The RRN Research Digest provides a synopsis of recent research on refugee and forced migration issues from entities associated with the RRN and others.
You can download the digest in PDF format here: RRN Research Digest
No. 183 | May 7, 2026
Dear RRN Research Digest readers, this will be our last issue of the semester. Thank you so much for your readership, contributions, and support. We will be returning in September; if you have any comments or feedback, please do email us at rrndigest@yorku.ca. We hope you have a lovely summer!
Sincerely,
RRN Research Digest Team
NEW RESEARCH AND PUBLICATIONS
Dustin, M., Ferreira, N., Matin, K., Rezaei-Toroghi, M., & Soloaga, I. (2026). Decolonizing Queer Migration: Iranian voices in exile. Bristol University Press. Open access book. This book offers an unprecedented study of how forced migration shapes gender and sexual identities, focusing on queer Iranian individuals. The authors explore how they negotiate, express and reframe their identities across different stages of exile and resettlement.
Krause, U., Joshua, G. N., & Schmidt, H. (2026). Refugee-led organizations in Uganda: Agency, Gender, and politics of self-organizing in exile. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Open access book. Self-organization plays an essential yet often overlooked role in the everyday lives of refugees in exile. By self-organizing, they challenge restrictions, claim political representation, foster social relations and belonging, and create ongoing economic opportunities. While government authorities and aid organizations are supposed to provide protection and assistance, refugees often continue to face adversities, restrictions, and risks, prompting them to establish and maintain their own support systems. Refugee-Led Organizations in Uganda offer nuanced insight into the problems arising from the aid system and especially the significance of the spectrum of informal and formalized self-organizations. Ulrike Krause, Gato Ndabaramiye Joshua, and Hannah Schmidt draw on a gender-sensitive understanding of relational agency and situated knowledge and use empirical research in Uganda’s camp Kyaka II and the capital, Kampala, to reveal how individuals collectively contribute to their own support in times of emergency and in everyday life.
Haugen, S., McNally, R., & Hallstrom, L. (2026). Supporting Refugees in Rural Canada: Exploring the Strengths and Weaknesses of Settlement Service Models in Smaller Communities. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 41(1), 1–19. This article demonstrates how refugee integration is supported in rural and small communities across Canada. We conducted virtual focus groups and interviews with 40 participants across the country who support refugees through settlement organizations, sponsorship groups, and other networks. The article outlines six participant-identified models of settlement services and explores the benefits, challenges, and limitations of and potential improvements for each model. These models highlight the mix of formal and informal supports existing in rural places and the urban focus of Canada’s settlement system. Recommendations include adequate funding of settlement services in smaller communities and engaging with rural service providers.
Lillevik, R. (2026). The Evolution of Vulnerability in Norwegian Refugee Debates: Semantic and Political Changes over Four Decades. Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, 42(1), 1–19. This study traces how vulnerability emerged as a key concept in Norwegian refugee policy from the 1980s to the 2020s. Using Koselleck’s conceptual history framework, it analyzes seven major legislative and policy debates. The findings show a shift from systemic understandings of displacement to individualized assessments of risk, reinforcing hierarchies of deservingness. Vulnerability liberalized asylum procedures but also legitimized restrictive policies, favouring resettled refugees over asylum seekers. The study highlights how this concept operates as both a moral and a political tool, shaping refugee priorities while narrowing political responsibility for global displacement.
Noori, S., & Baroud, J. (2025). Leveraging EdTech in Creating Refugee-Inclusive Classrooms in Canada. Education Sciences, 15(11), 1473-1490. Open access. As Canada experiences a growing number of newcomer students with refugee backgrounds, K-12 educators face challenges to meet students’ unique academic, linguistic, and psychosocial needs. This paper examines the role of educational technology (EdTech) to bridge the resource and training gap by enhancing teacher preparedness through an accessible, inclusive, and trauma-informed digital resource. Findings suggest that successful EdTech for refugee-background student initiatives must be trauma-informed, strength-based, culturally responsive, and designed with usability and accessibility in mind. Furthermore, collaboration between K-12 educators, researchers, and developers is vital to ensure that there is alignment of pedagogy and technology.
