Citation for the award of an Honorary Doctorate to Barbara Harrell-Bond, 27 July 2016 at SOAS, University of London
Published: 1 Sep 2016
The following introduction was delivered at SOAS, University of London, on 27 July by Dr Laura Hammond, Reader and Department Head, Department of Development Studies.
Madame President, Ladies, Gentlemen and Colleagues, it is a great honour and pleasure to present to you Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond.
Barbara Harrell-Bond is a legal anthropologist, author, teacher, and tireless advocate for the rights of refugees around the world. She is a seminal figure in the interdisciplinary field of refugee studies.
Trained as a legal anthropologist, Barbara Harrell-Bond studied at Oxford under the supervision of anthropologists Edwin Ardener and John Beattie. Her engagement with African Studies and refugees came later, but her commitment to social justice was clear in her 1967 dissertation, an ethnography of a housing estate in Oxford’s Blackbird Leys. She went on to conduct research in Sierra Leone on family law, administrative law, and dispute treatment in customary courts while employed by the University of Edinburgh and Leiden’s Afrika-Studiecentram. She extended her research in West Africa at the Faculty of Law, University of Warwick. While serving as the representative of the American International Field Staff in 1981 she was introduced to the plight of Sahrawi refugees in Algeria; this stimulated her interest in humanitarian and refugee issues.
Back at Oxford, at the encouragement of Oxford University’s Queen Elizabeth House, she established the Refugee Studies Programme (now the Refugee Studies Centre). Run by a small dedicated team, this institution quickly became the focal point for academics, practitioners and refugees themselves. Her research and teaching inspired generations of scholars – including several at SOAS – and practitioners. She helped found the Journal of Refugee Studies and Forced Migration Review – respectively the world’s leading academic and practitioner publications on refugees and displacement, and a book series on refugees with Berghahn Books. She is also a founder and Honorary Lifetime Member of the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration, the leading scholarly association on forced migration. Her pioneering work helped establish the study of refugees as an interdisciplinary academic field that aims to influence policy and bringing a refugee-centred focus to debates about asylum policy, social integration, and refugee legal assistance.
Barbara Harrell-Bond is author of the seminal Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. Based on her research in the 1980s in South Sudan she makes the simple argument – which she would be the first to agree should not have to be made – that refugees are not helpless victims, but always and everywhere have agency, resilience, and dignity. Showing how badly wrong international and government actors can go when they fail to keep this basic truth in mind, her book – as with all of her work – has served as a call to account for those acting to aid and protect refugees. Her criticisms are sharp, direct, and meticulously substantiated with evidence.
Barbara Harrell-Bond has never shied away from speaking truth to power, taking on donor governments, UN agencies – particularly the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees – large non-governmental organisations and host governments. Indeed, her bold criticisms, backed by robust evidence, have inspired generations of scholars to hold to account officials charged with assisting refugees.
Upon her retirement in 1996, Barbara Harrell-Bond conducted research in Kenya and Uganda on the extent to which refugees ‘enjoyed’ their rights. The book, Rights in Exile: Janus-Faced Humanitarianism, co-authored with Professor Verdirame, underlines the importance of legal assistance for refugees. This research led her to establish the Refugee Law Project at the University of Makerere’s Faculty of Law and the Refugee Studies Programme at Moi University in Kenya.
In 2000 she was invited to establish a refugee studies centre offering a graduate degree at the American University in Cairo. There too she started a legal aid NGO for refugees, AMERA Egypt, which, over her eight-year tenure, trained some 300 young people to continue their careers in this field. She also helped to establish the African Centre for Migration and Society at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. Many of the strongest and most interesting voices at these centres are academics who are refugees.
In 2010 she established, and she continues to coordinate, the Refugee Legal Aid Information Portal drawing together essential information needed by lawyers representing asylum seekers, including a network of country of origin experts to provide the objective evidence required to demonstrate that claims are ‘credible’.
Dr Harrell-Bond was awarded the Franz Boas Award for Exemplary Service to Anthropology by the American Anthropological Association, and received the Lucy Mair Medal for Applied Anthropology in 2014. She is an honorary fellow at Lady Margaret Hall. She was awarded an OBE in 2004 for her services to refugee studies.
Barbara Harrell-Bond is a strong supporter of SOAS’ Centre of Migration and Diaspora Studies and our two migration-related Masters Degrees. She regularly gives seminars to our students, several have worked as interns for the Legal Aid Information Portal, and she has helped to mentor SOAS staff as we have built up this important area of research and teaching.
