Cindy Horst

Peace Research Institute Oslo

This reflective piece explores the ‘I am the evidence’ side of the process of knowing. It offers the story of the Yugoslav wars of secession (1991–1999) and their human consequences from the point of view of someone who refuses to surrender ground to the socio-political conditions of life in which ethno-national and cultural differences have to be...

Education is one of the key tools of nation-building, as it aims to create future citizens. Yet what happens in seemingly ‘futureless’ contexts where refugees cannot access even social membership, let alone legal citizenship? In this introduction to our special issue on education for refugees, we explore the aspirations and conceptions of possible...

In this article we suggest that the call for widening participation as part of the quest for a more localised humanitarianism has overlooked the clash of ethical registers that this would entail. We show that the formal script of the professionalised humanitarian system operates with an individualised ethics, while multiple other actors that exist...

The Dadaab camps of Kenya have ‘warehoused’ refugees from Somalia and elsewhere since 1991, providing their inhabitants with little hope to (re)gain the legal rights, participation, and membership that citizenship provides. Refugee youth in Dadaab hope that education can enable their access to citizenship rights—in particular, physical mobility and...

In this article, I explore the concept of the questioning individual through life history research with two female artists from (post)war contexts. Afghan theater producer Monirah Hashemi’s story illustrates how self-expression in contexts of violence is not only politically but also socially repressed, and illustrates the role that marginalized ou...

Violent conflict and displacement reconfigure societies in abrupt, dramatic, and often contradictory ways. Power relations are often shaken up, with new social hierarchies emerging. Artists play a central role in periods of uncertainty and volatility, both as commentators of events and as inspirators for change. This special section explores the ro...

In this article, we argue that transnational citizens – those international migrants who maintain connections to their country of origin and its diaspora – can be moderate cosmopolitans. We hold the primarily normative idea of cosmopolitanism up against the empirical literature on transnationalism, and show how cosmopolitanism can develop from the...

Why do people protest in contexts known for violent suppression and imprisonment of protesters? There is a lack of psychological research on protest participation in repressive contexts. We address this gap by asking how individuals in Myanmar understand their motives for participating in a 2015 protest march against the enactment of the National E...

The question of what constitutes the “good citizen” has received renewed interest in Western Europe in connection with increasing pressure on the welfare state, concerns over migration-related diversity, and growing anxiety about a crisis of democracy. We draw on data from fifty in-depth interviews and six focus group discussions with residents of...

The radical uncertainty that refugees face because of war, flight and exile often dramatically shapes their participation in society. Violent conflict and human rights abuses are not just disproportionately experienced by, but can also create, political subjects. Such life events can transform the motivations, sense of responsibility and political...

What explains the rise in support for active citizenship programs in the Arab region? How has active citizenship been envisioned and taught with support by foreign states? How do participants understand the usefulness and impact of such programs? In this paper, we examine the contexts in which citizenship programs that embody the political aspirati...

Unrecognised internationally, Somaliland operates as a hybrid political order where a range of state and non-state entities provide security, representation and social services. Local business elites have impacted state formation after war by lobbying against a range of regulations, providing the government with loans and contributions rather than...

What are the conditions under which businesses can move beyond ‘doing no harm’ in the fragile and conflict-affected societies where they work to deliver more tangible positive peace dividends? Designed for businesses, practitioners, scholars and others who are interested and engaged in corporate impact in such areas, this report provides an overvie...

Cawo M. Abdi , Elusive Jannah: the Somali diaspora and a borderless Muslim identity. Minneapolis MN: University of Minnesota Press (hb US$94.50 – 978 0 8166 9738 0; pb US$27 – 978 0 8166 9739 7). 2015, 296 pp. - Volume 88 Issue 1 - Cindy Horst

In this article we explore the role of the Somali diaspora in Norwegian foreign policy towards Somalia through an in-depth case study. This empirical study sheds new light on the foreign policy impact of ethnic lobby groups by demonstrating three important points: 1) diaspora organizational strength can only be understood fully by taking a transnat...

Thomas Faist’s contribution lies in wishing to deconstruct political perceptions around forced migration that reduce the protection that refugees can access. One important task we have as academics is exactly to challenge dominant discourses that function to oppress or control, serving the interests of some at the costs of others, and to be aware o...

Civic participation today is increasingly multi-sited, operating in, between and across specific locations. Growing numbers of people experience multi-sited embeddedness, which I understand both in the sense of belonging to and engaging in multiple communities. In this article, I focus on those who left Somalia as young children or were born to Som...

In conflict and post-conflict settings, the international community operates with the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda supporting gender equality. During and after war, gender roles are often deeply contested as part of larger societal transformations and uncertainties. In Somalia since the 1960s, gender identities and roles have undergone su...

