OLLI Global Conflict and the Refugee Crisis
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Professor Crawford Wars, conflict,persecution, state failure, and even climate change have forced more people than at any other time since records began, to flee their homes and seek refuge and safety elsewhere. Most of the world’s 60 million displaced people in 2015 were fleeing ethnic and religious conflicts. We will explore the central issues at stake for both refugees and host countries, including protracted refugee states, why refugees must take life-threatening journys once they have been forced from their homes, issues of resettlement, and the impact of the crisis in Europe. We will then focus on some of the root causes of the crisis in global ethnic and sectarian conflict, and the Syrian conflict as a case study, Finally, we will look to the future and the search for workable and robust solutions.
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Week I The Global Refugee Crisis and Course Overview
"The Mismanagement of a Migrant Crisis Cost Rome its empire" http://qz.com/677380/1700-years-ago-the-mismanagement-of-a-migrant-crisis-cost-rome-its-empire/
Melissa Fleming: How to help refugees rebuild their world Ted Talk 2014
Week II: Why Don't Refugees Fly?
Watch: Turkish Coast Guard fires Water Canon at Refugees
Watch the film: "In this World" (2002) docudrama following a refugee/migrant (which one?) from Pakistan to London
Barat Ali Batoor: My desperate journey with a human smuggler Ted Talk 2014
Lynzy Billing, "These are the Most Powerful Photographs of the Syrian Refugee Crisis in 2015" BuzzFeedNews, Dec. 11, 2015
Week III: The Political, Social, and Economic Impact of the Crisis on Europe
Read: "The New Europeans" New York Times Magazine April 10, 2016
Week IV: Conflict and Climate as Causes of the Global Refugee Crisis
- Rukmini Callamachi, ISIS and the Lonely Young American, June 27 2015
- Phillip Zimbardo, “The Stanford Prison Experiment"
- Audry Quinn, "Syria's Climate Conflict" (There are good readings listed at the bottom of the article)
- Civizational conflict: Huntington
- Read the Introduction to The Myth of “Ethnic Conflict: Politics, Economics and Cultural Violence, Beverly Crawford and Ronnie D. Lipschutz, eds., Berkeley: International and Area Studies
http://repositories.cdlib.org/uciaspubs/research/98/
Session 4 Slides (click on the links in blue within the slides for the videos)
Session 4 Paths to Reconciliation (crowd sourced organizations welcome. Email bev@berkeley.edu)
And for those who wish to read more deeply:
- Peter H. Gleick, "Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria" 2013
- Muller J. Z. (2008). "Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism" Foreign Affairs, March/April, 18-35.
- Kurzban and Leary 2001. “Stigmatization and Exclusion” http://instruct.uwo.ca/psychology/371g/Kurzban2001.pd
- Gamson, William A. "Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the Politics of Exclusion." American Sociological Review Vol. 60:No. 1., February 1, 1995.
- Rogers Brubaker: Ethnicity without groups. European Journal of Sociology (2002), 43:
163‐177 (177-185 is a case study of Hungarians and Romanians in Transylvania for those interested) - Rogers Brubaker, "Religious Dimensions of Political Conflict and Violence," 2015
- Fearon J. and Laitin D.(2000). Violence and the Social Construction of Ethnic Identity. International Organization 54, (4), 845-877.
- Rik Coolsaet, "Facing the Fourth foreign Fighters Wave: What Drives Europeans to Syria, and to the Islamic State? Insights from the Belgian Case," March 2016
- War in the Central African Republic
Week V: A Case Study of Syria
- William Polk, "Understanding Syria: from Pre-Civil War to Post-Assad" The Atlantic 2013
- Robert F. Kennedy Jr. "Why the Arabs don't want us in Syria" February 16, 2016
Week VI: The Search for Solutions
- Protracted Displacement: Uncertain Paths to self-reliance in exile
- Fearon, James D., “Separatist Wars, Partition, and World Order,” Security Studies, vol. 13, no. 4 (July 2004), pp. 394-415.
And for those who wish to read more deeply:
- Stephan Rosiny, "Power Sharing in Syria: Lessons from Lebanon's Taif Experience" Middle East Policy Journal, Fall 2013 (Yasmin)
- Kaufmann, Chiam D., “Possible and Impossible Solutions to Ethnic Civil Wars,”
International Security, vol. 20, no. 4 (Spring 1996), pp. 136-175.