Subjects of self-reliance: a critical history of refugees and development
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In four empirical chapters spanning three regions of the world in the 20th and 21st centuries, I examine continuities and changes in institutional assistance to foster refugee self-reliance. I employ archival and ethnographic methods to document assistance practices and forms of implementation. I draw upon programme and evaluation reports of the League of Nations and UNHCR as key primary texts due to these institutions’ historical influence and prominence in refugee assistance, as well as private collections by individual assistance actors. I find that efforts to foster refugee self-reliance have largely occurred through development projects targeting both refugees and locals, and even entire regions; in so doing, this assistance has largely treated refugees as workers in need of employment. This ‘refugee self-reliance assistance’, as I term it, has been a main feature of refugee assistance yet has been hitherto neglected in academic scholarship in Refugee Studies as well as International Development. Through a Marxian reading of history I link refugee self-reliance assistance to material interests, outcomes, and changes. Drawing on critical welfare studies, I develop a theoretical framework of ‘international welfare’ and employ the theoretical concepts of instrumentalisation and reserve army of labour to explain how refugee self-reliance has become an instrument that alternately serves and exemplifies changes in social, political, and economic structures. The rhetoric surrounding refugee self-reliance belies shifting interests and their underlying values – whether self-reliance is espoused as an economic imperative, a protection instrument, or a human right, for example. The identification of these linkages has implications for understanding the conditions under which refugee self-reliance is ‘fostered’, for analysing the means through which it is intended to be attained, and its explicit and implicit outcomes. Through this examination, my thesis reveals that refugee self-reliance is not an end in itself but instead a malleable instrument to achieve economic gain, political exploits, and social control.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.069 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.014 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".