Spring 2007 International Studies Program Seminar:

REFUGEES IN AN AGE OF CATASTROPHE

 

 

According the US Committee on Refugees and Immigrants (USCRI) World Refugee Survey of 2006, there are 12 million refugees and asylum seekers, and 21 million IDPs in the world today.  The problem of refugees and forced migrants is one of the most tragic and persistent problems of our time. While the forced displacement of people within and across national borders has occurred from times immemorial, the twentieth-century was perhaps the most catastrophic of centuries in this regard. The problems of genocide and ethnic cleansing, of civil wars, political and dirty wars, terror wars, of famines and what Arundhati Roy sarcastically refers to as "greater common good" development projects (e.g., mega dams) were all productive of massive refugee and forced migrant flows during the twentieth-century and into the present. This course explores the causes, consequences, experiences of, and responses to, forced migration since the Second World War. We will discuss legal definitions, legal rights and responsibilities, with relation to refugees - those who have fled their places of nationality (crossing national borders) due to a "well founded fear of persecution," internally displaced persons (IDPs) and asylees - those who have been granted asylum either in a country of first asylum, usually neighboring their country of origin, or a third country, usually a "First World" country.

 

Themes of this course include key concepts like genocide, refugees and protection; the history and progress of human rights policies and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees; the policy of refugee encampment; sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) against refugee women and children; refugee refoulment, integration, repatriation; the politics of refugee resettlement and asylum; issues of memory and trauma and HIV/AIDS. Specific case studies will be drawn from the Sudan (including the Darfur crisis), Rwanda, Cambodia, Palestine, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Guatemala.

 

LAS            301
Seminar in International Studies
3 hours.  May be repeated to a maximum of 6 hours if topics vary. Prerequisite(s): Junior standing or consent of the instructor.  

16545

LCD

01:00 PM

-

03:20 PM

W

235

2BSB

Jackson, L

Office Hours:  Wednesdays, 4-6pm
Office Location:  1230 UH
Phone:  x32457
Email:  lajackso@uic.edu

Professor Lynette A. Jackson
Gender and Women's Studies Program (MC 360)
Suite 1230, University Hall
601 South Morgan Street
Chicago, Illinois 60607-7107