Locating the rural in international aid work

Hannah Owens was awarded a BISA Early Career Small Research Grant (ECSRG). The grant allowed Hannah to increase awareness about refugees living in rural areas and their protection mechanisms. Here she discusses the research and her conclusions.

Formal refugee camps continue to be the main site of scholarly research and aid policy, positioning refugee communities living outside of camps - considered ‘urban refugees’ - as a site of risk. Refugee communities are increasingly geographically spread, and more difficult to identify, categorise and secure. Without clear categories, the rural, both as a space and form of living, has been understudied in academic literature and excluded in policy and practice in international aid, resulting in an international aid policy unable to effectively respond to rural refugee needs. Rural refugees are not seasonal migrants who contribute to rural or environmental development solutions or the domestic economy, but ordinary people living outside of existing migration frameworks. To the detriment of rural refugees, humanitarian action has become a system of technocratic governance, capable of their political, social and conceptual erasure. This project investigates the exclusion of the rural in international aid work, examining the policy, political and everyday consequences of overlooking or amalgamating specific geographical spaces.

Project outline

The project is underpinned by three research questions:

1. In what ways is the category of the ‘rural’ present and absent in the development of refugee policy, and how does this shape the political, social and geographical technologies that govern refugee lives?
2. How are rural communities understanding and subverting categories that shape and dismiss their relationship to urban-rural geographies?
3. What might alternative systems of support and aid delivery look like if rural voices, experiences and hosts are central to the making of these frameworks?

The BISA Early Career Small Research Grant provided an opportunity to return to Jordan to conduct six weeks of fieldwork engaging with local communities, grassroots organisations and (inter)national employees working across the humanitarian and development sector. During this time, I organised creative workshops with Syrian refugees and Jordanian host-community members from various rural villages across the Mafraq governorate in northern Jordan. Participants included farmers and agricultural workers, teachers, shop workers, community leadership and those out of work. Each were asked to respond creatively to the prompt: ‘What does the rural mean to you?’ This broad prompt ensured participants could represent different aspects of their everyday life and interpret ‘the rural’ in a variety of ways. Given this openness, several themes emerged, including community, livelihood, aid, security, food, protection, the Syrian conflict and family. Working through a photovoice methodology, the artwork provided new avenues for conversation and facilitated a richer dialogue because the focus had shifted from centring the individual to centring the artwork. Putting these ideas into conversation with the aid sector, I interviewed 13 (inter)national employees working in agencies that either specialised in rural humanitarianism or development, or worked closely in rural regions as part of their urban refugee (or non-camp refugee) policy. Many of those interviewed did not have specific knowledge or expertise of rural locations, suggesting a need for further dialogue between these groups and the adoption of a more nuanced language to incorporate these diverse groups. 

In supporting this pilot scheme, the BISA grant has facilitated phase one of a larger project that will expand to include a comparative study of ‘the rural' across several locations in the Levant. In doing so, the project: 1) provides a much-needed account of rural communities affected by and living under urban refugee policy (URP); 2) contributes a new framework for understanding the everyday needs of rural refugees; 3) uses case studies to illuminate the specific conditions of rurally-based refugees living in communities affected by international aid and differing forms of violence, protection and host country commitments; 4) develops knowledge around alternative systems of aid delivery beyond an international aid framework.

Key findings

The workshop aims were to discuss: a) rural aid delivery; b) protection needs of rural refugees; and c) rural futures in Jordan and beyond. During the first workshop, while we had a short discussion, I found it hard to facilitate dialogue about rural lives and participants were quiet. On reflection, I found it better to provide participants with art packs they could take home and work on in their own time. This meant nobody was rushed to ‘produce’ anything or think on the spot. On meeting several weeks later, the conversation completely changed as the focus was now on the artwork. People could comment on one another’s work, disagree with their perspective or add to their own work; it inspired new lines of thinking between group members. Changing the format of the workshops shows that researchers must be led by their participants and be adaptable to evolving situations. In the second workshop, we were able to discuss the role of participation and ‘art as method’ in research with communities, alongside the key themes. The workshops not only produced rich insights on rural living and the creation of community artwork but, given the socio-political context, we discussed at length the issue of refugee return. These ideas are already being formulated into a journal article about the politics of post-crisis.   

This project makes a conceptual contribution to current approaches in critical humanitarianism and refugee studies by unpacking the refugee experience, starting with refugees’ own conceptualisations of the rural and settlement strategies in displacement. I hope the project will continue to contribute to the ongoing work to decolonise aid, understand the impact of the globally circulating humanitarian system and imagine alternative futures of relevant aid delivery. Refugees self-settled in these rural areas due to existing cross-border, circulatory kin and labour relations, and experience micro-level practices of solidarity and care which are overlooked in aid or agriculture livelihood policy. Crucial to identity-building and belonging in a new country, these often fall outside of (inter)national aid logics and colonial geographies. The decision to settle is part of a larger narrative of rural life histories and experience.

Photo by Hannah Owens