ReliefWeb

Authors: Dr Dawn Chatty and Dr Nisrine Mansour (RSC)

Working Paper Series No. 78

The displaced from Iraq now constitute one of the largest refugee populations worldwide. Of the officially estimated 4.5 million displaced Iraqis, about 1.7million are refugees (UNHCR 2010c) and 2.8 million (IDMC 2009, 2010) are internally displaced within their own country.

Unlocking this protracted crisis of displacement requires analysis of the perceptions of solutions, durable and not-so-durable, among all stakeholders: Iraqi refugees and exiles, international humanitarian aid agencies, national NGOs and host governments. New approaches to durable solutions mean both revising failed efforts and testing those untried.

This study focuses on the local-level perceptions of practitioners, policy makers and Iraqi refugees in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. It is based on desk research and interviews in the field in April and May 2011 and reveals the need to bridge the political with the operational in unlocking this protracted crisis. Its findings show clearly that the three classical durable solutions are largely unworkable for the majority of Iraqis in exile in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan for the reasons including that voluntary return to Iraq is stalled by security concerns and lack of development; formal local integration in host states is restricted by rigid legal regulations, sluggish economies and political instability; and resettlement to Western states is carefully controlled by a fortress mentality and an ‘elitist’ selection procedure.