Ep 14. Digging deep into urban displacement and forced migration_Zoe Jordan with Rumana Kabir

Hello and welcome to my Mars Mantra Podcast. Today I invited one of my colleagues, Zoe Jordan. Zoe is not from Jordan. Zoe teaches at Oxford Brookes Centre for Development and Emergency Practice, CENDEP. She's my dear colleague. So how are you Zoe today? Very good. Thank you Ramana. Thank you for inviting me. And thank you for making time doing all the lecture. For how many hours have you been talking today? Five hours today. Four hours of me talking. One hour they got a break from me. And now you have to talk again. Thank you for coming. But on a different topic. Yes, you can unwind today. Yeah. So I want to ask you about how it all started because now you're teaching. But before teaching you had another adventurous career. Tell us more about how it all started. How did it happen? I think I have two answers to this and one is probably more true than the other. So way back in my undergraduate days, I was studying at the University of Sussex and I took their program in development studies and I got to do a year abroad. And as part of that, we started learning about the Red Cross and their efforts in family tracing. And that's one thing that really stands out to me that I thought, well, this sounds horrible. Imagine that many tracing, tell us more. Because in a conflict or a disaster situation, if you're separated from your family and don't know how to find them again, they can come. The Red Cross will support you to trace where your family has gone and to reconnect you back together. And I remember when I first learned about this during my undergraduate days, I thought that sounds absolutely awful, you know, to be separated in that way from the people you love and the people you care about, but also the people who support you and give so much meaning to your life and so on. And I think that's when I first started being particularly interested in these questions of migration and particularly forced migration and what that means for the people, the families and societies that are affected by that. So in one way, that's my answer in that I was studying development studies. So I was already interested in this idea, but I'm sure, you know, and probably listeners to the podcast having heard all of your different guests will have an idea that there's lots of different parts to that. And I wasn't yet clear where exactly I wanted to focus my efforts, but I can't even remember what class that must have come up in now, but it does stand out to me as a, ah, this is something, you know, humanitarian side, this is where I want to go in this question of people being forced to move. That's something I'm interested in. But I said I had two answers, and one was probably more true than the other about where it all started. I think that's the one that started down the humanitarian track. But before that, why was I even studying development studies? Right. And I think really, this is my mom. So, you know, she was the one who said to me when I was considering my undergraduate options, and I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I don't come from a family who had been a traditional route to university, but she was very cool. And she said, you should do something that you find interesting. We'll figure out how you make a living from it later on. Do what you're interested in, and if you're interested in it and you're passionate about it, you'll find a way to make that work. So that's how I ended up doing development studies, and I think that's something that she'd put in my mind for a very young age. I know at home I have a letter from, you know, year 8, how old are you, in year 8, 12 or so. And I joined my amnesty group at school where, you know, writing letters to MPs. I don't know what we were writing about. But, you know, even since then, I think she was encouraging me to think about what are we doing in the world, or kind of what's our position, how do we relate to these things, to think about things a little bit, and encouraging me to ask these questions. I think I was quite a questioning child, actually, she's told me, I embarrassed her several times at pharmacies and so on, by pointing everything at her and saying, what's that, what's that? But encouraging that curiosity and encouraging education, which, as I said, it's not, it's not something that was necessarily in my family background, but particularly the women in my family have certainly, later on in their life, gone on to go back to studies. And so really supporting that for me, which was quite important. So yeah, two answers, which I think one of them gives you the bigger picture that allowed me to then discover the niche that I went into. So then what happened after you studied about Red Cross? I was quite, I can't think what the word is, but I was like, right, I want to work in the humanitarian sector, how do we go about that? And I remember looking through all of the job descriptions, and at this time, what I could see was you need to speak a second language, a second UN language, and have a master's degree. So after I graduated, I got the opportunity to go to France for a year, through the British Council scheme. And at that time, they did the teaching exchange. So the idea was, I would go there and help French students with the English language, and my equivalent from France would come to the UK, and I would learn