The title of this book is deliberately polemical. The cuts to aid and development programmes in 2024 and 2025 by some of the largest and richest countries in the world will have drastic impacts on the lives of some of the world’s poorest people (Amnesty International, 2025). In the most urgent contexts in which international aid is delivered, reductions in medical funding are predicted to cause millions of additional deaths (Lay, 2025). This withdrawal of support coincides with a deteriorating global human rights situation, much of which is tolerated (or even actively supported) by the same countries that are withdrawing humanitarian assistance. Incidents of conflict, political instability and state-sponsored terrorism are growing, and civilian deaths are increasing (GCR2P, 2025), from Sudan to Myanmar, Palestine, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Ukraine to name only the most prominent crises at the time of writing. More and more data is also emerging to highlight the intersection of political crises with environmental fragility (IDMC, 2025). An inevitable result of all this is a rise in the number of people forced to leave their homes: refugees, internally displaced people (IDPs) and other forced migrants, however we categorise them, we know that their numbers and the corresponding situations of individual distress are rising (UNHCR, 2025a).

Viewed from a post-development perspective, the recent cuts in development assistance appear much less dramatic. The current global situation is bad, but there are strong arguments that development assistance was not improving things (Malik, 2018). The well-established critical literature on the value of humanitarian and development aid highlights misjudged objectives and wasteful spending across the sector. According to this perspective there may be no reason to lament the reductions in aid budgets at all, though there are different causes for concern in the current situation. The phenomenon of the wealthiest states in the world providing ongoing material support for abusive regimes while simultaneously denying assistance to the victims of those regimes is certainly not new (Kandasamy, 2024). The more critical post-development analysis traces a direct line from the development sector to forms of European colonisation (IDC, 2022). Wealthy states have been explicit about the need for development aid to serve their foreign policy goals for many years (Patel, 2016). This includes the growth of ‘in-donor refugee costs’ covering the costs of housing asylum seekers once they reach wealthy countries – a figure which rose to 28% of the UK’s development budget in 2023 (Loft and Brien, 2025) and will now have to fall as the UK’s aid budget shrinks to 0.3% of GNI, apparently indefinitely (Wintour, 2025). Even when development assistance was given more generously and used in low-income countries its results were often disappointing (Dercon, 2022). Beyond a limited range of mostly medical forms of assistance there are good arguments to question the effectiveness of aid.

Yet the situation is inevitably more complicated than such a polemical presentation suggests, and this book is not a polemic. For one thing, context is important. The ways in which refugees respond to displacement, interact with their neighbours and engage with wider political forces are so varied as to require the wide-ranging comparative analysis that we set out in this book. We do not welcome the drastic cuts to aid since they are a further symptom, rather than a cause, of massive inequality. Despite the many failures, in the right context international development can begin to address inequality and even produce positive change. However, it is rather Eurocentric to suggest that international aid is the major catalyst for positive change. Despite the drastic cuts in humanitarian aid and development programmes the world is not, nor is likely to be, entirely without aid, and refugees continue to be recognised as worthy recipients of that aid, at least in some places.

In the short-term international support will certainly fall: at the time of writing, halfway through the annual budgeting process, emergency appeals by UNHCR had reached 10% of their target in the DRC, 15% in Lebanon, Ethiopia and Afghanistan (UNHCR, 2025b). Yet reductions from major donors in Western Europe and North America, who are currently making the greatest cuts, will result in greater prominence of other international donors, including those from the Gulf or East Asia who may have different priorities. Attention to southern-led responses to displacement has been lacking (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2018). Greater support may flow through national organisations in crisis-affected contexts, supporting the localisation agenda that emerged as one of the clear messages from the 2016 World Humanitarian Summit but has met with very limited success (Robillard et al., 2021). Finally, the decline of internationally supported organisations may push people living in areas affected by crises into leadership positions. Refugees and displaced people, the focus of this book, fall into this category. We do not make light of the costs of the cuts in international support, but if it can encourage a shift in ownership and a redirection of remaining resources, there may yet be advantages.

The Protracted Displacement Economies (PDE) project, on which this book is based, set out to explore these possibilities. We wrote and submitted the application on which the research was based in 2019, immediately following the signature of the Refugee Compact of December 2018 (UN, 2018). Research ran from 2020 to 2024. The focus on long-term, ‘protracted’ displacement is important since support from international donors declines over time (Etzold and Fechter, 2022). In very long-term displacement, such as many of the examples in this book, international support is minimal. In the immediate aftermath of a displacement crisis, it is important to remember that initial assistance is provided by other refugees and residents of the areas they are displaced to. International support often arrives soon after, in some cases in a matter of days. This assistance is not always suited to the situation, reflecting market surplus rather than the requirements of refugees. In some cases, it is sold on, rather than used directly and can provoke distortions in local economies. Whatever form this support takes, and however long it lasts it cannot be indefinite, and where displacement lasts longer than the willingness to support displaced people, alternatives to international engagement must be found. National governments or national NGOs may be willing and able to increase their own support. In recent years international organisations have aligned support with national forms of welfare to facilitate this transition, but this remains a major challenge (Lowe and Hagen-Zanker, 2024). Ultimately, as support is withdrawn, refugees fall back onto their own resources and support from the wider local community. Self-reliance, an important focus of the Refugee Compact, has always been the first and last means of support for refugees.

Whilst there is widespread concern at the current cuts in aid, most refugees living in protracted situations have actually been living in a world without aid for many years. In this book we explore the wider political economy of that process. There is a lot of excellent research in this area beginning with work on refugees and development in the 1980s (e.g., Kibreab, 1987) through work on specifically refugee and displacement economies to more recent work on the financial health of refugees, which we review below. The 2018 UN Refugee Compact remains the most recent high-level policy framework and its emphasis on the self-reliance of refugees sets the current policy context at a global level. At the time, this was interpreted as a justification for large-scale withdrawal of funding to refugees (Easton-Calabria and Omata, 2018). In the light of recent aid cuts those warnings look prescient and the important body of critical work on the notion of self-reliance of refugees (see Omata, 2017) is another area of inspiration for this work.

In the research design for the Protracted Displacement Economies project, we set out to make two further contributions. Neither of these are totally new, but they bring new dimensions to the discussion of political economies of protracted displacement. First, rather than focusing exclusively on displaced people alone or a network analysis of the connections they have developed, we take a place-based approach, considering displacement-affected localities (Zaman et al., 2025). This is common to the whole-of-society approach that UNHCR has developed for some time. Second, all recent analysis of the economic aspects of displacement highlights the need for this to be ‘more than economic’ incorporating elements of regulation or relationality. Much of the analysis remains financial so we deliberately centred the non-financial into understandings of the economic. In doing so we draw on well-established theoretical work in feminist economics (e.g., Agenjo‐Calderón and Gálvez‐Muñoz, 2019), which highlights the significance of care, mutual aid and moral economies.

Empirical research focused on long-term displacement in five countries: the DRC, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Myanmar and Pakistan. These countries were selected both for the existence of situations of long-term displacement and ongoing relationships with colleagues in those countries. UNHCR’s definition of ‘protracted’ refers to displacement of at least 25,000 people from the same country, which has lasted at least five years. Under this definition, multiple populations of refugees or displaced people are in situations of protracted displacement in each of these countries, far exceeding the five-year period in all cases. Teams in each country selected a single border or region (in the case of IDPs). This led to a consideration of borders between DRC–Rwanda, Ethiopia–Somalia, Lebanon–Syria, Myanmar–Thailand and Pakistan–Afghanistan. In practice, the situations examined in the project involved displacement of at least a decade and in some cases more than one generation. In the DRC and Myanmar, research was primarily with IDPs and in Ethiopia, Lebanon and Pakistan primarily with refugees. In most countries research involved both IDPs and refugees and in some locations these categories blurred in long-term displacement. In each of the five countries, in addition to national and regional stakeholders, empirical research took place in three selected locations: one camp, one urban neighbourhood and a third selected by the team to be representative of the wider displacement issues, or to shed light on a situation or context not captured by the other two fieldsites.

The book is divided into eight chapters. Chapter 2 details the common methodological approach of the project, which was followed with very minor variations in all five countries. Chapters 3 to 7 focus on one country each and Chapter 8 pulls the new arguments together into a short conclusion. The remainder of this chapter sets out the theoretical context of the project, it falls into three sections. The first reviews the literature on (political) economies of displacement covering a range of distinct bodies of work over the last 50 years. Most of these approaches consider some kind of role for international donors, generally through the UN. The changing approach to self-reliance structures our review and we finish by considering recent analysis of approaches to self-reliance of refugees. The second section examines the new elements of our research design, around the place-based approach of displacement-affected communities and feminist economics. We also build on critiques of self-reliance to consider the sustainability of place-based economies and ways in which institutional actors can prepare for that sustainability through a humanitarian anchor approach. The third section provides a more detailed overview of each of the chapters in the book, followed by highlighting some of the key findings of the project, which are returned to again in the conclusion.

