Southern Responses to Displacement

Our ERC-funded Southern Responses to Displacement project aims to explore why, how and with what effect a wide range of Southern-led responses have been implemented to support refugees from Syria. To better understand the motivations, nature, and impacts of Southern-led initiatives to address displacement from Syria, this project develops a multi-perspectival approach framed around the participatory co-production of knowledge with refugees, local communities, civil society groups, local, national, and international secular and faith-based organisations, and UN agencies. While it aims to critically analyse these different actors’ experiences and evaluations of the nature and impacts of Southern-led initiatives on different scales, however, the project purposefully aims to centralise refugees’ own experiences of and perspectives on these Southern-led initiatives. Indeed, by placing refugees’ conceptualisations at the forefront, the project aims to shed a unique light on refugees’ understandings of humanitarianism, and the extent to which people affected by conflict themselves consider that diverse Southern-led responses to conflict-induced displacement can or should be conceptualised as ‘humanitarian’ programmes. In so doing, the project aims to make a pivotal contribution to debates regarding the desirability and/or tensions of ‘alternative’ forms of humanitarianism, debates which have, until now, been monopolised by Northern academic and policy perspectives.