The REF-ARAB Project - Team - Maja Janmyr
Maja Janmyr is Professor of International Migration Law at the Department of Criminology and Sociology of Law, University of Oslo. In the REF-ARAB project, Maja will research the historical circumstances of UNHCR’s establishment in Arab states, asking:
(i) What was the nature of this expansion into Arab Middle Eastern states?
In the early 1960s, UNHCR was still a predominantly European organization and its mandate and extent of authority was temporally and geographically restricted. However, in 1963, UNHCR established a regional office in Beirut, and Lebanon became a member of the UNHCR Executive Committee.
(ii) What were UNHCR’s regional tasks in these early years, and what was the nature of its protection mandate?
Most importantly:
(iii) How was UNHCR’s mandate understood in a non-party state such as Lebanon, and what does this tell us about the functions of UNHCR in the region today?
Maja will also continue her work on refugee rights mobilization and will in this vein ask:
(i) How does the UNHCR-refugee dynamic influence the development of protection policy?
In Jordan and Lebanon, refugees and asylum seekers have self-organized by forming refugee committees, protests and sit-ins.
(ii) How do refugees engage with legal practices, discourses and institutions?
(iii) How are human rights and the law mobilized to increase protection on the ground?
(iv) What are the gender dynamics of this self-organization; and how does it interact with humanitarian concepts of international protection, and categories of vulnerability?