The route to self-reliance; a political economy of displacement

[R]elief should not discourage the initiative of the refugees, who should remain aware of the fact that emergency aid is only a temporary measure and that the final solution to their problems depends to a large extent on their own initiative, efforts and cooperation.

Recommendations of the Conference on the Legal, Economic and Social Aspects of African Refugee Problems, Addis Ababa, 8–18 October 1967.(UNECA, 1968).

Self-reliance is the social and economic ability of an individual, a household or a community to meet essential needs (including protection, food, water, shelter, personal safety, health and education) in a sustainable manner and with dignity. Self-reliance, as a programme approach, refers to developing and strengthening livelihoods of persons of concern, and reducing their vulnerability and long-term reliance on humanitarian/external assistance.

Handbook for Self-Reliance, UNHCR (2005, p. 1).

The current concern with self-reliance of refugees has a long history. The conference quoted above, organised by the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) was held only a few days after the ratification of New York Protocol removed the temporal and geographical restrictions of the 1951 Convention. We could go even further back. Easton-Calabria begins her critical history of ‘refugee self-reliance assistance’ with an account of programming for refugees by the League of Nations in 1920s Greece (2022, p. 1). She goes on to highlight the similarities in the kinds of activities that were financed by the League of Nations in the inter-war period and by UNHCR in the 21^st century. The fact that self-reliance has been a high-level concern for more than 100 years is in itself interesting, but the differences are also instructive. Even within the more limited timeframe of the last 50 years, there are obvious differences between current priorities and the ways in which self-reliance was discussed in 1967. Self-reliance has not been a continual focus for international policy and research over this period, though it seems likely that it has been an ongoing concern for refugees and displaced people themselves. In this section, we review shifting approaches to the economies of displacement.

The suggestion in the 1967 recommendations that ‘initiative, efforts and cooperation’ are encouraged by an awareness of the temporary nature of external support sounds uncomfortably paternalistic in 2025. In contrast, the 2018 Refugee Compact repeatedly (three times) emphasises the link between self-reliance and the easing of pressure on host countries, highlights the need for self-reliance in food production (para. 80, p. 31) and connects it to host states investing in education and human capital (para. 13, p. 50). The image of self-reliance that emerges from the Compact is of something that can and should be trained or at least prepared for. Given the relatively sudden termination or reduction of support programmes around the world in 2024 and 2025, the 1967 approach appears more relevant today. The term ‘relief’, central to the 1967 document, sounds archaic, though it suggests a degree of humility about the capacity of international donors and references the temporary nature of that support, both of which fit the reality, if not the ambition, of current provision of aid and development to refugees.

Beyond a common concern with self-reliance, the political economy of support for refugees in 1967 was very different from the contemporary situation. These differences highlight some of the challenges of the last 50 years or so that help explain the renewed focus on self-reliance in recent years. Earlier in 1967, at a conference on ‘Refugee Problems in Africa’ at the Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, the organiser argued that ‘the solution to the problem of massive rural refugee groups seems to have been found’ (Hamrell, 1967, p. 10). Similar views would make little sense in 2025, or indeed at any time since the 1970s. The solutions Hamrell is referring to reflected a practice of granting land to rural refugees that echoed Easton-Calabria’s example from 1920s Greece and had become widespread by the late 1960s and early 1970s, enabling them to continue farming with very little outside assistance. The arrival of Burundian refugees in Tanzania in 1972, many of whom were eventually naturalised in 2008, is still cited as a successful example of this kind of self-settlement (Kuch, 2017). The 1970s was also a high point for resettlement as public opinion in wealthy countries became more aware of human rights abuses around the world (Loescher et al., 2008). By the end of the decade, however, it was becoming more of a challenge to find durable solutions to refugee crises. This was most obvious in Africa, where a policy of encampment was becoming more widespread given the lack of political support for local integration. Regional instability, such as the simultaneous civil conflicts in Sudan and Ethiopia exacerbated the difficulties of quick solutions. Through the 1980s, concern at the increasingly protracted nature of refugee crises became more widespread. Solutions which occurred ‘naturally’ in earlier crises were much harder to engineer given the obstacles of protracted displacement.

The first attempt at an internationally organised solution with longer-term aims became known as the ‘refugees and development’ (RAD) approach. The 1979 Pan-African Conference on the Situation of Refugees in Africa, marking a decade since the 1969 Organisation of African Unity (OAU) supplementary refugee definition had been agreed, was the highest-level recognition of the need for refugee assistance to be linked with wider development support (Aga Khan, 1981). From the beginning, the intention was to extend such support beyond displaced people alone to encompass ‘host’ communities. In its attempts to prioritise more sustainable solutions to situations of long-term displacement it initiated a policy focus that remains recognisable in 2025, though it is significant that it arose along with and initially because of the more widespread use of encampment. The RAD approach was further established in the two International Conference on Assistance to Refugees in Africa (ICARA) conferences in 1981 and 1983. ICARA I had mixed success but ICARA II is widely recognised as a failure and was soon overwhelmed by the need for immediate humanitarian assistance during the Ethiopian famine from 1984 onwards (Loescher et al., 2008). Elsewhere, refugees fleeing Afghanistan from 1979 onwards were initially housed in multiple camps in Pakistan, though the geopolitical context of refugees from Soviet aggression meant that resources were initially plentiful. In 1984, programming in Pakistan underwent a deliberate shift from ‘care and maintenance’ to ‘income generating projects’ which emphasised self-reliance and sustainability (UNHCR, 1984). These ideas have a long history (Sran and Easton-Calabria, 2020).

During the 1980s, international assistance may have saved millions of lives. Yet it was becoming increasingly clear that the means of providing that assistance was also a major barrier to longer-term solutions. The impact of ongoing humanitarian assistance on refugees was exactly the opposite of self-reliance. Despite the decades during which ideas of sustainable support for refugees have been discussed it is extremely difficult to identify examples where short-term assistance to refugees has successfully combined with longer-term programming (Crisp, 2001). In a monograph reviewing the impact of ICARA II, Gorman highlighted how these difficulties were inherent in the structure of the UN system, with ‘refugee aid’ the responsibility of UNHCR and ‘development assistance’ falling to UNDP. As a result, these areas have been treated as ‘largely separate and distinct activities’ (Gorman, 1987, p. 10). In a review of the RAD approach published a few years later Sorensen argued that creating a link between refugees and development ‘remains a low priority for international donors, UN agencies and African governments’ (Sorensen, 1994, p. 185). He went on to connect the failure to prioritise sustainability with the failure of self-reliance: ‘There has been very little attention given to the efforts of refugees to help themselves’ (Sorensen, 1994, 187).

International assistance to refugees was critiqued most forcefully and influentially in Barbara Harrell-Bond’s Imposing Aid (Harrell-Bond, 1986). This was the first ethnography to set the refugee experience in a wider social context, including host communities but also crucially the humanitarian organisations that provided aid. Harrell-Bond began the research on which the book is based with a focus on Ugandan refugees living in camps in what was then southern Sudan, though her perspective quickly expanded to encompass refugees living outside camps too. She demonstrates that the provision of aid was central to her participants’ understanding of what it meant to be a refugee. In the introduction she quotes a Ugandan informant: ‘Our people believe that to be a refugee is to be taken care of by UNHCR’ (p. 6) and returns to this towards the end: ‘For many Ugandans, it was being forced to accept assistance by going to a settlement which marked the beginning of their status, refugee’ (p. 300). The requirement to move to camps to receive aid, rather than the flexibility of more dispersed support is the central imposition that the book takes issue with. Aid agencies were particularly concerned about a ‘dependency syndrome’, which was blamed for a variety of negative behaviour amongst refugees. Harrell-Bond instead attributes responsibility for such dependency to the organisations providing aid, drawing attention to the fact that most refugees in Sudan received no assistance. Limited efforts to support sustainability are ineffectual and income-generating projects are critiqued for not taking account of local conditions; she cites an example of the creation of a fifth carpentry workshop in a settlement where carpentry needs were met by the existing four.