French. You can probably imagine at the age of 21, there was quite a lot of speaking in English and sampling the delicious bakeries of France. But I did also learn French, at least to a certain degree, so it worked quite well. And then I said the other criteria I'd seen in all these job descriptions was to have a master's degree. And I know I said I was already interested in the humanitarian sector at this point, but I still had this interest as well, but how do I go about this? Do I want to go and study human rights, for example? Do I want to study law? You know, I was umming and ahhing about things, and eventually, I decided on a master's degree in public policy and human development, because I thought that might help me learn more about this topic. And they allowed for a specialization in, actually, I took a mixed specialization between risk and vulnerability in migration studies. And it was also outside of the UK, which was cheaper fees at that time, which also weighed into the decision. Yeah, that was a really good master's program, and actually, I wrote my thesis on the idea of urban displacement, which is one of the areas that I still focus on. I tend not to work so much in refugee camps, but more in those cities where we know the majority of displaced people are living. And I think this is one of those, I think my master's students don't believe them when I say this happened, but I was sending in job applications and not necessarily getting anywhere. And someone I'd interviewed during my master's thesis offered me a three-month opportunity. And that, of course, turned into two years, and into other jobs, and then eventually into the idea for the research that I joined Brookes to pursue my PhD. That is interesting. You never know what opportunities are out there until they're trying. Yeah, exactly. And I'd cold quote them as well. You know, you just send an email off into the... You forgot about it. Well, I mean, I interviewed them, I knew who the name was, but I did not expect them to turn around and say, hey, you wrote that thesis, you're clearly interested in this topic. Would you like to do something on it for three months? That's pretty awesome. Yeah. Or did you have to go to another country, or you did more desk research? No, actually, I moved to Goma in the Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Yeah. I know listeners can't see your face. My mom made a similar face. Again, they were very supportive. My mom always said... Can you use your French? Excuse me. I could use my French. And they definitely developed very quickly once you were there and speaking to people. My Swahili was never any good, but my French got better. But I... Tell us about that experience. How was it? I mean, that's the first time, I guess, you enter into the real world. Into that. Yeah, into that kind of work. I think... Well, I look back now, some of it is, I think, what else was I doing, and why on earth did I have that job as well? Someone freshly out of a master's program and a tough place. Well, it's a tough place, but also, not immediately, but over a year or so, I started leading a team there, a team of incredibly experienced people who lived in that city, who had been working in this field for years. And, you know, looking back, I now think, I'm not entirely sure that a fresh master's graduate was the person to be leading that team. There was other people who perhaps could have done that. But also, I mean, I always feel very weird when I say this, because it reflects, you know, the kind of position of the international humanitarian worker, but it's one of my favorite places that I've worked. And part of that is because of the people I was working with, and the organization that I was with. And that first opportunity I was invited, therefore, was to do a needs assessment that, you know, we knew there was a lot of people on the move, but we didn't precisely know what their needs were. And it was one of those nice cases where the donor was willing for us to wait to finish the needs assessment, so that the program actually reflected what people were telling us they wanted, rather than having to come up with something, you know, kind of without any basis, or so on. So, this was quite nice, and they allowed us to be quite inventive, or at least to kind of think slightly outside of the box in the way we approach things, which was nice. And, you know, we spent quite a lot of time working with two communities about how they wanted this project to run, how they wanted to be involved, even some of those things about, you know, how were they understanding vulnerability for who was going to be included in the project. What was the project about? It was about urban displacement. So, it was saying there's camps around the outside of the city of Garma, but also within the city at this time. The numbers weren't exactly clear, and that wasn't the point of our survey, but it was something like a 25% increase in the population of the town, or something like that. Just don't quote me on that. But... And where did these people come from, outside? No, they were coming from within the Democratic Republic of Garma. So, this is at the time, around the time of the Inventoire, which was just before I'd arrived. They'd been very much at the gates of Garma. And what is that word you mentioned? The Inventoire, it was a group of, an armed group that was active, one of several in the region, but that