Occasional Paper #37 HUMANITARIAN ACTION: SOCIAL SCIENCE CONNECTIONS Edited by Stephen C. Lubkemann, Larry Minear, and Thomas G. Weiss i Occasional Papers is a series published by The Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies Brown University, Box 1970 2 Stimson Avenue Providence, RI 02912 USA Telephone: (401) 863-2809 Fax: (401) 863-1270 E-mail: [email protected] http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Watson_Institute/ Abbott Gleason, Director Frederick F. Fullerton, Writer/Editor Mary Lhowe, Editor Statements of fact or opinions are solely those of the authors; their publication does not imply endorsement by the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies. Copyright 2000 by the Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for Interna- tional Studies. All rights reserved under International and Pan American Convention. No part of this report may be reproduced by any other means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher. All inquiries should be addressed to Publications Group, Thomas J. Watson Jr. Institute for International Studies. ii CONTENTS Foreword.................................................................................. v Acronyms................................................................................ xi 1. Understanding Forced Migration: Rethinking Collaborative Arrangements..................... 1 by Stephen Lubkemann, Larry Minear, and Thomas G. Weiss 2. Who Has Counted the Refugees? UNHCR and the Politics of Numbers ........................ 33 by Jeff Crisp 3. On the Margins, in the Mainstream: Urban Refugees in Africa..............................................63 by Marc Sommers 4. Sociocultural Factors Shaping the Mozambican Repatriation Process.............................. 91 by Stephen Lubkemann 5. The Quest for Accuracy in the Estimation of Forced Migration ..................... 127 by Susanne Schmeidl Notes..................................................................................... 159 Appendix I: Participants in the Workshop.........................179 Appendix II: About the Authors and Institutions..............183 iii iv FOREWORD As a rule, conference proceedings make dull reading. They are usually of interest to the conferees who want a readable record of what transpired or to a small circle of academics who are curious about what they missed. This volume, I believe, represents an exception to that rule. First, its topic is timely. As humanitarian practitioners confront a daunting array of challenges in the post-Cold War era, they are increasingly aware of the need to move from reflexive to reflective action. In their quest for more effective and savvy approaches to carrying out their man- dates amidst internal armed conflicts and uprooted popu- lations, practitioners are discovering that the social sciences offer an underused but promising resource. Second, this reprise makes good reading. The first chapter identifies key themes of a conference held in April 1999 at Brown University on the subject “Population Studies and Humanitarian Action: Exploring the Connections.” Chap- ters 2 through 5 contain commissioned papers presented to the group and then revised to reflect the ensuing dialogue. “Who Has Counted the Refugees?” by Jeff Crisp (Chap- ter 2) addresses crucial issues related to the mandates and methodologies of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in particular and, in a broader sense, of other aid agencies as well. Anthropologists Marc Sommers and Stephen Lubkemann present original research on Burundians in Tanzania and Mozambicans in South Africa and Zimbabwe (Chapters 3 and 4). They identify important insights from the social sciences available to, but largely ignored by, aid organizations. In “The Quest for Accuracy in the Estimation of Forced Migration” (Chapter 5), anthropologist Susanne Schmeidl examines both the need for and the difficulties of obtaining useful numbers of refugees and internally dis- placed persons as the basis for assistance and protection work. Third, the process of exploring the connections be- tween humanitarian action and the social sciences extends v well beyond a single conference. The issues it touches are the subject of continuing reflection in a variety of venues. In a special session in January 2000, the United Nations Secu- rity Council itself reviewed those issues. The council’s debate demonstrated, in the words of one reporter, “how new wars demand new definitions and, probably, new policies, if millions of people they have made homeless are to survive.” The Social Science Research Council, which was represented at the Brown conference, has subsequently held a conference of its own and is actively pursuing the topic, as is the National Academy of Sciences through its ongoing Roundtable on Forced Migration. In exploring the contributions that social science can make to humanitarian praxis, this volume complements earlier research and publications by the Humanitarianism and War Project. A recurring theme in our studies, whether of Central America, the former Yugoslavia, or, most re- cently, the Caucasus, has been that effective humanitarian action requires thorough familiarity with the historical and cultural contexts of the crises to which it responds. This volume identifies the tools and methodologies, the per- spectives and insights that social science practitioners can bring to bear. Another leitmotiv of the Project since its inception in 1991 has been the interaction between humanitarian prin- ciples and activities, on the one hand, and political forces and factors, on the other. This volume extends and deepens that analysis by examining how much the counting of refugees and internally displaced persons is itself often infiltrated by political agendas, not only of governments but also of aid agencies and the affected persons them- selves. A recognition of the political terrain upon which humanitarian action is mounted can, as noted in our other studies, help depoliticize aid activities and render them more effective. A third connection with earlier Project work concerns the examination here of the interplay among humanitarian practice, public policy, and social science research. The vi dynamic relationships among these three sectors recall an earlier study in which we analyzed the interplay among humanitarian actors, government policymakers, and the media. We proposed the concept of a “crisis triangle” as an analytical device for understanding the dynamic interac- tion of three sets of institutions, each with its own interests in humanitarian matters and its own constraints in dealing with them. In the present study, too, an “actor matrix” describing the triad of institutional actors—practitioners, policymakers, and researchers—may be a helpful analyti- cal tool. The intellectual journey retraced in this volume reflects a collaboration between Brown University’s Humanitari- anism and War Project and its Population Studies and Training Center (PSTC). The interest of the Project has been to promote more systematic interaction with, and input from, the social sciences as a key ingredient in increasing the effectiveness of humanitarian action. For its part, the PSTC has a long and distinguished history of basic research on demographic processes relevant to humanitarian action (including reproductive health, migration, mortality, and morbidity) and of developing sophisticated methodologi- cal tools for indirect estimation. The collaboration between the two entities has offered the opportunity to explore how social science insights and methodology may inform hu- manitarian action, and vice versa. As with other publications of the Humanitarianism and War Project, this Occasional Paper is written primarily for busy humanitarian practitioners who, while not card-car- rying social scientists, are increasingly open to the insights that those disciplines may provide. However, the mono- graph is also framed with academics and policymakers in mind. Aware of the competing demands on practitioners’ time, we had initially envisioned something shorter, only to find that it was impossible to do justice to the connections between humanitarian action and social science research as succinctly as we had hoped. Indeed, the different perspectives on the length of this vii publication illuminate one of the critical tensions between the two constituencies. Left to their own devices, aid prac- titioners, who in the past have demonstrated little patience for nuanced discussions of sociocultural context and the methodologies of enumeration, would have settled for a five-page checklist of “how-to’s.” For their part, the contri- butions from the social scientists would have been not only lengthier but also more technical and jargon-laden. In framing the workshop’s discussions and preparing this volume, we have accepted neither the aid community’s impatience with social science nor the reluctance of social scientists to bring their insights to bear on the specific programming challenges and constraints of aid agencies. In the middle ground where humanitarian practice and social science increasingly connect, aid agencies need to make more space for reflection while social science research design and presentation needs to be shaped less by theoreti- cal conjecture and more by the relevant demands of aid practice. The desideratum of the dialogue, as we understand it, is not to transform aid workers into anthropologists or to convert social