Despite her suspicions of institutional support for refugees, Harrell-Bond is not arguing for a withdrawal of that assistance. She quotes James Appe (1984) approvingly. He goes on to argue that the lack of involvement of refugees in decision-making processes makes ‘the whole industry of assistance more a myth than a reality’ (p. 271). Appe, who had been a refugee in southern Sudan himself, described his experience of the early 1980s: ‘UNHCR built houses, dug latrine pits and gave so much food at once that most of the refugees had difficulty in storing it’. (p. 272). This amounted to a failure to recognise the refugees’ responsibilities, he argued, which had longer-term consequences. Yet Appe, like Harrell-Bond, is not arguing that aid should be cut, merely managed differently. According to Harrell-Bond, assistance should be available to ‘fill in the gaps’ (1986, p. 331) of what refugees are doing anyway. Laura Hammond’s (2004) work, 20 years later, reported on research with Ethiopian refugees who had also been in camps in Sudan in the 1980s and then returned to Ethiopia. The challenges they faced were largely a result of their return to a different part of the country than that which they had originally been displaced from. Yet the nature of the support they had received in Sudan had not helped; one of the main organisations supporting their return, the Relief Society of Tigray, even argued that they had been ‘spoiled’ in the camps. Hammond is also influenced by Harrell-Bond’s more nuanced analysis of dependency. She confirms that the refugees had been continually supported during their time in Sudan but that this contrasted sharply with the lack of resources on their return. Hammond concludes that the information to make better informed decisions is now widespread and that more should have been done to support returnees (2004, p. 205).

The most powerful message to emerge from this body of research is that refugees need to be considered as independent economic actors. Whilst this does not seem particularly surprising, it is an insight which entirely contradicts any policy of large-scale encampment. Although the proportion of refugees who are assisted in camps continues to decline, the fact that new camps are regularly established highlights the fact that the economic independence of refugees needs to be re-stated. As Hammond (2004) concludes, failure in this area cannot be explained by a lack of information. Evidence for the damage caused by encampment has been overwhelming for some time (Hyndman, 2000; Verdirame and Harrell-Bond, 2005). The relatively comprehensive support received by refugees in camps met immediate needs, and was a more common solution to displacement, particularly from the 1980s onwards. Yet it was also clear to researchers, even at the time, that this did not simply delay the establishment of more sustainable solutions, it actively inhibited them. This means that the recent withdrawal of aid, where it affects regular support to refugees, is unlikely to transform their situation. What is needed is a balance between support at a sustainable level and an awareness of longer-term impacts, ‘filling in the gaps that exist’ in Harrell-Bond’s (1986) terms. There is some evidence that this began to develop in the 1990s. Alongside a renewed focus on refugee return by UNHCR, which that decade is mostly associated with, there was also a shift from the almost random support for income-generating activities to a more focused attention to livelihoods.

The focus on repatriation as the ‘preferred’ durable solution during the 1990s was not without success. Significant numbers of people did return (Black and Koser, 1999) though there were concerns that the ‘voluntary’ nature of return was at least partially compromised towards the end of the decade (Chimni, 2004). The focus on return also highlighted the situation of the many groups of refugees who were unable to return, faced significant barriers to local integration and for whom international donors were increasingly unwilling to fund ongoing care and maintenance operations, or resettle. Despite the existence of significant groups of refugees who had been in this situation for several decades, or even longer, the challenge of responding to protracted refugee situations became more of a priority for UNHCR and other international organisations around 2000 (Loescher et al., 2008). In a review of long-term encampment in Africa, Crisp concluded that over the previous decade or more UNHCR programmes had been ‘essentially static’ forms of care and maintenance (2003, p. 143). Concern about the vicious cycle of long-term encampment was becoming more widespread. UNHCR’s Convention Plus initiative, running from 2003-2005 returned to a focus on development as a solution that the organisation had turned away from during the 1990s. In 2004, the United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants launched an influential campaign against the ‘warehousing’ of refugees (Smith, 2004). Although UNHCR had begun re-emphasising self-reliance, Crisp acknowledged that UNHCR ‘has relatively little expertise (and probably has less expertise than it had a decade or two ago) in areas such as agricultural extension, micro-finance and income-generating activities.’ (2003, 143). As the focus on self-reliance has become more significant, the organisation has overcome this lack (or loss) of expertise by outsourcing support for these activities to other organisations.

Throughout the 1990s, new work developed around livelihoods, including through the political economy of conflict (Chambers and Conway, 1991, Macrae et al., 1994). In 1999 this was brought together in the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework, published by the UK’s then Department for International Development, which continues to influence analysis of livelihoods (Natarajan et al., 2022). In the seminal book, The Economic Life of Refugees, Karen Jacobsen (2005) applied a livelihoods framework to a political-economic analysis of protracted displacement crises. She quickly contextualised the central challenges of protracted displacement: declining support from international donors, restricted movement and limited access to any means of local integration, including the legal right to work or to access resources to establish businesses that go beyond mere subsistence. There were ongoing policy initiatives supporting self-reliance, but these were limited by potential government support as much as international funding. In 1999, the government of Uganda adopted a new policy called the ‘Self-Reliance Strategy’ that was initially planned over a period of four years. This was a promising initiative thanks to support from the government and the wider population yet ran into institutional difficulties with the international organisations involved, similar to those that Sorensen (1994) had highlighted a decade earlier. ‘A perennial problem faced by international agencies trying to support refugees in protracted situations’ Jacobsen argued ‘is the roadblock posed by the “mandates” of other UN agencies’ (Jacobsen, 2005, p. 74). Jacobsen cites work by Dryden-Peterson and Hovil (2003) which found that despite some initial success, renewed violence had forced refugees in Uganda off the fields and they were again dependent on assistance.

One of the strengths of Jacobsen’s analysis is to emphasise both the political and the economic: socio-economic support alone is not sufficient in the absence of legal status and rights. She concludes the book with a proposal for a ‘model for refugee assistance in protracted situations’ involving three clear principles which offered a pragmatic advance on the contemporary situation and still have relevance 20 years later (2005, pp. 93–100):

• ‘Designated zones of residence’ is a compromise between practices of encampment, which continue today, and the imperative of greater freedom of movement. It also allows development resources to be focused in a relatively restricted area.
• ‘Rights and obligations in host countries’: in addition to freedom of movement this includes security and access to the labour market, which remains one of the most controversial areas. Jacobsen highlights examples where refugees create employment, particularly in urban areas, and emphasises the impact that early access to the labour market can have on longer-term integration.
• ‘Doing away with parallel services’: in protracted crises the additional services needed specifically for refugees have mostly been established so ongoing support is required by the host community on the same basis. This has now largely been accepted by international agencies and UNHCR has a policy of supporting national systems of delivery for social protection, for example (Collyer et al., 2024).

The framing of refugees as independent economic actors, as opposed to merely recipients of ‘relief’ is fundamental to livelihoods analysis from the 1990s onwards. Jacobsen emphasised that the economic alone is insufficient if it is not set within a broader regulatory context. This broader political economic analysis is common to all subsequent work that we want to consider here. The main factor that differentiates analytical approaches is how the political element is understood. Amanda Hammar’s work on ‘displacement economies’ (2014) builds on this approach. As the title suggests, she frames the issue much more widely than just refugees, bringing in ‘host communities’, non-governmental organisations, local institutions and other stakeholders into the analysis. She argues that a focus on refugees reflects ‘certain anxieties about international border crossing’ and ‘make[s] invisible a much wider range of others affected by, and implicated in, processes of displacement’ (2014, p. 5).

Given the disproportionate growth in numbers of IDPs at a global scale this is a necessary shift. Research into IDPs in the 1990s had almost posited an ‘either/or’ approach to IDPs and refugees since the issues they faced and therefore the solutions required seemed so different from those faced by refugees, at least at the time. That has become less and less the case and the challenge has been to develop a single analytical framework capable of incorporating displaced people, whether they crossed an international border or not, as well as those affected by their movement. Jacobsen (2005) acknowledged that refugees are in some senses more fortunate than those people who were not able to leave and IDPs also fall into that category. Hammar’s framework encompasses both refugees and other displaced people. Although there is an obvious distinction in citizenship between refugees and IDPs, and some analysis tries to keep them separate for that reason, in practice IDPs often face very similar barriers in accessing basic resources. Even though IDPs technically have the right to work or move freely there are plenty of situations in which they struggle to do so either due to conflict, poverty or local restrictions and discrimination in ways that differentiate them from the non-mobile. UNHCR has begun to recognise this through a ‘whole of displacement approach’.

