While the ISIS insurgency creates new flows of refugees, rejected asylum seekers and Kurds with European passports continue to return. Five very different encounters in Iraqi Kurdistan in the last week illustrate the contradictions and complexities of migration. This is our second blog post in a series for World Refugee Day. The humanitarian and the researcher On the plane to Iraq, where I will interview rejected and returned asylum seekers, I meet my former employer. As the director of an NGO f...
Amid a new and violent insurgency in Iraq, our working paper spells out the options for the country and the international community. Based on research in 104 districts in Iraq from 2004-2009, the paper focuses on three counter-insurgency strategies: 1. Increasing troop numbers; 2. Investing in local development programmes; and 3. Cooperating with ethnic / tribal councils. Author Pui-hang Wong, a PhD Fellow at UNU-MERIT, finds that insurgents are highly responsive to counter-insurgency interventi...