Every week, IRIN's team of editors curates a selection of humanitarian reports and opinion you may have missed, from in-depth analysis and colourful features to academic studies and podcasts:
The “nos” of Lebanon’s refugee policy
Lebanon finally got itself a president late last month, after two and a half years of bickering. But few believe it’ll make much of a difference in enabling the government to actually get stuff done. This interview with Khalil Gebara, advisor to Lebanon’s minister of interior and municipalities, highlights what this lack of action means for the country’s million-plus Syrian refugees. Gebara says that in the absence of accord on much of anything, Lebanon’s government has only been able to agree on a set of “nos” for Syrian refugees – no settlement, no permanent work, no UN registration. Municipalities have largely done their own thing, in some places drawing investment and NGO programmes, in others putting refugees under curfew. Some 70 percent of Syrian refugees are now said to be without residence permits, forcing them off the grid. This situation is bad for everyone, but Gebara doesn't see it so much as bad policy as a lack of will – or ability – to create any consistent policy at all.
Representatives from around the world are in Morocco right now for talks on climate change, and some of the most committed nations are also the tiniest and most vulnerable. This report looks at the situation for Small Island Developing States, or SIDS – think Caribbean and Pacific Ocean countries, for example. Pummelled by climate change, in the form of more intense and more frequent storms, some are also facing an existential threat from rising sea levels. Apart from the immediate destruction, the storms have longer-term impacts; having to constantly respond to natural disasters sucks resources away from economic and social development. This joint report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank, and the Global Facility for Disaster Reduction and Recovery zeroes in on how SIDS can build up resilience, and it makes recommendations on how the international community can help.
How to make UN arms embargoes more effective
Diving into the debate over a UN arms embargo on South Sudan, the Small Arms Survey has published a useful report in which arms monitors identify the numerous organisational, operational, and political obstacles to their work. The experts reveal that the monitoring process is undermined by uneven coordination with UN peacekeeping operations; the blocking of access to investigation areas; insufficient investigative timeframes; and political interference and retaliation after the publication of expert reports. This paper points to a need for continued reform efforts regarding the oversight, management, and access prerogatives of UN panels.
From Dadaab to the US House of Representatives
Americans may not have elected their first female president on Tuesday, but the state of Minnesota elected the country’s first Somali-American lawmaker. Ilhan Omar, 34, came to the United States via Kenya, where she spent several years at Dadaab refugee camp after fleeing Somalia’s civil war. She arrived in America at the age of 12, quickly mastered English, and went on to earn a degree in political science and become a community organiser. An advocate for East African women to take up leadership roles, a practising Muslim, and a mother of three, her against-the-odds political career offers some consolation to defenders of the rights of women, refugees, and Muslims who were hoping for a different outcome to the presidential election.
One to listen to:
What will American foreign policy be under President Donald Trump?
It’s a brand new world, a Trump world. And what does Trump’s world look like? There weren’t too many clues during his election campaign, but this podcast tries to parse his words and actions and look ahead to how the world’s most powerful nation will interact with other countries over the next four years. Heather Hurlburt of the New America Foundation predicts, for example, that Trump may well withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change as he has threatened to do; it would cost him little if anything, politically. However, she says, a complicated deal with Iran that requires the country to halt its nuclear weapons programme as the US suspended sanctions may not be as easy to tear up. Despite Trump’s public derision of the deal, destroying it would have “very real consequences for regional relations and for relations with Europe, and so I don’t think he’s gonna do it,” says Hurlburt. Then again, who knows?
One from IRIN:
Screening for Islamic State in Iraq: an inexact science
The humanitarian mess unfolding near Mosul as tens of thousands of newly liberated Iraqis pour out of the city is being widely covered. But for weeks, IRIN contributor Samya Kullab has been busy exploring a neglected but important angle: who gets to decide who is a civilian and who is a so-called Islamic State fighter? How are they going about it? And, crucially, who is monitoring the process to make sure abuses don’t occur? At Debaga camp, near Erbil, Kullab speaks to those who say they’ve nothing to do with IS but have been held for more than six weeks in a special holding area. The UN assistance mission says its observers have not been obstructed, but they’re only allowed in at certain times and have no permanent presence in the camps. And what about the various militias? Should they really have a role in the screening process? Perhaps Juvenal put it best almost 2,000 years ago: Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? (Who will guard the guards themselves?).
Coming up:
Localistas descend on Brussels (16-17 November)
Brussels will welcome a cross-section of the aid community next week for the latest AidEx conference. This time the theme is localisation: the distribution of a bigger proportion of aid money, along with power, respect and influence, to local aid agencies. It's coming up for six months since the World Humanitarian Summit – so how far along are we with the commitments of the so-called Grand Bargain, which promised much in the way of transparency and efficiency, as well as localisation? Follow our own Ben Parker who'll be on a panel or two and tweeting from the conference, one of several hundred expected attendees. Also, shameless as we are, we invite you to vote in a contest featuring an IRIN photo essay by Jodi Hilton, which is up for an award.
(TOP PHOTO: Melting glaciers in the Arctic)
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