Hammar brings a wide range of concerns into the ‘more than economic’ elements of displacement economies. She defines displacement as ‘enforced changes in interweaving spatial, social and symbolic conditions and relations’ (2014, p. 9). This is far broader than most definitions but captures a relational understanding of displacement very effectively. Displacement involves an enforced transformation of relationships which is at least as significant as enforced movement. The notion of ‘displacement in place’, which captures the total transformation experienced by individuals in war or crisis as everything, even borders, move around them only makes sense if the relational can be separated from the spatial. Considering displacement in place also draws attention to the coercive disruptions to valued ways of living and functioning (Ali, 2023, 2024). The central question for Hammar, which she uses to set the context for her edited collection on displacement economies, is ‘what displacement generates in terms of new economies and political economies’ (2014, p. 11). This extremely productive question was central for us in framing the research on which this book is based.

A further significant reference for this research is the body of work that continues to emerge from the Refugee Economies programme at the University of Oxford. Amongst the range of articles, working papers and briefings, it is the 2017 book Refugee Economies (Betts et al., 2017) that best captures the originality of their approach and this was central to our reading in preparing our 2019 application. Although the book is subtitled ‘Forced displacement and development’ it is focused on refugees. Other publications from the programme draw on empirical research in Ethiopia or Kenya, but this book, the longest statement of the programme’s ideas, is based on empirical research in Uganda alone. This allows for research in three distinct locations representing an urban area (Kampala), two long-established camps (Nakivale and Kyangwali) and an emergency camp (Rwamwanja). Research involved refugees of multiple nationalities in Kampala, Nakivale and Kyangwali and predominantly Congolese refugees from the DRC in Rwamwanja. They define ‘refugee economies’ as ‘the resource allocation systems relating to refugee populations’ (Betts et al., 2017, p. 46).

They also begin their history of this resource allocation system in Greece in the 1920s, drawing on Claudia Skran’s (1995) history to capture a very positive picture of the success of the League of Nations support for Greeks returning from Turkey and go onto highlight the significance of self-reliance initiatives for refugees through the 1960s. Still, they quickly get to ICARA I and II and then devote significant attention to the International Conference on Refugees in Central America (CIREFCA), from 1987 to 1995. They complete the overview with the various UNHCR programmes of the 2000s, highlighting both the focus on development as a solution to protracted refugee crises and the very limited success that this approach has enjoyed – in their account, only CIREFCA had any positive impact. The central argument of this account is that the history of refugees and development has been one of refugees and the state, or international organisations acting on behalf of the state. The advance of their book is to include the market in this approach. The ‘more than economics’ element in their analysis is institutional, brought in through the use of New Institutional Economics as an underlying theoretical perspective. This is effective and begins with an analysis of what is specific about refugees in their engagement with both the state and the market. They argue that refugees are uniquely placed at three institutional intersections: 1. The state and international; 2. The formal and informal; and 3. The national and transnational (Betts et al., 2017, p. 9). They conclude that the different locations (urban, protracted camp, emergency camp) produce different combinations of institutional oversight and therefore different refugee economies. Ultimately, however, the market is key and ‘it is in creating opportunities for integration in markets that refugees will ultimately achieve autonomy and self-reliance’ (2017, p. 212). The analysis of the market in refugee economies goes well beyond the purely financial; other forms of exchange are important, such as assistance between traders, but in Betts et al.’s (2017) analysis they are important in the ways they support refugees in their engagement with the market.

Yet even a purely financial analysis is important and the financial inclusion of refugees and displaced people has been closely linked to developing self-reliance. It is usually associated with individual involvement in the official financial system (AFI, 2020). According to the World Bank, ‘Financial inclusion means that individuals and businesses have access to and use affordable financial products and services that meet their needs, which are delivered in a responsible and sustainable way’ (World Bank, 2025). UNHCR considers access to a bank account to be a necessary step to self-reliance since it allows people to save and receive money safely (UNHCR, n.d.). Financial inclusion reflects a much wider approach; a recent literature review on financial inclusion and refugees for the UK’s Department for International Development found very few approaches to financial inclusion that were specific to refugees (Megersa, 2021). Refugees displaced to urban areas potentially have access to a wide range of micro-finance institutions that provide services to the urban poor in general, some provided by humanitarian organisations (Buscher, 2011). Nevertheless, refugees and displaced people more generally often face additional barriers to accessing such institutions, and exclusion from mainstream financial systems may increase their vulnerability to more predatory financial organisations.

Efforts to support the financial inclusion of refugees and other forced migrants also raises significant concerns. Much of this is justified by the involvement of private companies and the combination of humanitarian activities and significant profit margins. A study of delivery of support to refugees through peer-to-peer lending highlighted the existence of a UNHCR initiative in Kalobeyei settlement in Kenya offering social assistance to refugees in partnership with financial companies including Western Union, while Western Union simultaneously operated in the settlement charging US$16 per transaction for remittances (Bhagat and Roderick, 2020). An alternative approach to financial inclusion is financial health. In the ‘Finance in Displacement’ study, based at Tufts University, Karen Jacobsen and Kim Wilson apply a definition from the Centre for Financial Services Innovation (CFSI) to the context of displacement. This shifts the understanding from inputs, such as the fact that refugees have their own bank accounts, which are common to financial inclusion approaches to a focus on outputs, such as an ability to cope with financial shocks. The CFSI defines it as follows: ‘Financial health is achieved when an individual’s daily systems help build the financial resilience to weather shocks and the ability to pursue financial goals’ (Ladha, 2017 cited in Jacobsen and Wilson, 2020). These goals are much broader than access to formal financial institutions, although a paper coming out of the Jordan study for Finance in Development argued that ‘far from being included in mainstream financial infrastructure, refugee transactions are hived off into a separate financial system of mobile wallets, which is as yet far from robust’ (Dhawan et al., 2024, p. 939). This echoes the concerns of Bhagat and Roderick about the very similar system operating in Kalobeyei and highlights the problems of applying policies such as cash transfers regardless of local context (Olivier de Sardan, 2018).

In Jordan, the economy faces chronically high unemployment, and the economic integration of refugees is difficult politically as well as economically (Ali 2021). Swati Mehta Dhawan and colleagues highlighted that refugees did not face a problem with access to financial institutions but a problem of income: ‘access to formal financial services was not among refugees’ most significant hurdles. Instead, the absence of fundamental economic rights, such as freedom of movement, work opportunities, necessary documents, business ownership, and asset acquisition in the host country, proved to be crucial for their integration and self-reliance.’ (Dhawan et al., 2024, p. 927). The financial health framework which they used included five measures (Dhawan et al., 2024, p. 935):

• meet basic needs
• comfortably manage debts
• recover from financial setbacks
• expand planning horizons
• invest in opportunities

This clear approach avoids many of the pitfalls of a focus on formal financial inclusion. It also situates questions of self-reliance firmly back in the relational. One of their conclusions is that ‘resources outside the traditional financial sector provide most of the financial heavy lifting’ (Dhawan et al., 2024, p. 937). Refugees’ first source of support in case of immediate crisis was those around them: neighbours, family members, shopkeepers, landlords.

This brings us to the concluding argument of this review. Self-reliance has been seen, and in formal documents such as the Refugee Compact continues to be seen, as something which can be developed through top-down programming. This is clear from the Handbook for Self-Reliance with which we began this section, which includes in Book 2, a 78-page toolkit on ‘making self-reliance work’ for policymakers. Much of this is sensible and useful, highlighting key considerations of all stages of a relief operation. Easton-Calabria and Omata describe this approach as ‘far from politically innocuous’, in fact, ‘the political and economic hegemony of neoliberalism has played a crucial role in shaping and legitimising the contemporary understanding of refugee self-reliance’ (2018, p. 1461). The core of their critique is the individualised focus, associated with neoliberalism, that is apparent in the ways that self-reliance is discussed in relation to refugees. Omata’s (2017) analysis of economic activities amongst Liberian refugees in Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana highlights how relatively low-level subsistence activities were mistaken for self-reliance, hence the ‘myth’ of self-reliance of the title of his monograph. The most controversial element of UNHCR’s definition of self-reliance is the final part of the quote at the top of this section: ‘reducing their vulnerability and long-term reliance on humanitarian/external assistance’ (UNHCR, 2005, p. 1). This is intended as an evaluation measure to determine when assistance can be withdrawn. The problem is that everyone, everywhere in the world depends on external assistance of one sort or another. The need for external assistance is simply part of living in society. Easton-Calabria (2022, p. 24) quotes Emman Ikoku’s description of self-reliance as ‘normal human existence’. Total autonomy is an illusion and an entirely unrealistic measure of self-reliance.

