The Unknowable Futures of Refugee Children: Globalization at a Crossroads

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Mainstream media would have us believe that the refugee crisis generated by the contemporary conflict is Syria is unprecedented. It is true that the number of refugees globally is at its highest level since World War II and that, in 2014 alone, 2.9 million people were newly displaced across international borders to become refugees (United Nations, 2014). These mass movements have resulted primarily from the conflict in Syria, but also with the onset and re-ignition of conflicts in Iraq, Mali, and South Sudan, among others (UNHCR, 2014a).

The phenomena of forced migration and exile, however, are not new. The 2.9 million newly displaced refugees joined almost 17 million others who have remained refugees for multiple decades, from on-going conflicts in Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Somalia, for example. Historically, 40 million people were displaced across Europe by the end of World War II. Independence movements across Africa saw the creation of more than 850,000 refugees in the single year of 1965. Between March and May of 1971, more than 100,000 people per day entered India from East Pakistan; by the end of 1971, there were 10 million refugees in India (UNHCR, 2000a, pp. 51, 52, 59). One million refugees crossed from Rwanda into what was then Zaire in July 1994, 15,000 each hour on one day (Médecins Sans Frontières, 2002, p. 22).

Annette is one of these refugees. In The Unknowable Futures of Refugee Children, I chronicle the educational experiences of Annette and hundreds of other refugees living in exile around the world. The book argues that the education of refugees illuminates dilemmas at the crossroads of globalization. There are increasing global interactions around education through multilateralism, bilateral cooperation, global social movements, and formal and informal exchanges of information and ideas. And yet, educational institutions may be among the last to be significantly altered by globalization processes (Dale & Robertson, 2012). In the goals they represent through structures and curriculum and how they define who belongs, both physically and vis-à-vis identity, education systems are inherently national. Need they be otherwise? Refugees are canaries in the coalmine of this need. Can they be otherwise? This book examines how education of refugees is realized in the context of nation-states and explores a role for “postnational” (Habermas & Pensky, 2001) approaches.

Annette was a young girl of ten when I met her in a refugee camp in southwest Uganda. She had recently fled war in Democratic of Congo. Surrounded by on-going fighting in the camp, with not enough to eat, her family torn apart, she retained a bright smile. I soon understood why. “Education will lead me to my dreams for the future,” she told me. Every day, she put on her bright pink uniform and went to school.

Like most refugees, Annette hoped, and truly believed, that she would soon return to her home country. That was until the day her father planted bananas around their compound. Bananas are a long to mature crop – you only plant them when you know you will be somewhere for a long time. Her father planted bananas, and Annette tried to plant her future in the form of education. She wanted to be a nurse.

The average duration of exile for refugees is 17 years (Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, 2014) – that’s the equivalent of a child’s whole shot at education, from birth to high school graduation. Annette had access to education in Uganda. Aligning with the 1951 Refugee Convention, Annette had access to the same education as a Ugandan national. She followed the Ugandan curriculum, in English, and at the end of primary school she would sit for the national exam and get her certification. Each day, she stood in front of the Ugandan flag in her school’s compound singing the national anthem: “Oh, Uganda! . . .We lay our future in thy hand.”

Annette was laying her future in the hands of the nation-state, but the nation-state did not reciprocate. She soon began to realize that she could pursue all the education she wanted, but she would never be able to practice as a nurse. She did not have the right to work in Uganda.

“Refugees, like any other children, go to school so they can have a better future,” said Jacques, a refugee teacher in Kampala, Uganda. Education is inherently about preparing for a future. But for refugees, that future is uncertain. Despite the protracted nature of exile and uncertainty of return to a country of origin, refugees are without any possible pathway to citizenship in their site of exile. Without a pathway to citizenship or, at minimum, the right to work, the promise of education is empty.

Education for refugees can be important not only to the life chances of individual refugees but also to the conflict-affected societies from which they fled, the nation-states in which they find exile, and to an interconnected world polity. Educated populations are less likely to experience conflict and they have the skills and knowledge to rebuild after conflict (see, for example, Collier, 2007; Davies, 2004). Yet at present, refugee children have the infamous distinction of being most significantly left behind by the global movement to provide education for all. Half of refugee children are out of school (Dryden-Peterson, 2015); and, together with other conflict-affected children displaced within their own national borders, refugees make up half of the world’s out-of-school children (UNESCO, 2015). Even when they are in school, the daily realities of refugee children like Annette most often place them outside of current membership in society and rights that would enable future economic, political, and social participation.

Current refugee education represents the ambivalence of globalization. On the one hand, it epitomizes global influences on education. It is steered by a multilateral institution and dependent on extraterritorial financing by donors. On the other hand, the parameters of refugee education are entirely circumscribed by nation-states, which retain the legal ability to open and close borders and to restrict the freedom of movement, right to work, and right to education of non-citizens. Cross-border movement and the resulting precarity is precisely why the education of refugees is such a different endeavor than the education of national populations. As Haddad noted, refugees exist in “the gaps between states” (Haddad, 2008, p. 7). If education is inherently national, can it exist productively in these gaps?

For the elite, cosmopolitanism may be possible within these gaps. But for refugees, such grand imaginings and aspirations are rarely within economic reach and they are not within legal reach. Current approaches to refugee education reflect national and global politics, but they are less attentive to the needs of refugee children for an unknowable and uncertain future. This book documents the failure of global structures of international development to make good on the right to education and the future this right might enable. It also explores spaces of possibility within the radical uncertainty that refugees face and examines the intervening structures that influence refugee children’s trajectories through uncertain presents and unknowable future.

The book is at once both global in scope and attentive to the particularities of daily experiences of refugee children and young people in local contexts around the world. It brings together original qualitative data from multiple and diverse field sites, including Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, Kenya, Lebanon, Somalia, South Sudan, Uganda, and Zimbabwe. It includes in-depth interviews with children, teachers, Diaspora members, and key informants (n=666), focus groups with children and parents (n=52), participant observation, and structured lesson observations (n=234).

There has been much journalistic attention to the plight of refugee children, especially in the context of the now five year-old conflict in Syria. This book will be the first in the social sciences to address the topic through rigorous and long-term research in refugee contexts and empirical analysis of data from multiple settings globally. To reach both experts and a broad audience, I write with the narrative arc in mind at all times, bringing the reader into a full story and deep analysis. The book centers on narratives and voices of refugee children, teachers, families, and actors in refugee contexts. My goal is that any reader will leave this book with a big picture understanding of refugee education as well as individuals who will live in their minds, making issues, policies, and practices that can seem a world away come closer, be more real, and take shape in the mind to be inspiring of thought and action.

Author

• Sarah Dryden-Peterson, Harvard University