This document discusses the role that national academies can play in addressing issues related to refugees and migration. It suggests that academies can support academics, artists, lawyers and journalists at risk, lobby internationally for safe passage and family reunification, engage in sustained public outreach to rehabilitate the role of evidence in policymaking, host international schools on rhetoric and argumentation to counter fear-based narratives, promote inclusive practices that further integration, and catalyze evidence to counter xenophobic narratives by highlighting places where fear is being overcome and migration is normal. The document argues that the exclusion and persecution of refugees undermines global cooperation, and that academies can offer counter-stories to change the dominant narratives around migration.

1. Refugees and Migration
How National Academies Can World Together to
tackle Global Issues
Alison Phipps

2. The third said: “The grass is growing up my
chimney” but the hermit answered “And you
have driven away hospitality.”

3. 1) Reception
The ‘crisis’ is reception
and hospitality.
The borders have closed.

4. What Role for National Academies?
1) Reception
• Support for Academics,
artists, lawyers and
investigative journalists at
Risk.
e.g. YAS Refugee Scheme,
CARA
• International lobbying for
safe passage and family
reunion.

5. 2) Evidence
We need to understand
why policy-makers are not
persuaded by the
substantial consensus in
the research evidence.

6. What Role for National Academies?
• Sustained, public work
and engagement to
rehabilitate the idea of
evidence.
• Nuanced understandings
of types of evidence as
more than RCTs.
• Summit on Academic
Consensus in field.

7. 3) Argument
Security Research (with its
roots in arguments based
on fear and threat) not
evidence, has won the
arguments. Fear works –
how can it be reversed?

8. What Role for National Academies?
• Joint International Summer
Schools for Rhetoric and
Argumentation; Media
Summits; for Conflict
Transformation
“We need to change the
narrative.”
“Our story needs to be heard;
no one is listening.”

9. 4) Integration
Integration, by whom?
Into what? For how long?
Integration is a
multidirectional, creative
process.

10. What Role for National Academies?
Do Integration in
Academies;
Embed inclusive working
practices and decision-
making into programming.
Learn from feminism and
postcolonialism.

11. 5) Xenophobia
Fear of difference is
normal. The use of fear of
migration for political
ends is producing the
global challenges.

12. What Role for National Academies?
‘Academies as Catalysts’ in
countering fear narratives with
evidence.
Focus on areas (historically and
geographically) where fear is
being overcome (e.g. N.I);
evidence on steps to genocide;
and the places where
migration is normal.

13. We Refugees: Arendt (1943)
“The concomity of the
European peoples went to
pieces, when, and
because, it allowed its
weakest member to be
excluded and persecuted.”
(Arendt: p119).

14. Necropolitics
Apparently no one wants to
know that contemporary
history has created a new
kind of human being – the
kind that are put in
concentration camps by
their foes and internment
camps by their friends.
(p111)

15. The offer of a Counter-story
People don’t change much through
doctrine or argument or sheer cognitive
appeal.
People don’t change much because of
moral appeal – or at least not these days.
Offer of other models or old stories half
forgotten, echoes from other peoples and
places, tracings. (Brueggemann)
Invitation to a counter-story

16. Alison.Phipps@glasgow.ac.uk
unesco-rila@glasgow.ac.uk
@alison_phipps
@UofGUnescoRILA
#UofGWorldChangers
@UofGlasgow