REPORTS AND POLICY BRIEFS
Compounding Returns: A Study On Remittance Loss and The Cost Of Deportations in Afghanistan. (2026). Reliefweb. Deportations are rising at the same time that humanitarian resources are tightening. Communities that relied on migration and remittances to bridge chronic poverty are now facing abrupt income loss, escalating debt and layered shocks (including climate related disruption), with many households moving quickly from precarious self-reliance into acute need. This study provides ground-level evidence of how forced returns are reshaping household economies, community support systems, and where the pressure points translate to protection risks.
Infrastructuring pathways: traversing the legal infrastructure of mobility in South America by Andrea Jiménez Laurence. (2026). Centre of Excellence for Global Mobility Law. Human mobility is as complex as the legal regimes that govern it, demanding an approach that extends beyond migration and refugee law to include temporary, pendular, and extralegal dynamics of movement. This paper adopts the lens of legal infrastructures to analyse how law and mobility co-constitute each other in South America’s diverse mobility pathways. The analysis shows that movement and the interaction of multiple regimes continuously (re)configure a legal infrastructure that both enables and constrains mobility, capturing how law shapes mobility, and how mobility, in turn, reshapes law.
Refugee Access to Higher Education in Canada: A Case Study of the Afghan Newcomer Community in British Columbia- Final Report by Noori, S., Mohamed, A., Safi, I., & Naikmal, M. (2026). Safi Association for Humanity. This research study investigates the obstacles in accessing higher education for newcomer Afghans in British Columbia (BC), Canada. The aim of this project is to find out what these barriers are through surveys and focus groups. This report highlights the preliminary findings presented in the surveys. The goal of this study is to provide insights and recommendations for enhancing Afghan refugee access to higher education in Canada, with a focus on BC’s education system at the end of study. This research project will also provide data regarding public education and community-based support services and resources available to these newcomers in their journeys towards post-secondary education.
The Impact of Temporary Migration Status on Access to Refuge in Victoria, Australia: Barriers to Safety and Support. (2026). The University of Melbourne. In this report we detail findings from our examination of the impact of temporary migration status on access to refuge in Victoria. Our findings suggest that concerns noted by the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence (RCFV) in 2016 remain largely unchanged – that is, that temporary visa holders have limited access to refuge due to the conditions attached to their visas. This report presents findings that identify the challenges that Victorian refuges manage in supporting temporary visa holders and highlights areas where reform at the national and state level could alleviate these challenges to ensure all women have equal access to safety.
Transit Migration: The Impact of Changes in US Immigration Policies on Central American and Mexican Transit Countries. (2026). Institute for the Study of International Migration. This report, a joint endeavor of Georgetown’s Institute for the Study of International Migration and the Center for Latin American Studies and supported by The Americas Institute, examines the impact of changes in US policies on the transit countries with particular attention to the cuts in US assistance, the closing of the US border, deportations and the likely taxation of remittances sent home by migrants.
NEWS AND BLOG POSTS
MSF DRC: New wave of violence in Ituri deepens humanitarian crisis, May 4, 2026. Reliefweb. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s (DRC) northeastern province of Ituri, Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders (MSF) teams are witnessing the impact of renewed violence on civilians wounded by gunfire, survivors of sexual violence unable to access appropriate care, and families forced to flee. Since February 2026, MSF has treated thousands of patients in the town of Fataki. Despite these efforts, the broader response remains drastically insufficient given the scale of needs.
On the Pacific coast, a perilous reverse migration route surges, only to disappear by Joshua Collins, April 28, 2026. The New Humanitarian. Jaqué, Juradó, Bahía Solano. The towns are like an archipelago starting on Panama’s Pacific coast and continuing down into Colombia. Impoverished, isolated, and far from the beaten path, they are unlikely – and dangerous – places for the effects of US President Donald Trump’s harsh migration policies to land. But for several months last year, that’s exactly what happened.
Somalia hunger crisis worsens as drought displaces more than 500,000 people, April 27, 2026. Aljazeera. Across Somalia, communities are suffering through a deepening hunger crisis, driven from their homes by drought and left waiting for critical humanitarian assistance that has not arrived. September’s failed Deyr rains mark the latest blow in a relentless climate crisis, destroying livelihoods, killing livestock, and forcing another year of harvest failure. More than 500,000 people have been displaced so far this year – more than 90 percent of them by drought – in addition to the 3.3 million Somalis already uprooted.
