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Anita H. Fábos is an anthropologist and associate professor at Clark University’s International Development, Community, and Environment department. She has worked and conducted research together with Muslim Arab Sudanese refugees in the Middle East, Europe, and the US. Formerly Director of Forced Migration and Refugee Studies at the American University in Cairo, and Programme Coordinator for MA Refugee Studies at the University of East London, Fábos’s scholarship explores transnational ethnic and religious identity, race, displacement and gender among Muslim refugees at a time of intensifying discourses of ‘security’ and ‘Islamic spiritual geography’. She has done action research with Sudanese women in Egypt on female genital surgeries (also known as FGM) and has written numerous articles and chapters about Sudanese experiences as forced migrants in the Arab world, Europe, and North America. Her latest book (with Riina Isotalo) is Managing Muslim Mobilities: Between Spiritual Geographies and the Global Security Regime (2014), published by Palgrave Macmillan. Fábos is currently researching refugee displacement and humanitarian policy and practice in urban settings in the Middle East.
Protracted Refugee Displacement in the Middle East: Making Home in Limbo?
This essay examines a key policy assumption behind the concept Protracted Refugee Situations—the notion that the refugee predicament, “limbo,” can only be resolved through going Home as defined within a nation-state framework. The authors’ proposal—that refugees can make home without necessarily going home—offers an alternative, refugee-centered perspective of home as a “constellation” of practices, strategies, and ideas.