was just the one that was particularly proximate at that time. But I mean, the map of armed groups and actors in that region is much more complex than that. And so, it wasn't only that that had caused the displacement, but there had been a large scale displacement into the city. And as I said, we weren't really clear, at that point, it wasn't being fully acknowledged by the authorities that that was happening, but clearly enough for them to let us, or to work with us on understanding what was happening. And so, yeah, we did an initial idea across most of the districts of the city, to try and understand some of those, I guess you'd call it traditional humanitarian needs. So, what was the food situation that people were living in? What kind of shelter were they living in? How were they earning money? You know, all of those kind of things. And then based on that, chose two particularly acute areas to work with them on various things, some related to questions around basic needs, and, you know, how could they meet those, but also trying to build a little bit forward, thinking about very local level, I'm going to say governance, but not quite governance, but administrative support, you know, helping people access the services that they've acquired, and a little bit about thinking to the future, because, I mean, sadly, it's maybe always in the news, this region, it's someone that's affected by conflict, very often. And if there's not a conflict, there is an active volcano right next to the city, that there's plenty of reasons that it makes sense not to address it just for now, but also for the future, which we talk a lot about in relation to disaster, but we don't always think about it in relation to conflict, displacement. Yeah, good that you mentioned about the volcano. I remember watching a documentary on BBC that all these active volcano, and they were recording things. And also, DRC has got a lot of mine, and because of the mining industry, the conflict is happening, and all the mobile phone, all the materials we use in our mobile phone comes from there. Yeah, I mean, I know, there's a lot more research into this now, I'm not fully completely up on about how much mining and the conflict are interrelated. But it's definitely, you know, it's one of those questions we raise our mobile phones, but also a lot of the technology as we change in response to the climate crisis, is reliant on minerals that are being mined from these regions. And so obviously, we want to do everything we can to address the climate crisis, but we need to think about how that's implicating others as well. I understand that after that experience, you moved on, you didn't carry on working in the humanitarian sector. I said one more year. Okay. Yeah. Okay. More French, more beach as well. So you know, when I left, I was very flippant. And so I know when I left, um, yeah, when I when I took that position, I kind of thought, well, it's Haiti, this was five years or so after the earthquake, and I thought, it's the Caribbean. You know, there'll be some hard work, but there should be quite nice as well. I found Haiti much tougher than I was expecting. Both in time there after the earthquake. Yes. Um, even five years after the earthquake, I think, partly, again, this has to do with the type of the project and some of the things that we wanted to do weren't able to be done. You know, sometimes some of the things that communities perhaps saw that would have made more sense, we weren't authorized to do, which is always frustrating, because you think, well, what's the long term project here if this isn't responding to what people actually want? So the disparity was incredibly, I mean, it's evident in every case, right? But between, you know, what your colleagues are living, what the people you're working with are living, and what you can do at the weekend as a international humanitarian worker was, it was very in your face, and it becomes quite shocking. And I was also, I was quite sick several times when I was there, which, obviously, that that plays a role as well. So nowadays, I look back, and I can see some of the wonderful things about about being in Haiti, right? And, again, a fantastic team. And, you know, there's, it's a fascinating, like a visual culture they have there with I, I don't know. Have you been? I think so. The paintings and the metalwork. Some of that's amazing. And actually, my parents came to Haiti, which I thought was, they came to both Haiti and then traveled to the Dominican Republic, but I think they enjoyed Haiti more. But I mean, they're very interested in the arts and so on. So that was quite cool. You know, I remember I went there after two years after going to do an evaluation of the humanitarian response. And after I came back for months until I finished my report, I just kept on listening to it. Yeah. Yeah. And still trying to recreate a rum punch in the way that you can have it there. Of course, there are all these positive memories which we cherish. Of course, this Mars Mantra podcast is about what we learn and how we move on and not make the same mistakes. Speaking of Haiti, it was more urban displacement as well. Is that why you were interested and you couldn't do much? This was a bit of a mix, actually. So I was based just outside of Port-au-Prince in Grécy, which is close to Léogane, which is where the epicenter of the 2010 earthquake was. And so, I mean, there's always a