Throughout this review, we have emphasised the repeated references to a ‘more than economic’ understanding of the economic lives of those in displacement. A political economic framework is necessary to capture an idea of self-reliance but the content of the pollical varies from one analysis to another. For some it is a favourable regulatory framework, guaranteeing core principles such as physical security, freedom of movement or access to the labour market. Others see the political as referring to a more relational understanding of integration into a wider community, a ‘relational humanitarianism’ (Brun and Horst, 2023) or a ‘collaborative element’ (Brown et al., 2024). In any context, although it might appear that people are doing it for themselves, they are in fact successfully embedded in a much broader context. In an attempt to get away from automatically individualising notions, the ‘Refugee Self-Reliance Initiative’, a group of multiple humanitarian organisations coordinated by the Women’s Refugee Commission and RefugeePoint, has redefined self-sufficiency as ‘the social and economic ability of an individual, a household or a community to meet its essential needs in a sustainable manner’ (Easton-Calabria et al., 2017, p. 5). This was developed into a fully fledged conceptual framework for measuring self-reliance (Leeson, Slaughter and Buscher, 2022) covering basic needs, resources and sustainability. Although this framework was published too late for us to explicitly employ it for this research, it corresponds closely to elements of the approach we took. In the following section, we briefly detail the ways in which we build on this rich body of research in the Protracted Displacement Economies project.

Moral economies of displacement

Our central concern in the Protracted Displacement Economies project is to investigate how people living in situations of protracted displacement have developed strategies for collective survival. We draw a series of lessons from the huge body of work we have reviewed in the previous section. Any discussion of economy must involve a broad set of considerations that are not obviously economic, mostly captured in a political-economic analysis. This includes a broader regulatory framework involving various levels of government and other state agencies such as the police or the military. It also requires a relational understanding of the displacement context. Given the title of our project, our debt to both the Refugee Economies project at Oxford and Hammar’s (2014) Displacement Economies work is obvious. We draw inspiration from Hammar’s question about what else displacement produces to focus our attention on the ‘displacement-affected community’. This defines a relatively broad focus for the research. We also pick up on the ‘more than economic’ concern that characterises most work in this area over the last 20 years with an explicit connection to the established theoretical body of work around feminist economics. The key to feminist economics is the notion of ‘social provisioning’ which links to a broad array of non-financial forms of exchange which are central to any holistic understanding of the economic. Neither of these ideas is entirely new in work on refugees, though we do not know of another comparative project of this size which has set out to bring them together. This section considers the displacement-affected community and briefly reviews work on feminist economics in this area to clarify how we are using both. We finish with an overview of the humanitarian anchor, a form of social provisioning in the aid sector that we planned to investigate through this project.

Displacement–affected communities

Awareness of the need to support host communities alongside refugees characterised the RAD approach of the early 1980s and has been constant in research and policy since then. As we discuss in the previous section, this met with mixed success, partly due to the structure of the international response but over this period no policy or analytical approach focused on displacement would entirely overlook the non-displaced. The challenge is that as crises become more and more protracted, clear distinctions between ‘host’ and ‘displaced’ inevitably blur. This does not mean that there is no distinction. Structural inequalities exist in all contexts in this research – even in situations of internal displacement. Yet, with time, certain individuals will have found ways around them. Even in the context of refugee camps, which are usually characterised by residential segregation, we need a more fluid understanding of the displaced/host distinction.

For example, Kebribeyah refugee camp, established in 1991, is the oldest camp in the Somali Region of Ethiopia. Over time the town has grown around the camp, refugees have left, some returned to Somalia, some resettled and some able to afford land in town. During the course of this research, it became clear that vacant land in the camp was increasingly being reclaimed by town residents who had a claim to it before the camp had been built, land was being sold and members of the ‘host’ community were moving in. The camp still exists as an identifiable demarcation of land, but people living there are both refugees and ‘hosts’. The town’s population is similarly divided and relations of marriage and kinship increasingly link the two groups. Historically, many of the ‘hosts’ had previously been refugees in Somalia in the 1980s. Distinctions are still made between ‘host’ and ‘refugee’ groups, but in the context of such a protracted situation they lack a clear sociological basis. This is one reason why the more ambiguous notion of the ‘displacement-affected community’ is becoming more widespread amongst stakeholders in this part of Ethiopia, partly as a result of this research (Adugna and Gezahegne, 2024).

The term ‘displacement-affected community’ recognises this blurring that almost inevitably occurs between hosts and displaced. Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh recognise that ‘histories of displacement intersect with histories of hosting’ (2020, p. 349). Even for newly displaced groups this is an important insight but where shared histories extend over decades in protracted situations of displacement it is a necessary reflection that host and displaced groups are not distinct social categories, neither is each group homogenous. There are also ideological reasons to challenge these categories that become more significant in long-term displacement. One of the films produced in the Pakistan research tells the story of a young man born in Pakistan who feels the injustice of his exclusion from basic elements of equality under the law. The 1951 Convention definition requires an individual to have crossed an international border to be considered a refugee. Where individuals have not crossed any borders, but their parents or even grandparents have done so, there are good reasons to resist the ‘refugee’ label, not just as legally inaccurate but as discriminatory. Again, the flexibility of ‘displacement-affected community’ allows us to include subsequent generations of non-displaced people, where they are clearly continually affected by the displacement.

In addition to breaking down a strict host/displaced distinction, we may wish to include others who arrive as a result from displacement, in Hammar’s (2014) terms. This includes representatives of humanitarian or development organisations whose presence in the area is solely down to displaced people; Harrell-Bond’s Imposing Aid (1986) was the first study to recognise the significance of this group, and their inclusion is now fairly common. The group may fit into the rubric of the displacement-affected community but to indicate the greater distance from displacement we prefer to consider them part of a broader ‘displacement-affected population’. Other groups fall into this category, such as particular state employees who have come to the area because there are displaced people there who need their services. This includes police and security services, teachers, healthcare workers and local administrators of all the various services a newly arrived population needs. The private sector may also increase involvement. In cities and even small towns there will already have been an infrastructure of shops and services in place to support the arrival of displaced people. Nevertheless, significant increases in population or displacement in more remote areas, such as the establishment of new camps, may lead to new commercial opportunities. It is clear that displacement produces employment in a range of sectors. Over time, in the case of protracted displacement, a larger proportion of these jobs will be taken up by displaced people themselves. The exception is probably only direct state employment for refugees, but even here there are employment opportunities in some contexts, such as teaching.

The displacement-affected community has not been widely used as a term. One of the earliest references is in a UNESCO study on education for refugees and IDPs (Ferris and Winthrop, 2010). The authors refer to communities that refugees and IDPs have left as ‘displacement affected’. More often the term is not obviously defined. UNHCR has recently started using it, though it is not clear exactly who it refers to. The phrase appears seven times in UNHCR’s ‘Policy on Engagement in Situations of Internal Displacement’ (UNHCR, 2020). In every case it is preceded by the word ‘wider’ as in ‘UNHCR will galvanize and contribute to government-led efforts to address the needs of IDPs – including those who are integrating locally, returning to places of origin or settling in another part of the country, as well as the wider displacement-affected community’ (UNHCR, 2020, p. 154). In each of these cases it is clearly used to refer to those who are not displaced but it is not clear if this is in the immediate vicinity of displacement, those who have been left behind or somewhere else entirely.

All of these aspects may make sense, but it is worth trying to tie the meaning of this term down a little more precisely, particularly if it is beginning to be used more widely. ‘Community’ poses an immediately problem for social scientists since there are such a wide variety of understandings of the term. Community is an ‘essentially contested concept’ in the sense intended by Gallie (1955) in that the uncertainty is wrapped up in value judgements and different uses that become difficult to disentangle. We therefore distinguish between two common uses of the term ‘community’. The first, probably older, sense of the term ‘community’ refers to everyone who lives in a particular location. This first use refers to a particular place, though usually of a fairly limited size. In a book originally written in 1887, Tonnies, one of the first sociologists to be interested in the idea, was keen to distinguish ‘community’, where everyone knew each other, from the more depersonalised ‘society’, where they did not (Tonnies, 1887/1988). The limitation of everyone knowing each other would restrict ‘community’ to a fairly small village but that seems unnecessary. Still, the size should probably be limited in some way since it makes no sense to refer to an entire city as a ‘community’ for example. A second more recent usage of ‘community’ is to refer to people who have something in common or who see themselves as part of a group. They may live in the same place, as part of a larger population, or they may be widely dispersed, yet retain an important sense of something shared, such as the commonly used term ‘transnational community’.