This article aims to contribute to an increased understanding of the importance of migration in humanitarian and 'post-humanitarian' contexts, by exploring the interlinkages between protection and displacement. It argues that the strategies by which conflict-displaced populations protect themselves are largely based on mobility. Yet, humanitarian a...

This chapter illustrates the discrepancies between citizenship as a universal discourse of equal rights and the realities of socio-economic marginalisation for certain groups of citizens. This point is illustrated by exploring the transnational citizenship practices of diaspora Somalis in Kenya, Egypt, Europe and the United States. Horst and Al-Sha...

This chapter analyses the interplay between class and migration patterns of Brazilians to Norway, Portugal and the United Kingdom in order to refine our understanding of feedback mechanisms. At the policy level, socio-economic distinction among migrants is an ever-present, if often disguised, form of differentiation: migration management regimes ar...

This book set out to explore how migration at one time influences the subsequent patterns of movement. As noted in Introduction, this tendency for people to move in particular directions apparently following the pathways laid out by those who travelled before is well established in the migration literature, with many empirical examples of these mig...

This introduction addresses the ways in which flight and exile create particular types of uncertainty, including both radical and protracted, in people's lives. We argue that the concept of uncertainty, in its meaning of imperfect knowledge and the unpredictability of the future, is central to studies that theorize conflict-induced displacement, tr...

Migrant remittances have received unprecedented attention over the past decade and scholars have interpreted remittance flows from a range of vantage points. In this article, we explore the meaning of remittances from three perspectives – (1) as an ingredient of terrorism and crime; (2) as a contribution to development; and (3) as an obstacle to in...

This article analyses how European governments and civil society actors engage diasporas in Europe as agents for the development of their countries of origin. Through a critical examination of diaspora engagement discourse and practice in various European countries, we identify three implicit understandings. First, development is conceived of as th...

This chapter addresses the appropriateness of RDS as a methodology for collecting survey data on migrant populations. What kind of problems do migration researchers encounter when using RDS to study migrant populations? What do researchers need to find out about the people they study, before starting an RDS survey? How do these issues relate to the...

The potential for productive collaboration between European relief and development actors, on the one hand, and refugee diasporas from the Horn of Africa, on the other, has been seriously undermined by misunderstandings about the apolitical role diasporas ought to have. This article, which is based on findings from multi-sited research on diasporas...

This article examines how conflict in the country of origin interacts with other factors in shaping migrants' remittance-sending practices. Our data come from a survey of 10 immigrant groups in Norway and semi-structured interviews with Somali and Pakistani remittance-senders and receivers. First, we conduct an in-depth comparison to explore the di...

This handbook has been co-written by a team of researchers involved in the DIASPEACE project, under the coordination of Cindy Horst (ed.). On the front cover, all other authors are listed in alphabetical order. The following description of the authors is presented in the alphabetical order of the institutions involved. Giulia Sinatti has been Progr...

This article aims to explain the gap between IDP law and practice in Colombia. Colombia's IDP legislation is considered one of the world's most advanced legal systems as it puts in practice the UN Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement. However, the reality of life for IDPs in Colombia does not match their legal rights. Especially the sections...

This article aims to provide insight into the transnational political engagements of Somalis in Norway, and focuses mainly on their financial contributions. Such an aim is inspired by the increased interest in the transnational political engagements of diaspora groups, which has not yet been matched by sufficient empirical research on the topic. Th...

Promotores: prof.dr. J.T. Schrijvers; prof.dr. A.J. Dietz. Includes bibliography, p 267-281. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Amsterdam, 2003.

This article illustrates the methodological potential of elec- tronic media such as the Internet and e-mail for research amongst refugee diasporas. It will first describe research amongst Somalis in Kenyan refugee camps, which demon- strated the importance of transnational networks in the survival of refugees in the camps. The intention of the re-...

The Somali word buufis is commonly used in the Kenyan refugee camps of Dadaab, referring to a person's dream of resettlement. It is an ambiguous phenomenon, bringing hope and remittances into the camps but also removing investments from the region and, when the dream cannot be reached, sometimes having adverse psychological effects. Buufis is trigg...

There is a tendency to consider all refugees as 'vulnerable victims': an attitude reinforced by the stream of images depicting refugees living in abject conditions. This groundbreaking study of Somalis in a Kenyan refugee camp reveals the inadequacy of such assumptions by describing the rich personal and social histories that refugees bring with th...

Could there be a better way to create more hardship,more instability and more potential refugees,while increasing the appeal of extremism, than tocut off the money transfer lifeline to Somalia byshutting down remittance agencies?

In the first part of the paper, I will outline some of my research findings in relation to the movement of information, people and resources within the social networks of Somali refugees. On the basis of the research material collected in Garissa and Nairobi, I will concentrate on the relationship between urban refugees and those in the camps. In t...