Refugee peer helpers: volunteering by and for refugees, an alternative integration model?
The REPAIRS research project aims to study the specificities of volunteering by migrants, in the context of the reception system in France, in light of their migratory journey.
The challenges of volunteering by migrants
In Lebanon, the first country to receive Syrian refugees, volunteer programs by and for refugees can be observed at all levels of the assistance chain: from the UNHCR to NGOs and the State’s social development centers. These programs share a common point – the integration of refugees – but different views. For humanitarian organizations, it is about developing the power of refugees to act in a self-entrepreneurial logic. For Lebanese social assistance institutions, the challenge is to preserve social peace with host communities by involving refugees in projects of common interest. For refugee volunteers, it is a way to circumvent the ban on labor law and to acquire professional training, as part of strategies for accessing humanitarian aid resources and UNHCR resettlement procedures. But what about after obtaining this resettlement in France? Does the volunteering of asylum seekers, towards other migrants, follow the same logic? If these programs are also presented under the banner of integration into the host society, do they carry the same meanings as in the Lebanese case, for the migrants who practice them, and the institutions that supervise them?
Mixing quantitative and qualitative to create a complete panorama
The REPAIRS research project aims to understand the specificity of volunteering when it is carried out by migrants, towards other migrants. The aim is to list its characteristics, in the context of the reception system in France, and its relational configurations within the French Red Cross. The objective will also be to understand what place this practice really occupies in the social and professional integration path of the people who practice it. And how the peer-aidance logic on which it is based comes to imprint on these volunteer commitments, a certain form of social intervention. The methodology used for this study is essentially qualitative, and of a socioanthropological nature. It is based on a double immersive ethnography with migrant and non-migrant volunteers, and the staff of the French Red Cross. Paris and Marseille are the places chosen, as a priority, for this study, due to the centrality that the systems of these territorial delegations represent on the national scale of the CRf. But more specific mini-surveys are carried out in other territorial delegations of the French Red Cross, such as Nantes, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Orléans or La Rochelle. This qualitative approach will be supplemented by a statistical study based on questionnaires distributed on a national scale, which will make it possible to draw up an accounting overview of the number of people concerned by this type of volunteering within the French Red Cross association.
Biography
Leila Drif is a PhD student in anthropology at EHESS, associated with Ifpo Beirut and a fellow of the Convergence Migration Institute. Her thesis, prepared under the co-supervision of Blandine Destremau and Michel Agier, focuses on the experience of hospitality around the reception of Syrian refugees in the margins of Beirut. She proposes a critical anthropology of the international refugee protection system based on an urban ethnography of an irregular neighborhood of Beirut established as a refuge space for Syrians in exile. She is the author of “Être réfugié et « volontaire » : les travailleurs invisibles des dispositifs d’aide internationale”, Critique internationale, vol. 81, no. 4, 2018, pp. 21-42.