bit of this debate, right? When you're in a smaller town right next to a big city, somehow you're suddenly seen as less urban. So perhaps there's a bit of conversation there about whether it was urban or not. But I think some of it certainly was. And some of the things we were looking at is, you know, five years after an earthquake, some people have rebuilt in place, right? And some of what we would have liked to have done would have been perhaps to support that, to support the formalization of that, and to think about how they could continue to, I guess we say, develop from there, right? In that vision. But that wasn't something that was possible at that point in time. It wasn't supported. So we had to do other strategies, which were always going to be more, you know, kind of like rental support and so on to move people back into the urban proper. I suppose when I call it back into the towns, back into the cities, which I know that there's been some successful cases of, but also perhaps wasn't quite reflecting if the communities have had the whole choice what they'd like to do. I still see it as urban work that we were doing there, but not... Peri-urban. Peri-urban. Yeah. How did you get urban? That's one thing I was asking my students. Because in Iceland, 150 people live in a city. Yeah. But in another country, that is not going to be seen as urban. It can be completely different. It's one thing that struck me. I mean, I guess we'll come on to this. But when I started at Brookes, my PhD research was in Jordan and mainly in Amman. And, you know, it's a completely different urban kind of space. Exactly. And that's what you did next after the Haiti project. That's what I did next. And it came from an idea that I'd had when I was in Goma. So, you know, when people are displaced, they often live with host families, right? This idea that a family will welcome in someone else. And that's very nice. You know, it's a huge help. It's... Sorry, I can't remember that name now, but I often cite it in my paper. Someone calls it the silent NGO because of the amount of assistance that's provided through these networks. But I had a bit of a question that when people have been displaced and they live in a host family, and perhaps we provide support to that family, right? And in urban areas, that might be a cash-based support. And then what happens when that support stops? Exactly. And if we don't understand the reason, kind of how that relationship works without the humanitarian intervention in it, we don't know what we're doing when we intervene and when we stop intervening. And does that present a risk of exploitation, of people being forced to leave? And of course, questions, particularly kind of gendered questions that might come along with that, who might be more vulnerable and who's left out of these networks of support? So, all of these questions have been going around in my head and we've done some small investigations as part of kind of an advocacy project. But I thought... Would you like to spend some more time? This is in the DRC. So, I'd like to spend some more time on this. Applied for the PhD at Sandap and happily they said yes. So, that was my next step. And what are you doing now, apart from teaching your students? Apart from teaching my students? Yeah. So, right now, I'm working on a couple of projects. Obviously, there's been some in the intervening years. But the ones I have now are... We have a new one, which is funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation, which is supporting us. We have a partnership with Abermint University in southern Ethiopia. And this funding is supporting us to have some of their faculty members join us to complete their PhDs here at Brookes, which are co-supervised with members who already have their PhDs at Abermint. So, that's really nice to have that type of partnership and to be able to continue to build together. And it's part of a slightly wider project that's looking at multiple displacement. So, what happens when people are displaced time and time again? How... Kind of positively and negatively, how might that affect their networks and how they move through that experience? So, that's one thing I'm looking at. And that's really exciting. And I only started a couple of months ago. So... Are the students here? The students are here. One joined us in... Can you bring them to the podcast? Yeah. They're very, very interesting. And they both have a lot of experience. You know, as I said, they were faculty members, right? So, they're... They taught in the... They taught. They taught there. Yes. And I think some of them did their... We have two. So, I think one did their master's degrees outside of Ethiopia as well. So, they're bringing all kinds of experiences into that. They also have more experience in the law field, which, of course, in refugee studies is very relevant, but I'm not a lawyer. So, there's lots to learn from them. So, that one's kind of happening now as we speak. It's kind of ramping up. And then I have one that is heading into the final year of the project, which is quite different. And it's quite different from what I normally do. And this is looking at the idea of EU externalization, right? So, the idea that the EU is moving its borders outside of its own territory. So, you might look at things like the sponsorship of Frontex in Libya, right? They have a... The Coast Guard and so on, who is now responsible