There is a meaningful sense to the ‘displacement-affected community’ in both senses. The first, place-based idea of community we will also refer to as ‘displacement-affected localities’. Up to a certain threshold of population size compared to numbers of displaced people it is reasonable to assume that everyone in an area is affected by displacement. Any attempt to fix this threshold is likely to be fairly arbitrary but where displaced people form 20% or more of a population it seems likely that the entire population will be affected by that displacement and we could refer to the entire locality as a displacement-affected community or locality. This is the basis on which we identified specific research areas for the survey work, detailed in chapter 2. Beyond that, a network understanding of community is more appropriate. This network may extend beyond a single location. This may include anyone left behind in a pre-displacement location, in the sense that Ferris and Winthrop (2010) use the ‘displacement-affected community’. But there is a further group worthy of inclusion, which is those people who live elsewhere but retain a meaningful connection to the main group of displaced people. These people may have lived in the place-based community but moved on, elsewhere in the country or perhaps internationally through resettlement or they may be family members who have always lived elsewhere. This may also include other groups who have come to the locality temporarily but whose connection to the place and the people who live there is more limited. With the inclusion of this final group, we refer to the ‘displacement-affected population’.

This gives us three senses of the term and though we will use ‘displacement-affected community’ most frequently, we occasionally use both ‘locality’ and ‘population’. To summarise:

• The ‘displacement-affected community’ is everyone who is displaced (refugees and/or IDPs) plus the people living in the locality where displaced people have arrived (as long as displaced people make up 20% or more of the population) plus those people who have been left behind.
• The ‘displacement-affected locality’ is the place where the displacement affected community is located, including everyone who is physically present at any one time, including humanitarian actors, traders and state employees who are not ordinarily resident in the locality.
• The ‘displacement-affected population’ is the broadest term, encompassing any actor who engages with the displacement affected locality including transnational actors.

We hope that these distinctions are useful in distinguishing future use of these terms. We now turn to the second conceptual element we have tried to incorporate into this analysis.

Feminist economics

Much of the literature that we have reviewed takes a broadly feminist approach. The influence of feminist theory across the critical social sciences has been clear for several decades. It is common for work across the sub-discipline of refugee studies to be attentive to power relations, including a gender analysis of existing power structures. The suspicion of policy development around self-reliance that focuses on an individualised understanding of self-reliance is a clear example of how feminist analysis has been mainstreamed into what is widely accepted as good research practice. More broadly, research around refugees and displacement often considers questions of intra-household dynamics or care work that draw explicitly on a feminist analysis. Major policy institutions, such as UNHCR, have developed policy grounded in feminist theory (for example UNHCR’s (2019) Age, Gender and Diversity Policy, which has been widely praised). Feminist analysis is therefore nothing new in research with refugees, but the introduction of feminist economics brings a more systematic approach, focused explicitly on the central questions of our research. Feminist economics as a sub-discipline traces its inception to the formation of the International Association for Feminist Economics in 1992 and the initial publication of the associated journal Feminist Economics in 1995. Its growing popularity is perhaps associated with the increasing specialisation of mainstream economics and the widespread pressures to confirm to disciplinary norms.

A sub-discipline that is partly characterised by the rejection of disciplinary dogma is inevitably hard to define and feminist economics is an extremely heterodox approach. Nevertheless, in their introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Feminist Economics Berik and Kongar (2021) suggest that the ‘social provisioning approach’ is an effective starting point that connects a range of approaches within feminist economics. For Power (2004, p. 6), ‘to define economics as the study of social provisioning is to emphasize that at its root, economic activity involves the ways people organize themselves collectively to get a living.’ Power (2004, p. 4–5) highlights five elements common to social provisioning:

• Any economic system requires analysis of both paid and unpaid caring labour, both of which are necessary for any economic system. The rejection of an individualised understanding in favour of collaboration and interdependence aligns with analysis of self-reliance that we have already considered.
• Well-being should be the central measure of economic success. This builds on the capabilities approach, which similarly critiques any economic analysis focused exclusively on financial measures such as income and expenditure (Nussbaum and Sen, 1993). The shift from means to capabilities that is associated with this focus reflects the shift from inputs to outputs in the comparable shift from financial inclusion to financial health that we review above.
• Human agency is important: ‘processes as well as outcomes should be examined in evaluating an economic event’ (Power 2004, p. 5). This has significant reflections in the literature in refugee studies. The care and maintenance approach common to most encampment policies is justified by the preservation of life but overlooks questions of refugee agency. The prioritisation of agency would lead to very different forms of organisation.
• Ethical judgements are an important part of any economic analysis.
• An intersectional analysis that both rejects gender as a variable and situates it ‘at the intersection of multiple power and inequality axes, such as class, race, ethnicity, age, and functional diversity’ is central (Calderón and Gálvez‐Muñoz, 2019, p. 161).

Much of this approach reflects elements of the literature we have reviewed. Taken together the focus on social provisioning represents a substantial theoretical shift, even a move towards a post-capitalist economics (Gibson-Graham, 2006).

This requires an attention to the non-financial aspects of displacement economies, a collective, collaborative understanding of economic activity, rather than an individualised account, an attention to power dynamics at all levels, including within the household and an intersectional analysis of power. Work across gender and development aligns closely with this analysis of ‘economics as if all people mattered’ (Beneria et al., 2016). In refugee studies, this perspective has been explored through attention to social networks, highlighting for example how access to social networks, rather than access to other forms of capital, is key to the success of refugees in urban areas (Buscher, 2011). Landau et al. (2017) also reported that for newly arrived displaced people close kin, ethnic or national connections provide non-material assistance such as the exchange of information needed for survival in a new city. The formalisation of these insights through the feminist economics and particularly the social provisioning approach provides a clear basis to our consideration of the ‘more than economic’ that is common to recent approaches to refugee and displacement economies. It also has important methodological implications which we consider in the next chapter. The ‘more than economic’ is also evident in the many ways in which members of the displacement affected communities and populations provided care and support that was both mutual and non-financial (Ali et. al 2025).

Humanitarian anchor

Finally, we are also interested in the potential of the idea of the ‘humanitarian anchor’ (Zaman, 2018) as it may be applied to protracted displacement economies. This is a form of social procurement that aims to redirect resources of large humanitarian organisations to support for local business initiatives within the displacement-affected community. It builds on work in cities such as Preston in the UK and Cleveland in the US, where large ‘anchor’ institutions such as local councils, hospitals or universities revised their procurement processes so that securing the cheapest possible price was not the only consideration. Where wider social value was recognised in supporting small local business cooperatives, even if they were not the cheapest possible supplier, these ‘anchor’ institutions could use their considerable budget allocations to have a wider local social impact. In humanitarian and/or development contexts it is often large international agencies that have access to the considerable resources of an anchor institution. If they were to redirect these resources to developing procurement channels for essential equipment locally, they could use this to support the development of business initiatives. As Zaman argues:

Opening up the procurement channels of humanitarian actors and agencies and organising displacement-affected communities into worker-owned cooperatives can yield compelling outcomes. Investing in displacement economies re-envisions humanitarians operating in protracted displacement settings as facilitators and enablers of a social economy, nudging them away from the logic of project delivery and instead allowing displacement- affected communities to decide for themselves what the parameters and focus of any project ought to be. (Zaman, 2018, p. 21.)

This approach fits the social provisioning approach of feminist economics very closely. Based in a cooperative approach, which considers ethical dimensions central to the economic decision making of procurement. We were keen to use the research to investigate how widespread these practices already are and where the potential for developing this kind of social procurement exists.

Outline of book

The remainder of the book is structured as follows: the following chapter considers the practical steps involved in the research and the planning behind them, Chapters 3 to 7 consider one country each and are written by the research teams that worked in each country, and the conclusion brings our arguments together with a summary of the key findings of the project.

Chapter 2, ‘Researching protracted displacement: The Protracted Displacement Economies project’ sets the context for the research, explains the selection of countries and of sites within each country and details the comparative approach. This involved implementing the analysis outlined in this chapter, involving a conceptualisation of displacement-affected communities and an operationalisation of the social provisioning approach from feminist economics. As with any large research project much was unforeseen, but this underlined the instability of the lives of people living through protracted displacement. Far from a static or sedentary situation of passive waiting, displaced people involved in the research had to respond to an ongoing series of shocks and crises, often of a national or even international nature.

The five country chapters follow the same structure. Each is divided into three sections: 1. country context, which provides relevant background on the protracted displacement situation, legal provisions and historical analysis; 2. the research process, which examines any methodological choices or complications specific to the country; and 3. key findings, which highlights the most relevant conclusions from research in each country under a set of common headings around our theoretical concerns, including sustainability, feminist economies and mutual aid and the humanitarian anchor. Each of these chapters also contains embedded links for the short films that were made during the film workshop in each country. The conclusion completes the collection, summarising the collective elements of the key findings.