Two Sides of Japan’s Immigration Policy: Welcoming Migrant Workers and Excluding Asylum Seekers by Nanako Inaba, April 27, 2026. Georgetown Journal of International Affairs. Despite a new immigration system to address labor shortages, the Japanese government remains reluctant to address undocumented migrants, specifically Karihomensha communities. This article explains how the unethical treatment of undocumented migrants in Japan reflects a broader issue in which the country fails to protect the human rights of migrant workers who contribute to critical economic growth. It argues that, to remedy this human rights crisis and adhere to national and international standards, Japan should grant undocumented migrants residence status and proposes a mechanism to do so.
38 migrants die off Libya coast, including Egyptians, Sudanese, and Ethiopians, April 28, 2026, Middle East Monitor. Thirty-eight irregular migrants have died after a boat sank off the coast of eastern Libya, the Libyan Attorney General’s Office said on Monday. In a statement, the office said the victims were on a dilapidated vessel that departed from the city of Tobruk, heading north across the Mediterranean. It added that a human trafficking network had organised the journey using an unsafe boat, which sank before reaching its destination. The victims were of Sudanese, Egyptian and Ethiopian nationalities.
EVENTS, RESOURCES, DIGITAL AND SOCIAL MEDIA
Event: The future of solutions to internal displacement? Refugee Law Initiative. Given the prevalence of internal displacement globally, its low profile in humanitarian practice and research is both notable and problematic. The newly published, 45-chapter Oxford University Press Handbook of Internal Displacement seeks to change that. This launch event brings together five of its authors (David Cantor (RLI), Walter Kälin (Former UN Special Rapporteur on IDPs), Martina Caterina (UNHCR), Natalia Krynsky Baal (UNHCR), and Greta Zeender (GICHD)) to reflect on the importance of a renewed focus on internal displacement for engaging with key challenges for humanitarian work in a rapidly shifting global context. This is a hybrid event and the in-person location is at NHCR HQ, 94 rue de Montbrillant, Geneva. It will be on May 28, 2026, 12:30 PM – 1:30 PM CEST.
Event: To be or not to be: The road to citizenship. Research Matters. Join for an engaging look on the importance of immigrants’ social environments in decisions to become citizens and how citizenship trends are changing in Canada. Maciej Karpinski (IRCC) will open the discussion by presenting Longitudinal Immigration Database (IMDB) data from 2011 to 2023 to unpack recent trends in citizenship uptake. The analysis provides new evidence on when citizenship uptake started to decline, how large the drop is and whether it’s a lasting trend among immigrants who meet eligibility requirements. Thomas Soehl (McGill University) will then explain how social connections influence immigrants’ decisions to apply for citizenship. This study shows that people don’t apply for citizenship just because they know someone who already has it. They are more likely to apply when influence comes through strong social ties to naturalized immigrants who share similar characteristics like education or migration experiences. Seeing peers gain citizenship can encourage others to apply as a way to achieve equal status. This online event is on May 13 at 1:30 PM to 3:00 PM EDT.
Seminar: Sovereignty Ordering Migrations Inside European Borders: Uses vs. Ethics. MOEBIUS Seminar. Baptiste Jouzier will give a lecture on the topic, “Encadrer la gestion des migrations, renforcer la protection des migrants : la normativité au défi de la gouvernance mondiale des migrations .” This event is online on May 15, from 2:00 – 4:00PM CEST.
Seminar: Queer and Trans Mobilities and the Search for Refuge. Migration Mobilities Bristol. Mengia Tschalär (CUNY), Samuel Ritholtz (Oxford), Rebecca Buxton and B Camminga (Bristol) in conversation with Diego Rodriguez (Leicester). A conversation across three books: The Way Out: Justice in the Queer Search for Refuge (University of California Press, 2026), East African Queer and Trans Displacements (Bloomsbury, 2026), and Queer Liberalisms and Marginal Mobilities (Routledge, 2026). This is a hybrid event, with the in person location being at Arts Complex (Room G.H01), 3-5 Woodland Road, Bristol BS8 1UJ. This will be on May 20, 2026, 4:00 – 5:30 PM BST.
Virtual Book Launch: Canada in the Global Refugee Regime. Carleton University. Join editors Nathan Benson, James Milner, and Dephine Nakache for the virtual book launch of Canada in the Global Refugee Regime, exploring Canada’s role in responding to global displacement and advancing collective action for refugee protection. Drawing on policy insight and scholarly analysis, the book highlights the political dimensions of contemporary refugee protection, underscoring the limitations of the existing global refugee regime. This event will be online on May 20, 2026, 11:00 AM – 12:30 PM EDT.