25/04/2024
How to rebuild a city with Karam Alkatlabe
Tugba, who became a Wolfson Fellow in February this year, has held visiting positions at Harvard Law, Princeton, Sciences-Po, and the Institute for Advanced Studies, and had tenure at the University of Kent, but her expertise in international relations come as much from in-country experience in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe as it does from her research.
“Berlin, Brussels, Princeton, Paris, New York, Izmir, Sarajevo, Santa Ana, Port-au-Prince, Davao, Medford, Cambridge – both in the US and UK! – have been some of the stations in my life,” she says.
“I have been a foreigner most of my life, in a very good sense. My journeys have allowed me to temporarily join various communities - linguistic, intellectual, and social communities - and learn from the encounters and experiences, concepts and practices. They have also enabled me to become a keen observer of people, cultures and societies - an anthropologist of sorts.”
These global encounters also opened up new perspectives and gave Tugba first-hand experience of many of the themes and issues that she explores in her research – which, amongst other things, focuses on legal borders, and geographies, claims to extra-territoriality and the production of indifference, law’s distinctions between liberal and illiberal and tensions between state and empire.
“Being able to cross borders when my friends and colleagues could not; not being able to return the hospitality that I have received in so many places, whether in El Salvador, Haiti or the Philippines; these things have made me very much aware of our differential rights, privileges and opportunities."
“It is a global world for some, but it is a world of borders for many, and a lot depends on what has been coined by Ayelet Shachar as 'birthright lottery'. Our passports, our nationalities, can open or foreclose whole parts of the globe for us.”
The Refugee Hub: coordinating the University's response
After Harvard Law, Tugba joined the University of Cambridge in 2018 and The Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement, which was created as “a response to the importance of movement as one of the greatest achievements and challenges of the 21st century” and “to lead an innovative and transformative programme that impacts global policy and practice on migration and mobility”.
After her arrival, Tugba set up the Refugee Hub in 2021/22 to enable the University to have a more coordinated impact on the issues.
“Afghanistan, Ukraine, Sudan – conflicts, crises and emergencies generate quick humanitarian reactions. And this is important. But relying on reactive capacities can lead to fragmented and uncoordinated responses,” she says.
“It was surprising to see that the University of Cambridge had so far no central coordination point, or a dedicated research or practice hub centred on refugees. A hub can help us put better structures and coordination mechanisms in place to provide for synergies and efficiencies across the collegiate university, whether in terms of research or practice. We also need to understand better conflicts, crises and emergencies within their unique histories and cultures, to offer appropriate responses.”
The Centre and the Refugee Hub – which now serve as the point of contact on refugees and displaced persons at the University – have also been active in spotlighting the voices of refugees and people affected by conflicts.
“We are in the process of planning, setting up and exploring opportunities for setting up dedicated country/region desks,” says Tugba, “including Afghanistan, Myanmar, and Sudan, as well as in regions, such as the Mediterranean and East Africa, to foreground the voices of those who have experienced conflict, together with expertise at Cambridge, to shape our responses.
“More generally, we need to expand our public and policy outreach as to protect rights and improve lives of people affected by conflict, whether they are at home or abroad.”
The refugee crisis: “we can think differently”
According to UN figures, a record 103 million people were forcibly displaced around the world in mid-2022. How do we deal with this problem? Well, first we need to deal with that word problem, says Tugba.
“It is only when we close borders that refugees become a ‘problem’,” she says. “This problematization seem to be ingrained in the devaluation of the rights of – unwanted – non-citizens on the one hand and the continuation of colonial discourses, entry policies, and exclusions on the other.
“We can think differently, however, and learn from policies for welcoming political dissidents in the past and Ukrainian refugees in the present.”
One way The Refugee Hub is thinking differently is through imaginative collaborations with those affected by wars, conflicts, and crises.
“We will soon be holding a closed workshop with young Afghan leaders on the Future of Afghanistan,” says Tugba. “The objective of this workshop is to bring together young Afghan leaders and researchers, now in diaspora, to establish a diverse and representative platform, which will meet regularly over the following years to discuss and create consensus on key issues, such as women and minority rights, reconciliation, and in particular educational initiatives for Afghan women and refugees.
“As result of these workshops, we hope to develop position papers and shape interventions, with the support of academic experts at the University of Cambridge, to share with global stakeholders.”
Standing with refugees as a Cambridge community
Through her research, the work of the Centre, and the Hub, Tugba is committed, not only to create collaborative methods of engaging with these issues, but also of facilitating collaboration and bringing the topic to wider attention, not only in Cambridge, but internationally.
This week, as part of Refugee Week, Tugba and the Hub team have organised a programme of events to coincide with World Refugee Day on 20 June, an international day designated by the United Nations to honour refugees.
There’ll be a rich programme of research and public events including panel discussions, flash talks, films, a poetry workshop, and more. The event is open to all and aimed at centring the diversity of refugee experiences in finding better ways to uphold refugee rights.
“It’s an opportunity for us to create awareness and solidarity with the situation of refugees,” says Tugba, “and to stand with refugees as a Cambridge community.
“We can also learn from each other, explore new ways to connect, and discover how to make a difference locally and/or globally, whether as volunteers, practitioners and/or researchers.”
The programme kicks off today, 10.00-18.00, in the Alison Richard Building, Cambridge.
The full programme for the week is available on the Centre for the Study of Global Human Movement’s website.
Discover more about Dr Tugba Basaran
Most of Tugba’s research is located somewhere at the intersection of politics, law and society "as a critique of our times". She is particularly interested in states’ ways of governing, concerned with the contradictory and repressive natures of law in liberal democracies in relation to human rights, particularly that of non-citizens.
“I like to analyse the operations of law in micro-settings," she says, "such as refugees at airport waiting zones, rescue and indifference on the high seas, criminalization of humanitarian assistance, extra-territorial obligations of states. I am interested in legal techniques of creating boundaries and borders in the past and present, how legal violence, that is authorized violence, is deployed, and how laws are deployed to interrupt social relations and undermine societal norms. Exploring detailed socio-legal practices is illustrative of fractures and fault lines of our societal norms, of our times. Ultimately, it is a critique of the rule of law and with that liberal political philosophy.”
You can read Tugba's profiles on the Wolfson website and on the Institute of Criminology's website.
