Foreword

From 2018 to 2022, I served as a ‘Challenge Leader’ for UK Research and Innovation’s Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF). That role gave me an opportunity to help shape research in one of the GCRF’s key focus areas, ‘Security, Protracted Conflict, Refugees and Forced Displacement’. In that capacity, I led the writing of the call for research proposals on Protracted Displacement that came out in 2019. What we were trying to generate was a body of research and evidence that would look at protracted displacement through an interdisciplinary and holistic lens, making connections between the different aspects of displaced people’s lives, and the policies that seek to support them that could provide new intersectoral and cross-cutting approaches to promoting the welfare of those affected by displacement.

There’s always a satisfaction in seeing an idea for research take shape as a project and then reach a successful conclusion. While some publications from this project are still coming out, and the ‘impact’ of the research will continue to develop in the coming years, the production of this book is a major milestone.

It’s great to see that the book is fully open access, as it enables policymakers, practitioners and researchers who lack access to university libraries to be able to benefit from the findings of the research. The research team have made extra efforts to ensure that their work will be as accessible as possible, publishing the Lebanon chapter in Arabic as a working paper with  partner organisation Basmeh & Zeitoonah, and planning the upcoming publication of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) chapter in French. I’m also personally very pleased to see a total of 18 co-authors from institutions in the Global South, since enabling and increasing more equitable global research collaborations was an important objective of the GCRF.

The core of the book is obviously the research, and here this book excels. It demonstrates the value of equitable research partnerships as a key component of research excellence. The country chapters are written by people who know their subjects intimately, since very often they live close to or with those they are writing about, rather than as external observers. This should be the measure of any research in this field, but it is not as widespread as it should be. The array of methods that the book draws on is also impressive. Engagement with film was an attractive element of the original application and it’s great to see that the open access technology allows the films to be embedded in each chapter – take a look online if you’re reading a hard copy of the book.

The contributions also demonstrate the high calibre of more traditional methods used. The quantitative research (baseline survey and panel) cover more than 70,000 individuals, plus multiple focus groups and hundreds of qualitative interviews; together these sources of data provide an incredibly detailed database that is reflected in the analysis in each of the country chapters. This data has been publicly archived on the UNHCR Microdata Library, even before the book’s publication. While making data available is a regular requirement not just for GCRF but for all UKRI-funded projects, the way that the team has done this in partnership with an important international organisation like UNHCR is a fantastic example to set.

Perhaps the thing that would have most surprised me in 2019 is the title of the book I would be asked to write a foreword for five years down the line. Refugees in a World Without Aid captures the situation of many refugees living in situations of protracted displacement. Although the Global Compact on Refugees, signed at the end of 2018, highlighted the intense international political concerns around refugees, it also indicated a desire amongst states to devote fewer resources to ongoing crises. So, it is not the direction of travel that would have surprised me, rather it is the speed with which we have got here, and the enormous geopolitical changes that have brought about this situation.

Even though, as the introduction points out, there is still considerable aid provided by wealthy states, the last few years have seen the first and fastest decline in assistance from the major donors that I have witnessed in my professional career. In 2025, in the United States (US), one of the first moves made by newly inaugurated President Donald Trump was the immediate evisceration of the foreign aid budget, including the effective closure of the US Agency for International Development and drastic cuts in funding for UN agencies that support refugees. In the United Kingdom (UK), the defunding of humanitarian and development assistance has been more gradual, but still stark. In 2019, the UK enjoyed a largely deserved reputation as a ‘development superpower’, one of relatively few countries reaching the threshold of 0.7% gross national income (GNI) devoted to official development assistance (ODA). However, what followed was a blurring of the definition of development assistance. Nearly a third of the UK’s ODA budget came to be spent on housing asylum seekers in the UK within a few years. The reduction of ODA from 0.7% to 0.5% in 2022 (and to an expected 0.3% in 2027) have dramatically reduced the UK’s impact in addressing the key challenges of global aid. Countries across the EU have made similarly drastic reductions, partly in response to the US’s cuts to military support for Europe which have necessitated increases in defence spending. Where this is combined with the alarming rise in conflict across the world, Refugees in a World Without Aid seems like a heuristic generalisation rather than the error it would have been in 2019.

The question, which the book does not quite answer, remains ‘What are we to do?’. I have spent much of my professional career at the intersection of research and policy in this field, working with various United Nations (UN) agencies, donors and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) with GCRF, and more recently leading an EU-funded Research and Evidence Facility on migration and displacement in the Horn of Africa. Policymakers everywhere are keen to be guided by good quality research that helps inform the decisions they need to make about how and where they should spend money and efforts to have positive impact. When the amounts of money involved shrink, research may still help to prioritise, but where budgets are cut to the extent that major programmes are wound down, researchers are often left to document the impacts on those left unaided.

Many of those impacts are obviously negative. This book does not shy away from the situations of widespread human distress in situations of protracted displacement, particularly in the extremely fragile political contexts considered here. Yet it also recognises that this has been the reality for many people, particularly in situations of protracted displacement, for some time and it is here that some of the solutions for how to survive without aid are to be found. Refugees and displaced people never sit and wait for aid to be given to them. From the moment disaster strikes, they are in a constant state of motion, working to find ways to help themselves. Often this involves moving from one place to another, bringing some family members along and leaving others behind to watch over whatever property they have left. Aid, when it comes, can supplement what people are doing to try to support themselves, but it is never – and has never been – the only resource at their disposal. At its best, assistance systems can support people’s efforts to help themselves by facilitating their freedom of movement, their right to work, and their access to basic resources. At its worst, it blocks people’s access to these essential resources, rendering them unable to meet their basic needs.

As the chapters in this book show, refugees’ efforts are often manifestly insufficient to enable them to become entirely self-sufficient, but if the barriers to them doing so can be removed they will be better able to provide for themselves.

Amongst the array of research financed under this call, we were especially interested in Protracted Displacement Economies for its explicitly political economic focus. The book’s conclusion, ‘A new political economy of displacement’, does an excellent job of reviewing the huge quantity of literature that already exists on this topic and is as good a statement of the current challenges as I have seen. When (and we have to hope it is when) wealthy states once again consider themselves part of the solution to these challenges, they will need to build on the collective self-provisioning of refugees and displaced people rather than attempt to improve on it or replicate it.