Madame President, it is my privilege now to present Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond for the award of Doctor of Laws (Honoris Causa), and to invite her to address this assembly.
Acceptance Speech, Honorary Doctoral degree, SOAS
By Dr Barbara Harrell-Bond.
It is a great honour to receive this doctorate from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Thank you so much. I am not sure I deserve it. The only improvement that I can document coming out of my book, Imposing Aid, is now, 30 years later, according to policy at least, that refugees should receive shrouds to bury their dead. Before the book, they used their blankets, with UNHCR accusing them of selling them when they asked for more. The other improvement I can point to is that, again at least theoretically, women in camps now receive sanitary towels. That came about because the only way I could get men to leave my meetings with women was to talk about menstruation. Knowing women had nothing to protect themselves with, I wondered out loud with them how they ever managed their periods during those horrifically long trips in lorries, from the border to the camps. Other than these, things seem to have gotten worse, not better, in the humanitarian assistance field!
When I began the teaching programme at the RSP [Refugee Studies Centre, Oxford], being old-fashioned and believing in traditional ‘disciplines’, I always saw refugee studies as a multi-disciplinary field comprised of law, anthropology, psychology, health, politics, history. At the RSP we never managed to properly encompass health, although we always had a course, Nutrition for Social Scientists. In the old days, the idea was to introduce students to the literature and theories in these different disciplines. Then they would be at least somewhat prepared to return to their discipline to do advanced degrees – or, as many did, go work in the ‘humanitarian’ field.
SOAS has been for some time in a very strong position to compete with the Refugee Studies Centre’s Masters degree. In refugee law, you have Lutz Oette; and you have the skills to start a refugee law clinic. One thing I learned during my years in Uganda, Kenya and Egypt after retiring from the RSP was that legal assistance, rather than humanitarian aid, matters most in a refugee’s survival. Everything or nothing can begin when a person seeking asylum in a safe country is recognised by that state as a refugee.
In the social sciences you have Stefan Sperl, Tania Kaiser, Laura Hammond, Richard Black, Nadje Al Ali, Ruba Salih, John Campbell, and Paolo Novak – all having strong field experience in a refugee-affected region.
If you just are able to add psychological issues – a vast field in refugee studies – you will need to change the name of the degree!
Sometime back I wrote an article entitled: ‘Can Humanitarian Work with Refugees be Humane?’. Recently we had a roundtable at the Refugee Studies Centre where a medical NGO was relating the hard decision, which took it five years to resolve, to divert some of its resources to saving refugees from drowning in the Mediterranean, and working with the psychological problems suffered in the illegal detention centres in Southern Europe and North Africa. Cathryn Costello, the RSC’s new lawyer wrapped up this discussion by saying to the effect, ‘Can we really call ourselves humanitarians if we are only involved in saving people from drowning? Or only treating the psychological scarring from detention? Should we not be actually transporting people across the sea away from persecution to safety? Should we not be helping refugees escape illegal detention? Unless we are involved with refugees in ways which put our own reputations and lives and livelihoods at risk, can we truly consider ourselves humanitarians?’
In fact, was that not what organisations like the International Rescue Committee were doing during the Second World War?
If you are a householder and have a spare room, it is possible for anyone of you to be a ‘humanitarian’ right here in the UK – just by providing a bedroom and an address to a destitute refugee!
I am thinking of Julius, a gay Ugandan, who arrived in the UK 15 years ago, not speaking English. A person had arranged to meet him, but his plane was diverted to Gatwick airport. He did have a visa to enter, but he had no knowledge of ‘asylum’ and even if he had, he did not know that sexual orientation were grounds for being recognised as a refugee. Another Ugandan woman was on the plane who was planning to claim asylum; the first time he got an idea what getting asylum was about. Julius told immigration that he had lost his job because he had been accused of selling medicine to the rebels – a true happening but not grounds, as his testimony stood, for asylum. He spent these fifteen years ‘couch surfing’ in the living rooms of acquaintances while hiding from the police.
Fortunately for Julius, another gay Ugandan, whom we assisted to get recognised, found him in London and brought him to me. We took his testimony and obtained a lawyer. He is still sleeping on another person’s couch in Oxford, and has no ‘address’, but his ‘fresh’ case has been submitted. He is getting his own room and the ‘address’ he so urgently needs in September. Hopefully, the Home Office will also recognise him; but there will always be a chance for an appeal.