Research Consortium on Remittances in Conflict and Crises

Organizational Summaries

Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS)

COMPAS is a national research centre on migration established in 2003, funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and located at the University of Oxford. The mission of COMPAS is to conduct high quality social scientific research in order to develop theory, inform public opinion and evaluate policy on migration. The Centre’s staff comprises senior and junior scholars from a range of disciplines, and COMPAS serves as a national hub for a far-reaching network of individuals and institutions in both academic and practitioner circles.

COMPAS research is organised around five programmes:

• Sending Contexts (headed by Frank Pieke) investigates migratory sending contexts at the micro-, meso- and macro-levels.
  
• Infrastructures of Migration (headed by Bridget Anderson) considers the relationship between migration, smuggling and trafficking, recruitment, workers and employers.
  
• Integration and Social Change (headed by Ellie Vasta) is concerned with the ways newcomers incorporate themselves into societies like Britain that are themselves highly differentiated by class, race and ethnicity, culture, gender, religion and region.
  
• The Migration-Asylum Nexus (headed by Nicholas Van Hear) seeks to develop concepts and analytical tools for understanding the linkages between economic and forced migration.
  
• Migration Management (headed by Sarah Spencer) assesses immigration and integration policies and their impacts.

For further details see www.compas.ox.ac.uk

Information Centre about Asylum and Refugees (ICAR)

ICAR is an academic research organisation based at City University in London. Founded five years ago, ICAR has two main objectives. First, to conduct research on asylum in the UK with an emphasis on legal processes, integration strategies, asylum settlement and host-incomer relations, media reporting of asylum and public attitudes. And second, to collect and disseminate research findings, evidence about the impact of policies and other information on asylum in the UK. Information is generally used by academic researchers and students, government, service providers and the voluntary sector. In addition, ICAR conducts research on specific asylum populations in the UK including Sri Lankan Tamils and Somalis with a particular focus on transnational links and political engagement. Information and analysis can be accessed on www.icar.org.uk

Institute for the Study of International Migration, Georgetown University

Within the framework of remittances and development, ISIM is working on the particular problems associated with war-torn countries, disaster prone regions and fragile states: For the past several years remittances have been on the agenda of development organizations, including several UN agencies and the international financial institutions. The result has been a stream of research that has grown almost as exponentially as the remittances themselves. The research has brought positive actions leading to reducing money transaction costs, encouraging use of financial institutions, linking to micro enterprises and taking some needed measures to increase transparency and accountability. The majority of the research and most of the actions, however, do not fit well with the realities of war-torn countries and fragile states where using financial institutions is not an option and moving funds to the families who need them is highly risky. On the other hand, the fact that remittances are, in fact, reaching families in such places is a story well worth investigating and reporting. ISIM has brought together a number of researchers from several countries who share these interests and concerns.

International Peace Research Institute, Oslo (PRIO)

PRIO is an independent, international research institute based in Oslo, Norway. The institute hosts the Centre for the Study of Civil War, and three broad research programmes. These are focused on security, peacebuilding, and ethics and identities, respectively. Research at the institute is funded on a project basis. Principal funders are the Research Council of Norway, the Norwegian ministries of Foreign Affairs and Defence, and a number of other national and international donors. Apart from tailored reports requested by funders, research results are published in the form of articles in international peer-reviewed journals. Two such journals, Journal of Peace Research and Security Dialogue, are edited at PRIO. For further details see www.prio.no

Overseas Development Institute

The Humanitarian Policy Group at the Overseas Development Institute is one of the world's leading teams of independent researchers and information professionals working on humanitarian policy issues. HPG is dedicated to improving humanitarian policy and practice through a combination of high-quality analysis, dialogue and debate. HPG explores these themes through an integrated programme of research, networking with the Humanitarian Practice Network (HPN), and events. The Group also manages Disasters, a major peer-reviewed journal reporting on all aspects of disaster studies, policy and management.

Within the Group, one cluster of research focuses on enhancing operational response, examining a number of key programmatic concerns. These include the role of remittances as an important source of income for disaster-affected communities, enabling them to survive and to recover their livelihoods; how agricultural markets work in conflict-affected environments, in order to better understand how rural livelihoods might be supported; and the potential of cash-based responses to crises, as alternatives to more traditional commodity-based programmming. For further details see http://www.odi.org.uk/hpg