We have already shared this work widely, through multiple stakeholder meetings in each country. From the beginning of the research, core country stakeholder groups have included representatives of the displacement-affected communities, government officials and representatives of major NGOs and international organisations. These stakeholders fed into each stage of the research process, advising on final questions for the survey and interview materials. In each context, chapters 3 to 7 have been presented to these stakeholder groups.

In some cases, the ideas from this project are already having an impact – our displacement-affected communities analysis has received a much more enthusiastic welcome in the Somali region of Ethiopia than in other places and is beginning to inform policy. In other contexts, there is some interest and our research is contributing to ongoing campaigning – efforts to gain some form of naturalisation for Afghan refugees in Pakistan appears to be increasingly likely to meet with some (probably limited) success and our research will have made a small contribution if that eventually happens. Elsewhere, the political situation in the research locations has deteriorated markedly and it is not clear what uptake the research has had; the eastern DRC is a clear example; since our final stakeholder meetings, most of our research participants have been re-displaced and government control of the entire area has been lost; both Myanmar and Lebanon are also suffering through ongoing conflict.

We are more confident of a much slower, more modest impact that the research will have, contributing to wider trends in the field, continuing to push ongoing debates that we have traced in this chapter over the last 50 years and gradually moving the policy environment, sometimes in almost imperceptible ways. But within this longer timeframe of a half century it is clear that analysis is changing. It is becoming much more natural to emphasise the agency of refugees, understandings of the economic are broader and more social, policy has shifted and attitudes to new crises are very different now than they were 50 years ago. We hope this study makes a contribution to this dynamic and vitally important field. The longevity and overall impact of the 2025 reductions in donor support will not be known for some years. If self-sufficiency is interpreted as a more collective endeavour and the limited remaining funding can be focused towards more sustainable, productive responses that ensure refugees themselves are able to take a more significant role in defining solutions than has been the case in recent decades some good may come of this period.

References

Adugna, F., & Gezahegne, K. (2024). Forced displacement and social cohesion in Ethiopia. Research and Evidence Facility, EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa. https://blogs.soas.ac.uk/ref-hornresearch/files/2024/05/Forced-displacement-and-social-cohesion-in-Ethiopia-Final.pdf

Aga Khan, S. (1981). Study on Human Rights and Massive Exoduses. UN Economic and Social Council, Human Rights Commission. https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/29902?ln=enandv=pdf

Agenjo‐Calderón, A., & Gálvez‐Muñoz, L. (2019). Feminist economics: Theoretical and political dimensions. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 78(1), 137–166. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajes.12264

Ali, A. (2021). ‘Disaggregating Jordan’s Syrian refugee response: The ‘Many Hands’ of the Jordanian state.’ Mediterranean Politics, 28(2): 178–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2021.1922969

Ali, A. (2023). ‘Conceptualizing displacement: the importance of coercion.’ Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies49(5), 1083–1102. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2101440

Ali, A. (2024). ‘Displacement in Place and the Financial Crisis in Lebanon.’ Journal of Refugee Studies, 37(1), 201–219. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fead076

Ali, A., Jan, M. A., Samaha, C., May, E., Aung, A., Paw, J., Fechter, A., Non, M. K. C., Collyer, M., Bogale, A. A., Lakshman, R., Gamage, K. V (Forthcoming). Support, Care and Mutual Aid in Protracted Displacement Economies. Sussex Centre for Migration Research Working Paper. https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/centres/sussex-centre-for-migration-research/publications-and-media/working-papers

Alliance for Financial Inclusion (AFI). (2020). Advancing the Financial Inclusion of Forcibly Displaced Persons. Case studies on Rwanda, Mauritania and Afghanistan. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5cfe2c8927234e0001688343/t/60892b13db454d424c5f62ad/1619602209073/AFI_FDPs_CS_AW_digital_0.pdf

Amnesty International. (2025). USA: Lives at risk: Chaotic and abrupt cuts to foreign aid put millions of lives at risk. (May 29). https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/amr51/9408/2025/en/

Appe, J. (1984). Obstacles in assisting refugees. Disasters 8(4), 271–272.

Beneria, L., Berik, G., & Floro, M. (2016). Gender, Development, and Globalization: Economics as if All People Mattered, 2nd ed. Routledge.

Berik, G., & Kongar, E. (2021). The social provisioning approach in feminist economics: The unfolding research. In Berik G., & Kongar E. (Eds.), The Routledge Handbook of feminist economics (pp. 3-21). Routledge.

Betts, A., Bloom, L., Kaplan, J. D., & Omata, N. (2017). Refugee Economies: Forced Displacement and Development. Oxford University Press.

Bhagat, A., & Roderick, L. (2020). Banking on refugees: Racialized expropriation in the fintech era. Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 52(8), 1498–1515. https://doi.org/10.1177/0308518X20904070

Black, R., & Koser, K. (Eds.). (1999). The end of the refugee cycle? Refugee Repatriation and Reconstruction (Volume 4). Berghahn Books.

Brown, A., Mackie, P., & García Amado, P. (2024). The Displacement Economies Framework. Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies. 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/15562948.2024.2379380

Brun, C., & Horst, C. (2023). Towards a conceptualisation of relational humanitarianism. Journal of Humanitarian Affairs, 5(1), 62–72. https://doi.org/10.7227/JHA.103

Buscher, D. (2011). New Approaches to Urban Refugee Livelihoods. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 28(2), 17–30. https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.36473

Agenjo‐Calderón, A., & Gálvez‐Muñoz, L. (2019). Feminist economics: Theoretical and political dimensions. American Journal of Economics and Sociology, 78(1), 137-166.

Chambers, R., & Conway, G. (1991). Sustainable Rural Livelihoods: Practical Concepts for the 21st Century. IDS Discussion Paper 296. https://www.ids.ac.uk/download.php?file=files/Dp296.pdf

Chimni, B. S. (2004). ‘From resettlement to involuntary repatriation: towards a critical history of durable solutions to refugee problems.’ Refugee survey quarterly, 23(3), 55–73. https://doi.org/10.1093/rsq/23.3.55

Collyer, M., Mutasembere, T., te Lintelo, D., & Zaman, T. (2024). Social Assistance and Forced Displacement: A New Solution to an Old Problem? Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 40(2), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.25071/1920-7336.41093

Crisp, J. (2001). Mind the Gap! UNHCR, Humanitarian Assistance and the Development Process. International Migration Review, 35(1), 168–191.

Crisp, J. (2003). No solutions in sight: the problem of protracted refugee situations in Africa. Refugee Survey Quarterly 22(4), 114–150.

Dercon, S. (2022). Gambling on development. Hurst.

Dhawan, S. M., Wilson, K., & Zademach, H. M. (2024). From financial inclusion to financial health of refugees: urging for a shift in perspective. Third World Quarterly 45(5), 926–945. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2023.2264780

Dryden-Peterson, S., & Hovil, L. (2003). Local Integration as a Durable Solution: refugees, host populations and education in Uganda. New Issues in Refugee Research. UNHCR Evaluation and Policy Unit, (Working Paper No. 93), 1-27. https://www.unhcr.org/asia/sites/asia/files/legacy-pdf/3f8189ec4.pdf

Easton-Calabria, E. (2022). Refugees, Self-Reliance, Development: A Critical History. Bristol University Press.

Easton-Calabria, E., Krause, U., Field, J., Tiwari, A., Mookherjee, Y., Wake, C., Barbelet, V., Carpi, E., Slaughter, A., & Leeson K. (2017) ‘How do we measure refugee self-reliance?’ Refugee Self-Reliance. Moving Beyond the Marketplace. RSC Research in Brief 7. October 2017. https://www.rsc.ox.ac.uk/publications/refugee-self-reliance-moving-beyond-the-marketplace

Easton-Calabria, E., & Omata, N. (2018). Panacea for the refugee crisis? Rethinking the promotion of ‘self-reliance’ for refugees. Third World Quarterly, 39(8), 1458–1474. https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2018.1458301

Etzold, B., & Fechter, A. M. (2022). ‘Unsettling protracted displacement: connectivity and mobility beyond ‘Limbo’. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 48(18), 4295–4312. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369183X.2022.2090153

Ferris, E., & Winthrop, R. (2010). Education and Displacement: Assessing Conditions for Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons affected by Conflict. UNESCO. https://www.humanitarianlibrary.org/sites/default/files/2014/02/190715e.pdf

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. (2018). Southern-led responses to displacement: modes of South–South cooperation? In Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E. & Daley, P. (Eds.), Routledge handbook of South-South relations (pp. 239–255). Routledge.

Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, E., & Qasmiyeh, Y. M. (2020). ‘Refugees’ Pandemic Responses in a Palestinian Camp in Lebanon’, Current History, 119(821), 349–55. https://doi.org/10.1525/curh.2020.119.821.349

Gallie, W. B. (1955). Essentially Contested Concepts. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (56), 167–198.