for kind of stopping the boats or bringing the boats back or monitoring that in a certain way. That's one extreme example of it. You might also look at... There was an agreement between Greece... The EU over Greece and Turkey, right? That the idea was that migrants would be returned from Greece to Turkey if they'd been found to cross in an irregular way. And in return, a migrant... A refugee would be kind of resettled from within Turkey. But again, this is pushing that management of the border beyond another country. So, those are quite like harsh measures, you might say. You can also see softer things. So, information campaigns, right? Like people saying, do you know the route to Europe is really dangerous? Might be one form of information campaign. Or you could flip it and say, think of all the wonderful opportunities you have here, where you already are. Why don't you stay here? And this is what is kind of part of that process of just... Our borders are no longer at our territory. They are deep into other territories at this point. So, that project here at Brookes, we're just looking at the Jordan part of it. But it works across six countries. So, it's also looking at Lebanon, Libya, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Senegal. So, even that range of countries gives you an idea about how this is working, right? And some of those you might have thought of. If you follow the news about migration in the Mediterranean, you might think, okay, well, Libya, that's on the border. That makes sense, right? But some of them, Senegal to a certain extent, you might see how there's a route. But some of them don't necessarily have that same proximity, but still very much sites where this process of moving management of migration into the EU, into these states is happening. And so, what we're looking at in this project is, okay, we understand to a certain extent what the EU is hoping for here, right? They're hoping for safe and orderly regular migration and to kind of limit those numbers as well. But what are the partner countries hoping to get from this? And in particular, if we look at literature that, who are the partner countries? So, those six I mentioned, Lebanon, Jordan. Keeping the refugees in their countries and sending them to the EU. Refugees or migrants. Why are they signing these agreements? What is it that they see? And how do they shape those agreements themselves, right? So, trying to get outside of this idea that the EU is this all-powerful actor, still recognizing the disparity, the kind of power disparities between some of these countries, but thinking the countries I mentioned in different ways are very astute actors themselves, right? They have their own priorities, their own interests, their own publics that they need to respond to. So, how do they do that? So, it's quite different for me because normally in my research, I would spend most of my time talking to what you might call everyday people, right? And this one's involved speaking a lot more to, you know, more politicians and policy makers, which has had its own challenges because sometimes they wouldn't necessarily want to tell you. But it's also been very interesting. And in terms of your research work with other universities, you don't do research sitting in the UK, you also collaborate with other universities. What gave you the idea of doing that? I don't know if it was an idea as such. I mean, some of it was presented to me by, you know, kind of supervisors and mentors showing me the way, I think, right? That maybe somehow similar to humanitarian and development work, we're not there to do it all on our own. You know, we don't have to be the hero. That's a misrepresentation of what this work is. The only way we can do it is if we're working together and if we're collaborating. And, you know, in some of these, some of these projects were, I was invited in as a very junior scholar, but I was shown how that collaboration works, but also some of the challenges that we still face within the kind of institutional and financial infrastructures. You know, for example, which institution is allowed to be the lead on the project? That very much sometimes depends on where the funding has come from. Can our collaborating institutes in other countries, they might be seen as experts in that country, but they're not allowed to be seen as experts on the topics in other countries, right? So, you know, if I could research wherever I wanted, you know, within relevant degrees, they say, well, it's okay as a UK university to go into any country and research. So let's say if you were working with a university in Bangladesh, they might say, well, you can do research in Bangladesh, but you wouldn't need research in France. You know, there's a bit of a disparity, right, about who can do what. And I learned a lot from my colleagues kind of thinking about some of these issues that when we're trying to build equitable partnerships, what can we do ourselves? But what do we also need to kind of pressure for beyond that? But I hope, I don't know, I hope things are getting better. I think, and there's a lot more discussion about this at least now, right? There's not necessarily everywhere, but I think, I hope, within this field and particularly within refugee studies, we're thinking more about who's doing what and who's leading what and what roles we're asking from different people. And do you have any challenging