Development & diaspora : Development and diaspora

One of the outcomes of the 41st Executive Committee decisions was the development of "Guidelines on the Protection of Refugee Women." These Guidelines are directed to assist the UNHCR and other imple- menting partners to "identify the specific protection issues, problems and risks facing refugee women" (UNHCR 1991:11). [...] The literature on and by immigrant and refugee women and women in the South clearly indicates that a sustained analy- sis of their lived experience must take into consideration issues of power and privilege in the intersection of racism, ethnicity/nationality, cul- ture, gender, class and colonialism.10 When do refugee women name themselves, when and how are they named by others and what are the i [...] As Moghadam describes: "It is in the context of the intensifi- cation of religious, cultural, ethnic and national identity — itself a func- tion of uneven development and social change — that we see the politicization of gender, the family and the position of women" (1994:16). [...] By way of example, Korac (Chapter 5) argues that identity "politics" have been influential in the manipulation and redefinition of national/ ethnic boundaries at the expense of dislocating and endangering the lives of citizens— particularly women and children — of the former Yugoslavia. [...] In Chapter 4, Cultural Collision and Human Rights, Gilad discusses her dilemma as a member of the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada on the one hand, and as a social anthropologist trained in the cultural relativist school of thought to respect the cultures of other peo- ple, on the other.