Abstract

Over the last decade, following a general decline in aid from traditional bilateral and multilateral donors, the international community has dramatically changed the way in which it seeks to fund humanitarian responses to refugee flows, with an increasing reliance on ‘refugee finance’.

Refugee finance is the term used to refer to new financial instrument aimed at attracting private capital, mainly in the form of refugee bonds, technical assistance funds and concessional loans. Reliance on refugee finance marks a paradigmatic shift ‘from funding to financing’, based on the assumption that private capital will successfully complement public sector funds to resource refugee responses and support host countries facing the fiscal stress of hosting refugees. But what are the socio-economic, legal and financial implications of this shift towards refugee finance? More specifically, how does it affect our understanding of ‘protection’?

Speaker

Daria Davitti - Lund University

Bio

Daria Davitti, LL.M., Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in Public International Law at Lund University, Faculty of Law. She specialises in international human rights law and international economic law and is currently the Principal Investigator of the 5-year project ‘Refugee Finance: Histories, Frameworks, Practices’ funded by the European Research Council Starting Grant 2023. Prior to academia, she worked as a UN Human Rights Officer for UNOHCHR and was deployed with the UN Assistance Mission in Afghanistan.