experiences that you look back and think, oh, I wish I could do it a bit differently? I mean, plenty. It's thinking about which one to pick. I mean, as I said earlier, some of the things around kind of how we work as a team and team leadership and what I thought that needed to look like, I think I would change. Some of my thoughts around that now, it's a constantly evolving way of working, right? And I think you see it with our students as well, this idea that a teacher stands at the front and just tells you everything you need to know. I mean, definitely here at SENDUP, that's not the way we do it, right? We have students who are coming from so many different backgrounds and so many different experiences that what a waste if we only listen to the teacher. And I think I would try to incorporate that in the way that I work. If I was going back into practice to do that in a different way and think about how we... I was going to say collaborate, but that sounds quite weak, right? But kind of recognize that we're each coming with a different skill and that is valuable in and of itself. You don't need to be able to do everything. What you do need to be able to do is build those relationships so you can work together. Yeah. So building relationship is very important. It's very important. In all kinds of ways, right? Because especially as, you know, I'm somewhat an outsider in a lot of the context I work in, even if I go repeatedly and I think if you don't have those relationships and you can't demonstrate that commitment, why would people trust you with that information? Why would people trust that you're going to be able to take for it, you know, in the field? We work in some very personal stories in some cases, right? Some very difficult stories. Why would they share that with you if you don't show that commitment back to them? Right. So how do you unwind yourself and also how do you make sure that I know you have a very strict work regime. You make sure that, you know, you just don't get carried away researching and reading and not stop. How do you do that, your work-life balance? I mean, as you know, in the last year I've strictly removed all work email from my phone, which feels terrifying. But once you've done it, it works very well. But I think the other thing is, you know, things like simple things. I like cooking. That's great. And you can cook wherever you are, right? You might be cooking something slightly different with slightly different ingredients. Sometimes you might be doing it in the dark, depending on whether your generator is working that day or not. But some things like that you can still do, right? And again, we all know that food is a wonderful way to build those relationships. And then I think it's about finding people who are on a similar wavelength but also understand some of what you've been through. So of course you have family and you have friends, but also they won't always have had the same experiences. My mum still doesn't think that I've told her everything that happened to me in Congo. And I keep saying to her, Mum, a lot of it is working on the computer in a fairly boring office. It's something you're familiar with. But there are some things where it's helpful to have. You know, I have a very good friend who was my housemate for two years, who just get it. If you need to share something with them and talk about something, even if it's years later, they understand what that means. And I think that's... You've been through it together. You've been through it together. And I think that's part of it as well, that sometimes you don't necessarily know it in the moment, right? In the moment, you're in work mode. You have your responsibilities, you have your things you need to do. And it might be days, weeks, months. It might be a long way down the line that you think, Yeah, actually, that was quite a lot. I need to talk to someone about that. It's like I say, having someone that understands that or, you know, if necessary, like finding professional support to talk about that, which, again, the sector is getting better in this and being open about that, but I think it's an important part of it. Yes, and you mentioned that, you know, we are not superheroes. We are humans. And I think that's the part the humanitarian sector is gradually realizing because we take so much pressure on us. But, and then it is not as glamorous as it seems from outside. So people need to absorb a lot of information and how they unwind is very important. And that comes to the title of our podcast, My Mars Mantra. So what is your Mars Mantra? I struggled so much with this question. And I don't think I've got a good one. Your inner resilience. Yeah. You said you cook and you cook. Yeah, but I think the closest thing I've got is to think about this as caring with others. And it's not caring about others as such because that's, that can be paternalistic or something, right? It's about finding those relationships that support you and you can support them. And together you care about these issues enough to make a difference. So that's as far as I got to kind of care with others. Because I think that, yeah, you can't do much on your own. You can do a bit. But if you want to move further, you have to. You have to go together. And that will help you to keep going, right? To keep that motivation when some days it might not feel like you can do much that day. Thank you so much, Philly.