Refugee camps and refugee rights: A simulation of the response to large refugee influxes

Abstract

This essay introduces and analyzes a one-class role-play simulation during which students engage in stakeholder negotiations on how to respond to a large flow of refugees between two fictional African countries. Participants acquire an in-depth knowledge of arguments regarding granting and restricting refugees’ freedom of movement and civil and economic rights. Contributing to the expanding literature on active and interdisciplinary teaching strategies, this content-oriented simulation teaches public policy, as well as humanitarian and development responses in the wake of a large influx of forced migrants in a developing country. The simulation thus addresses questions related to courses on development, conflict and refugee studies, international organizations, human rights, and international relations. Based on six iterations of the simulation, the essay discusses specific design decisions in the preparation, interaction, and debriefing stage and their impact on the simulation, as well as principal learning outcomes. This includes detailed discussions of briefing memos, role sheets, role selection, and key questions during the debriefing session.

keywords:

• Role playing
• active learning
• simulations
• refugees
• human rights
• humanitarian emergency; migration studies

Acknowledgments

This simulation has benefitted from extensive feedback from my students at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, Columbia Law School, and the New School’s Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs. Their candid comments and useful suggestions have improved the design of the simulation, as well as enlightened me about its potential. I am indebted to Alexander Aleinikoff, Victor Asal, and André Corrêa d'Almeida, who have generously shared their invaluable insights on an earlier draft of this article, as well as to three anonymous reviewers for their helpful observations and recommendations. I also thank Rahma Ahmed and Wambui Mwangi for their advice on Swahili names used in the simulation and Sandhya Iyer for her excellent editorial assistance.

Notes

Notes

1 The full scenario is provided in the online Appendix.

2 The names of towns, districts, ethnicities, and associations are entirely fictional and based on pertinent Swahili words. E.g., the town Usalama means safety, the border district Mpaka means border, the merchants’ association Biashara gets its name from trade, and the two refugee ethnicities Akili and Wengine signify intelligent people and the other.

3 In this case, instead of the African Union, regional organizations may be represented through the League of Arab States, ASEAN, or the Organization of American States.

4 The first time that this simulation was used, students were allotted their roles at the beginning of the simulation class. The pre-class preparation included abstract preparation for the four major groups. In the simulation session, students were given the first 10 minutes to apply their prepared arguments to their specific role. Discussions with students suggested that they would benefit from a more thorough preparation, which led to distributing the roles a few weeks prior to the simulation.

5 The remainder live in self-settled camps, collective centers, and reception or transit camps.

6 Not all of these readings are required. Depending on the overall focus of the class, some are provided as additional readings. For a full reading list, please see the Appendix.

7 Asal and Blake (2006, 5) stress that having to define goals and positions is one of the key ways of helping students learn from content-oriented simulations.

8 Please see the online Appendix for the full instructions.

9 In two out of the six simulations done thus far, the table layout could not be changed. The government officials occupied the podium while the other groups, starting with the UN and local government, took up either side of the first few rows and the refugees came behind the UN. This did not have a visible impact on the depth of the discussion, but a roundtable setting facilitates interactions among students.

10 Smith and Boyer (1996, 692) also suggest that students first meet in more homogenous intra-agency groups and then in heterogeneous groups with all stakeholders.

11 Alternatively, the host government could issue a unilateral decree, based on consultations with stakeholders, or it could sign an agreement with key development partners (especially donors). While instructors, whose sole focus is content-related, tend to disregard power relations and adopt purely democratic decision-making rules (Asal and Blake 2006, 9), this assumption is not compatible with the secondary process-related learning outcomes of this simulation.

12 In this case, students took inspiration from the 2015 EU-Africa Valletta Summit on Migration and the 2016 EU-Turkey deal, both of which were discussed in class.

13 During the semester, students have to submit two 600- to 800-word response papers to the readings before the respective class. They can choose two out of 13 sessions on which to write their reflections. The distribution of papers per class is linked to students’ level of engagement with the respective topic.

14 Interestingly, the increase in response-paper submissions took place once the roles were distributed the week before the interaction phase.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Naujoks

Daniel Naujoks teaches international development, public policy, migration and refugee studies at Columbia University and at The New School. He has published widely on the effects of migration and citizenship on social, economic, and political development, migrants’ rights, ethnic identity and the impact and genesis of public, diaspora and citizenship policies, as well as on refugees and displacement, including his book Migration, Citizenship, and Development: Diasporic Membership Policies and Overseas Indians in the United States (Oxford University Press, 2013). His recent research focuses on “migration governance” and public policy design in the light of migration and displacement. In addition, Dr. Naujoks regularly advises United Nations agencies and international organizations—including UNDP, IOM, World Bank, ILO, UN-DESA, OECD, UNESCWA, and UNICEF—on issues of migration, diaspora engagement, human rights, displacement, and development. He currently serves as chair-elect of the International Studies Association’s Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies section.