the idea of global governance without requiring action, while attendance at high-level events are used by academics to confirm their importance and impact. However, there are opportunities also for independent researchers to be policy-relevant. First, by not letting good academic research be buried underneath dense postmodern phrasing, but rather be articulated so that policy-makers can grasp the content. Second, by using the potential for innovative collaborations with policy-makers; collaborations in which researchers help design and build projects, in which research is not the precursor but the parallel to action.

The values of individualism developed in the post-Enlightenment West are at the core of the contemporary refugee protection system. While enormously powerful, this tradition assigns priority to the individual as distinguished from the community. Based on patterns established in centuries of religious thought and practice as well as on the insights of key thinkers in the tradition of Western individualism, this paper argues that consideration of communities should receive greater emphasis. In terms of the refugee protection system, this shift requires examining how best to address the needs of communities that are uprooted, as well as the needs of communities into which displaced persons are received, rather than only focusing on individuals who cross a border and seek refugee status.

The article discusses the principles of voluntariness, safety, and dignity in the context of refugee repatriation. It begins by setting out the applicable legal framework, and discusses how that framework has been elaborated upon and refined since 1951. The article then discusses how the principles of voluntariness, safety, and dignity have, in practice, been applied (or, in a few unfortunate cases, ignored). After noting that we are now living in an era of protracted refugee emergencies, the article concludes with a number of recommendations regarding alternatives to repatriation and the conditions under which repatriation can take place without offense to the principles of voluntariness, safety, and dignity.

Drivers can be understood as forces leading to the inception of migration and the perpetuation of movement. This article considers key drivers of migration and explores different ways that they may be configured. We modify existing explanations of migration to generate a framework which we call push-pull plus. To understand migration flows better, analysts could usefully distinguish between predisposing, proximate, precipitating and mediating drivers. Combinations of such drivers shape the conditions, circumstances and environment within which people choose to move or stay put, or have that decision thrust upon them. In any one migration flow, several driver complexes may interconnect to shape the eventual direction and nature of movement. The challenge is to establish when and why some drivers are more important than others, which combinations are more potent than others, and which are more susceptible to change through external intervention. Drawing on Afghan and Somali movements featuring ‘mixed migration’, the article concludes that proximate and mediating drivers, rather than those in the structural and precipitating spheres, appear to offer greater potential for intervention. To be effective, though, migration policy should be understood not simply as a stand-alone lever, but within the wider political economy.

Repatriation has long been the international community's preferred solution to refugee crises. This article argues that repatriation must be understood not in terms of physical return but as a process of political rapprochement between citizen, community and state. In particular, this work takes account of the need to accommodate community-based political identities. Repatriation should be conceived of as the deliberate remaking of a social compact between not only refugee-citizen and state but also refugee-nation and state. This offers a means for resolving the inherent contradiction between the notion of universal human rights and contemporary political organization which determines meaningful access to these rights on the basis of group or national identities. This is particularly important given the role of group-based conflict in causing mass refugee flight.

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship. All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century – repatriation, resettlement and local integration – are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation–state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences o...

SummaryCapital services are the flow of services into the production of output that are generated by the capital stock, as opposed to the stock of capital itself. As such, capital services are the measure of capital input that is more suitable for analysing and modelling productivity (see Long and Franklin 2010 for new estimates of multi‐factor productivity). This article presents experimental capital services estimates for 1950 to 2008. New estimates for 2008 are presented in this article with earlier years updated to incorporate revisions throughout the time series. Revisions are caused primarily by balancing revisions to the constant price plant and machinery series and new data on computer hardware investment. In addition, this article presents for the first time an experimental quarterly series of capital services growth for the whole economy.

SUMMARYThis article presents current price labour productivity estimates using published data from the Annual Business Inquiry (ABI). The article updates the work of Goodridge (2007) and Daffi n and Lau (2002) in presenting estimates for the years 2006 and 2007. A new development presented in this article are constant price labour productivity measures which have been formulated using Producer Price Indices (PPI) and the experimental Services Producer Price Indices (SPPI) to deflate output. These enable a more accurate analysis of industry labour productivity trends over time. It is found that capital intensive industries generally exhibit both higher levels and growth in labour productivity over the sample period.

SUMMARYThis article presents multi–factor productivity (MFP) estimates using experimental measures of quality adjusted labour inputs and utilisation of capital services. Using a growth accounting framework, output growth can be split into the relative contributions of labour and capital inputs, and a residual component which is variously described as ‘disembodied technical change’, the ‘Solow residual’, total factor productivity or simply as MFP. This approach complements traditional measures of productivity, which focus only on one input, labour, and take account only of the volume of labour, measured in jobs or hours, and not on changes in the composition of labour over time. Estimates are produced at the market sector and whole economy levels.The article develops the work of Turvey (2009) by extending the back data to 1994 (1995 for the market sector) and forward to 2008, and by providing estimates at an enhanced level of industrial disaggregation, consistent with parallel developments in measuring labour and capital inputs.

