African Asylum: Hard at work

Just in case it was starting to look like all I am doing over here is galavanting around looking at animals, soaking up the scenery and sipping lattes I thought I better post something about my work! Yes, I have been working. And very much loving doing real research. When I began I thought that PhD thesis would be just like a really, really, really long (100,000 word) essay. But it's not quite.

With a few exceptions, most of the essays I have ever written, whether in law, philosophy, history or education, were in response to a question that had (more or less) already been answered, in some cases by literally hundreds of academics. My job as author of the essay was to show that I had read at least a handful of the answers proposed by these academics, had understood what they were and was able to do a reasonable job of summarising them. Doing a PhD is different to this in two main ways: 1. You have to come up with your own question, and make sure no one has answered it already. 2. You have to have read all of the authors (not just a handful) who have ever written about any related question.

As I have written before (see here), my own PhD hopes to answer the question: who is a refugee under the 1969 African Refugee Convention's expanded refugee definition? The purpose of my first visit to South Africa, in January of this year, was to establish point one above. Sitting in Sydney and pondering the literally thousands of books and articles that have been written on the meaning of the international refugee definition (contained in the 1951 Refugee Convention) I thought - surely someone somewhere has already written about the African refugee definition. But in fact, with the exception of two articles, they haven't. Point one, tick.

The lack of literature on Africa's expanded refugee definition is double-edged. On the one hand it means that, compared to many PhD topics, there is a relatively small amount of reading one has to do to to satisfy point 2 above. On the other, it makes it rather a lot more difficult to answer the question at all! This is exacerbated by the fact that information about refugee status determination in Africa - for example, decisions, case law and policy documents - is notoriously difficult to find. Sometimes this is because it simply doesn't exist. In some countries a refugee applicant is just told whether or not their application is accepted, without a written decision at all. Other times it is because the information is not made publicly available. So that's why I am here.

My field research therefore consists of two main activities - interviewing people who work in refugee protection, whether as lawyers, advocates, decision-makers or other government and UNHCR officials, and gathering documentary information that is not available from outside Africa. In South Africa I have had a fair deal of success on both fronts. By the time I leave for Kenya in just over a week I will have interviewed more than a dozen lawyers, academics and officials and have photographed or copied a substantial collection of refugee status decisions by both the Department of Home Affairs and the Refugee Appeal Board. In Kenya I will lack the research advantage I had in South Africa of having been here before. But buoyed by my growing confidence as a real life researcher, I still hope to collect a similarly useful amount of information on Kenyan understandings and interpretations of the expanded refugee definition.

But while the exciting field research continues, so do the more run-of-the-mill aspects of PhD life - reading, writing, emails etc. There is a surprising amount of administration involved in what is supposedly a very solitary venture. Especially as I am involved in organising and attending a number of workshops and conferences in the coming months (two in the UK in December and one in Oxford in February). As a result, I have three papers to write before the end of the year!

As proof of my hard work I am including some photographic evidence below. The lack of functional internet in my Jo'burg apartment means I have to (or get to) work in some interesting places...