Refugee Leadership and the Politics of Humanitarian Funding: Between Localization and Exclusion
LAU Beirut Campus - Irwin Hall Faculty Lounge
The Department of Communication, Mobility and Identity (CMI) at the School of Arts and Sciences invites you to its CMI Open Classroom talk session.
About the event
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The localization turn in humanitarian policy has encouraged funders to provide more resources to refugee-run initiatives, which are increasingly recognized as crucial frontline service providers due to their embeddedness in the communities they serve. However, with new funding comes greater donor influence on the agendas of community-led initiatives, as well as new hierarchies of inclusion and exclusion in humanitarian partnerships.
In this discussion, Watfa Najdi will consider both the opportunities and the tensions yielded by the emergence of funding channels that target refugee-run initiatives.
About the people
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- Moderator
Cory Rodgers
Assistant Professor of Migration Studies, LAU
Dr. Cory Rodgers (he/him) is a social anthropologist. Prior to joining LAU, Dr. Rodgers was a senior researcher at the University of Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre, where he was the principal investigator of the project Social Cohesion as a Humanitarian Objective (2020-2023). His research investigated the impact of projects intended to promote “social cohesion” between displaced populations and their host populations, whether merely to prevent inter-communal tensions or to promote more ambitious forms of cross-communal solidarity.
- Speaker
Watfa Najdi
Watfa Najdi is the former refugee research and policy program coordinator at the Issam Fares Institute at AUB. She is now reading for her PhD at the International Institute of Social Studies at the Erasmus University Rotterdam.