SUMMARYThe duration of unemployment is an indicator of how efficient the labour market is at matching workers to jobs. Understanding the drivers of unemployment is of interest to policy makers, researchers and the public alike. Economic theory suggests that there will always be some measure of frictional unemployment in any economy, as it takes time for workers to search for and find appropriate jobs (ONS, 2008). This article analyses the effect that an individual's characteristics have on the length of their unemployment, and ultimately on their likelihood of becoming employed.

This article uses data from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), over the period 1991 to 2006, to examine the factors affecting the length of unemployment spells. The analysis is carried out with particular interest in the effect of regional labour market conditions on an individual's conditional probability of leaving unemployment. A discrete time proportional hazards model is estimated, controlling for a range of demographic, educational, occupational and regional characteristics.

The repatriation of Russian refugees from Bulgaria between 1922 and 1924 under League of Nations’ supervision represents the earliest international attempt to organize a co-ordinated refugee return. Drawing on new archival research, this article argues that enhanced understandings of the historical development of repatriation contribute to the contemporary political theorization of repatriation. It demonstrates the long-standing liberal-international commitment to the ethical corollaries of ‘voluntariness’, ‘safety’ and ‘protection’ in repatriation, despite the manipulation of these terms by political emigre groups interested in resisting Soviet state power. This exposes the complex connections between the early 20th-century rise of the sovereign European nation-state and consequent refugee exodus. Repatriation was thus a fundamentally political project concerned with restoring the relations between state, nation and citizen: it ultimately failed in the Russian–Bulgarian case not because of any disagreement over repatriation's liberal corollaries, but because of disputes between the League of Nations, the Soviet State and the Russian refugees themselves regarding the nature of both inter-state and intra-state sovereignty. The article concludes by suggesting that it is these questions of political community which continue to pose the greatest challenge to repatriation as a durable solution to contemporary refugee crises.

This chapter examines the role of gender in displacement, focusing on women’s and men’s experiences and the different ways in which gender identities, roles, and relations are influenced by processes of and responses to forced migration. It begins with a brief historical overview of feminist and gendered analyses of forced migration. It then explores the causes and experiences of forced migration by drawing on gendered evaluations of individualized persecution and experiences of conflict-induced mass displacement. It also explores the nature of refugee status determination processes, highlighting emerging sensitivity to the interconnectedness between sexual orientation, gender identity, and asylum. Furthermore, it considers developments in responses to sexual and gender-based violence in mass displacement contexts, along with the paradoxical implications of policies aimed at promoting gender equality and empowerment in camp contexts. The chapter concludes by commenting on the gendered nature of the three durable solutions: local integration, repatriation, and resettlement.

This chapter examines how many of those refugees and asylum seekers making transnational journeys are classified as irregular migrants by states who seek to make such movements illegitimate. It considers the framing, targeting, and active production of ‘forced migrants as illegal migrants’ in the literature and highlights the importance of the labels of ‘forced’ and ‘illegal’ in the governing of migration. It discusses the concept of ‘figures of migration’, which is based on the notion that categorizations of people on the move such as the ‘refugee’ or the ‘illegal migrant’ do not represent distinct social groups sharing characteristic features. Furthermore, it looks at how academic knowledge production might intervene in the contested politics of mobility in order to refuse, destabilize, or subvert the terms by which the rendering of ‘forced migrants as illegal migrants’ has become unambiguous.

The chapter (Chapter 18) explores the central role of the UN and its subsidiary agencies, particularly the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) in the Palestinian refugee problem, especially on the right to durable solutions. The UN established a special regime comprising two agencies, the United Nations Conciliation Commission on Palestine (UNCCP) and UNRWA, with shared but distinct international obligations towards the displaced Palestinian population. Consequently, the UN decided to exclude Palestinians from the 'universal' refugee regime incorporated in the 1950 UNHCR Statute and the 1951 Refugee Convention. This chapter explores how the key protection of durable solutions has been severed from the refugee definition, and the consequences of relegating Palestinians to weak and widely disparate rights protections around the world.

PART I: APPROACHES: OLD AND NEW PART II: SHIFTING SPACES AND SCENARIOS OF DISPLACEMENT PART III: LEGAL AND INSTITUTIONAL RESPONSES TO FORCED MIGRATION PART IV: ROOT CAUSES OF DISPLACEMENT PART V: LIVED EXPERIENCES AND REPRESENTATIONS OF FORCED MIGRATION PART VI: RETHINKING DURABLE SOLUTIONS PART VII: REGIONAL STUDIES: CURRENT REALITIES AND FUTURE CHALLENGES