This January, three CMES master's students participated in a Harvard winter term field study course on the Syrian refugee crisis led by Professor Claude Bruderlein of the Harvard School of Public Health. Supported by a financial grant from CMES, master’s students Stephanie Sobek (’14), Jenny Quigley-Jones (’15), and Elsien van Pinxteren (’15) spent three weeks in Jordan with Professor Bruderlein, thirteen other students, and teaching fellow Anaide Nahikian. Their goal was to examine the national and international response to the Syrian refugee crisis and learn strategic approaches to navigating the political and humanitarian issues surrounding it.
For van Pinxteren, who earned her undergraduate degree in Middle East Studies from Cambridge University, the course represented an opportunity take advantage of the CMES AM program’s flexibility to gain hands-on experience in a humanitarian crisis. Van Pinxteren, who plans to pursue a PhD in political anthropology, took the winter field study course to bridge the gap between her more theoretical academic studies and the real world and to gain perspective into how policy is made and applied at an on-the-ground level.
Quigley-Jones came to CMES interested in critical security studies but her J-term experience in Jordan made her reconsider and she now plans to focus on acquiring relevant academic training for a career in humanitarian work. She cites Professor Bruderlein, whose career combines the academic and the applied, as an inspiring example of a potential career path.
Sobek, who is at CMES on a Pickering Fellowship through the U.S. Department of State, knows exactly what she’ll be doing after leaving CMES, as her fellowship requires her to work for the State Department for three years after graduation. Sobek spent last summer in Washington, DC on the Syria desk, an experience which sparked her interest in the Jterm course in Jordan. The experience provided insight into how she might form partnerships in the NGO world through her work in the foreign service.
Jointly offered by the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard School of Public Health, the “Winter Field Study Course in the Middle East 2014: Assessing the Syrian Refugee Crisis in [Jordan]1” attracted graduate students from a wide range of backgrounds. The diversity of the participants became an important strength as they approached the task of how best to gather relevant information about the refugee situation. After an initial two days of lectures, most days consisted of back-to-back meetings with government officials and NGO representatives, followed by debriefing sessions. The students often had only the tiniest biographies on their interview subjects before meeting them, approximating a real-life field environment in which information is frequently scarce. In these conditions, the combined knowledge of the group, and their familiarity with and trust in each other, was a key asset. “Instead of one person trying to memorize everything, you get a group of people who have researched everything and together form a sort of ‘ball of knowledge,’” van Pinxteren explains. Quigley-Jones was surprised by the level of synergy they attained by the end of the course: “It was amazing to learn a group so well. I’ve never been that organized with a group of people before,” she says
The purpose of the interviews was to develop and practice strategies for gathering information in a crisis situation in order to inform policy decisions. Van Pinxteren appreciated how much insight they gained into the underlying motivations—economic, political, legal—that drive decision-making by an individual or organization in humanitarian situations. “In a typical undergrad course or graduate course, like a history course, you’re not always confronted with that,” she explains. “The experience has also triggered my interest in international law, because it made me understand the bigger picture, where you have so many forces that work with and against each other.”
Though their meetings were all off the record, those insights helped shape the focus of one of the major deliverables of the course, a “Non-Paper on the International Response to the Syrian Refugee Crisis” that the students produced mid-way through their trip. The paper, which is available at https://www.belfercenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/files/Harvard%20..., surveys five policy issues that the group identified as most pertinent: Borders, Camp vs. Urban Settings, Refugee Livelihoods, Host Communities, and Responsibility.
In the second half of the course students broke into smaller groups, each of which developed a policy proposal to address one of these issues. Sobek’s group focused on refugee livelihoods. Although Syrian refugees are not legally permitted to work in Jordan, Sobek was struck by how entrepreneurial the population is. For example, the main street in Zaatari, the largest refugee camp in Jordan, has become a major shopping thoroughfare, and the group was told that Jordanians themselves sometimes shopped inside the camp. Despite the potential economic growth and mitigation of refugee poverty that could result from allowing Syrian refugees to participate legally in the Jordanian economy, Sobek notes the frustrating structural impediments to such a scenario. She cites the example of a Jordanian who opened a location of popular Syrian chain restaurant in Jordan. The business, which employees Syrians illegally, is raided on a regular basis and required to pay substantial fines for each Syrian working there, creating a revenue source that may deter the government from granting the refugees permission to work legally in the country.
Although the students were very close to the crisis, visiting Zaatari camp and meeting with practitioners who work with refugees on a daily basis, the primary purpose of the course was not to directly assist the refugee population, but rather to gain practical skills they can use in similar situations in the future. This distinction was both a relief and a challenge. Quigley-Jones was concerned leading up to the trip that they might arrive and naively attempt to “fix” a situation they knew little about, and she appreciated that the course took a different approach. At the same time, it was difficult to be so close and unable to help. The primary focus of the international aid effort is, of necessity, on providing shelter, food, and basic healthcare to the ever-growing population of refugees. One of the hardest aspects of the experience was learning about secondary human rights issues that arise out of the crisis and remain largely unaddressed to due lack of resources: “early marriages” in which girls as young as thirteen are married to men from neighboring countries in order to get them out of the camps and relieve their struggling families, for example, or the experience of women who pay to be smuggled out of a camp on false pretenses, only to be raped and returned. Quigley-Jones was also wrenched by the realization that the population of refugees who have made it out of Syria are in some sense the lucky ones, as those who remain in the country beyond the reach of aid organizations are even more vulnerable.
Sobek, Quigley-Jones, and van Pinxteren all say they would highly recommend the course to others, particularly CMES students with an interest in humanitarian work. They are grateful to have had the chance to work with Professor Bruderlein, who pushes his students to challenge themselves and emphasizes self-discovery, as well as an unvarnished understanding of what various kinds of humanitarian work entail. “He wants to create students who have this fluidity,” Quigley-Jones explains, “who have the ability to go into one place, not become defined by the organization, then switch and do something else amazing.” All three felt challenged and enriched by the experience on a professional and personal level. “You haven’t lived if you haven’t taken this course!” says van Pinxteren.
—Article by Johanna Bodnyk
1Originally planned for Lebanon, the course was moved to Jordan due to security concerns. ^