Gibson-Graham, J. K. (2006). A Postcapitalist Politics. University of Minnesota Press.

Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect (GCR2P). (2025). 2025 Open Statement Ahead of the Open Debate on Protection of Civilians. (May 13). https://www.globalr2p.org/publications/2025-ngo-statement-ahead-of-the-open-debate-on-protection-of-civilians/

Gorman, R. F. (1987). Coping with Africa’s Refugee Burden: A time for solutions Geneva. UNITAR.

Hammar, A. (2014). Displacement economies in Africa: Paradoxes of crisis and creativity. Zed Books/Nordiska Afrikainstitutet.

Hammond, L. (2004). This place will become home: Refugee repatriation to Ethiopia. Cornell University Press.

Hamrell, S. (1967). Refugee Problems in Africa. Scandinavian Institute of African Studies,.

Harrell-Bond, B. E. (1986). Imposing aid. Emergency assistance to refugees. Oxford University Press.

Hyndman, J. (2000). Managing displacement: Refugees and the politics of humanitarianism. University of Minnesota Press.

International Development Committee (IDC). (2022). Racism in the Aid Sector. UK Parliament. https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm5803/cmselect/cmintdev/150/report.html

Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC). (2025). 2025 Global Report on Internal Displacement (GRID). https://www.internal-displacement.org/publications/2025-global-report-on-internal-displacement-grid/

Jacobsen, K. (2005). The Economic Life of Refugees. Kumarian Press.

Jacobsen, K., & Wilson, K. (2020). Supporting the Financial Health of Refugees. The Finance in Displacement (FIND) Study in Uganda and Mexico. The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University.

Kandasamy, N. (2024). Asylum Denial Beyond Borders: The International Dimensions of British Responses to Tamil Asylum Seekers in the 1980s. History Workshop Journal (98), 55–77. https://doi.org/10.1093/hwj/dbae025

Kibreab, G. (1987). Refugees and development in Africa: The case of Eritrea. The Red Sea Press.

Kuch, A. (2017). Naturalization of Burundian Refugees in Tanzania: The Debates on Local Integration and the Meaning of Citizenship Revisited. Journal of Refugee Studies (30)3, 468–487. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/few024

Landau, L. B., Bule, K., Malik, A., A., Wanjiku Kihato, C., Irvin-Erickson, Y., Edwards, B., & Mohr, E. (2017). Displacement and Disconnection? Exploring the Role of Social Networks in the Livelihoods of Refugees in Gaziantep, Nairobi, and Peshawar. Urban Institute.

Lay, K. (2025, March 26). Aid cuts predicted to cause 2.9 million more HIV-related deaths by 2030. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/mar/26/aid-cuts-pepfar-epidemic-prediction-cause-29-million-more-hiv-related-deaths-by-2030-lancet-study

Leeson, K.C., Slaughter, A. & Buscher, D. (2022). Better Lives Now: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding and Measuring Self-Reliance. Refugee Point and Women’s Refugee Commission https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5b96ee1f36099b138a86b3d9/t/67618eb8e85e9d5a851e439d/1734446779183/2505-RefugePoint-SRI%2Bframework%2Breport%2BFINAL.pdf

Loescher, G., A. Betts & J. Milner, (2008). The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The politics and practice of refugee protection into the twenty-first century. Routledge.

Loft, P., & Brien, P. (2025). The Aid Budget and Support for Refugees in the UK 2022 – 2025. House of Commons Library. https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-9663/CBP-9663.pdf

Lowe, C., & Hagen-Zanker, J. (2024). Linking Social Protection and Humanitarian Systems to Respond to Forced Displacement. IDS Bulletin 55, No. 2. Institute of Development Studies. https://bulletin.ids.ac.uk/index.php/idsbo/article/view/3267/3383

Macrae, J., Zwi, A., Duffield, M., & Slim, H. (1994). War and Hunger. Rethinking international responses to complex emergencies. Zed Books.

Malik, K. (2018, September 2). As a system, foreign aid is a fraud and does nothing for equality. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/02/as-a-system-foreign-aid-is-a-fraud-and-does-nothing-for-inequality

Megersa, K. (2021). Financial inclusion in a refugee response. K4D Helpdesk Report 1023. (August 18). Institute of Development Studies. https://www.ids.ac.uk/publications/financial-inclusion-in-a-refugee-response/

Natarajan, N., Newsham, A., Rigg, J., & Suhardiman, D. (2022). A sustainable livelihoods framework for the 21st century. World Development 155. 105898. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2022.105898

Nussbaum, M., & Sen, A. (1993). The Quality of Life. United Nations University.

Olivier de Sardan, J. P. (2018). Miracle mechanisms, traveling models, and the revenge of contexts. Cash transfer programs: A textbook case. In Olivier de Sardan, J. P. & Piccoli, E. (Eds.), Cash transfers in context: An anthropological perspective (pp. 29–91). Berghahn Books. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvw04jbv

Omata, N., (2017). The myth of self-reliance: Economic lives inside a Liberian refugee camp. Berghahn Books.

Patel, P. (2016, September 13). Too much of YOUR money is simply stolen or squandered. Daily Mail. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3788162/My-fury-wasted-foreign-aid-International-development-secretary-Priti-Patel-pledges-major-overhaul-12billion-budget.html

Power, M. (2004). Social provisioning as a starting point for feminist economics. Feminist economics, 10(3), 3-19. https://doi.org/10.1080/1354570042000267608

Robillard, S. C., Atim, T., & Maxwell, D. (2021). Localization: a ‘landscape’ report. Feinstein International Center, Tufts University. https://fic.tufts.edu/publication-item/localization-a-landscape-report/

Skran, C. (1995). Refugees in Inter-War Europe. The Emergence of a Regime. Oxford University Press.

Skran, C., & Easton-Calabria, E. (2020). Old Concepts Making New History: Refugee Self-reliance, Livelihoods and the ‘Refugee Entrepreneur’. Journal of Refugee Studies 33(1), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fez061

Smith, M. (2004). Warehousing refugees. World refugee survey 38(1), 38–56.

Sorenson, J. (1994). An Overview: Refugees and Development. In Adelman, H. & Sorenson, J. (Eds). African Refugees. Development Aid and Repatriation (pp. 175–190). Westview Press.

Tonnies, F. (1988). Community and Society (C. J. Loomis, Trans.). Routledge. (Original work published 1887).

United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA). (1968). Recommendations of the Conference on the Legal, Economic and Social Aspects of African Refugee Problems, Addis Ababa. October 8-18, 1967.

United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). (1984). Pakistan Programming vol 7. In UNHCR archives reference 110.

UNHCR. (2005). Handbook for Self-Reliance. https://www.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/legacy-pdf/44bf7b012.pdf

UNHCR. (2019). UNHCR Age, Gender and Diversity Policy. https://www.unhcr.org/uk/publications/unhcr-age-gender-and-diversity-policy

UNHCR. (2020). Policy on UNHCR’s Engagement in Situations of Internal Displacement: UNHCR/HCP/2019/1. International Journal of Refugee Law 32(1), 148–159. https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/eeaa007

UNHCR. (2025a). Global Trends. Data and statistics, (June 12). https://www.unhcr.org/global-trends

UNHCR. (2025b). Underfunding. https://reporting.unhcr.org/dashboards/underfunding#:~:text=In%202025%2C%20underfunding%20will%20stop,to%20secure%20the%20funds%20required.

UNHCR. (n.d.). Financial Inclusion. https://www.unhcr.org/uk/what-we-do/build-better-futures/livelihoods-and-economic-inclusion/financial-inclusion

United Nations (UN). (2018). Global Compact on Refugees. UN.

Verdirame, G., & Harrell-Bond, B. E. (2005). Rights in exile: Janus-faced humanitarianism (Vol. 17). Berghahn Books.

Wintour, P. (2025, May 13). Labour to defend aid cuts, claiming UK’s days as ‘a global charity’ are over. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2025/may/13/labour-defend-aid-cuts-claiming-uk-days-global-charity-over

World Bank. (2025). Financial Inclusion: Financial inclusion is a key enabler to reducing poverty and boosting prosperity. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/financialinclusion/overview

Zaman, T. (2018). The ‘humanitarian anchor’. A social economy approach to assistance in protracted displacement situations. ODI HPG Working Paper. https://media.odi.org/documents/12203.pdf

Zaman, T. Oeppen, C. & Collyer, M. (Forthcoming). Displacement affectedness: a moral economy lens to examine protracted displacement.