The protection and security of vulnerable populations in complex emergencies using the Dadaab refugee camps in the north eastern province of Kenya as a case study

The past two decades has seen a dramatic upheaval in the international world order: the end of the Cold War, the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent 'War on Terror', increased Jihadist activities, the accelerated pace of globalization, climate change and the 2008 global financial crisis have contributed to fear, uncertainty, poverty, conflict, massive displacements of populations of asylum seekers and refugees globally and a proliferation of Protracted Refugee Situations (PRS), defined as situations in which refugees have been in exile 'for 5 years or more after their initial displacement, without immediate prospects for implementation of durable solutions. In the past two decades there has been a huge proliferation of these with more than 7.2 million refugees now trapped in these PRS, with a further 16 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) trapped in camps within their own countries. The Dadaab refugee complex in Kenya, which of as March 2012, holds over 463,000 refugees, is the most significant and extreme example in recent times of a PRS. It was established in 1991 following the collapse of the Somali Government of Dictator Siad Barre, and the disintegration of Somalia into the chaos that still exists today. PRS such as Dadaab raise particular issues about humanitarianism in terms of aid, protection, security, human rights and the actions (or inaction) of the various stakeholders on an international, national and local level. This thesis investigates these issues by the use of a case study methodology on Dadaab as a PRS, framed in the context of humanitarianism and in particular the issues that arise in terms of how the international community, the UN system and individual states provide assistance and protection to vulnerable populations. Although the refugee camps have been in existence (as of 2012) for over 20 years, there has never been such a detailed study of Dadaab (or any other PRS) undertaken to date and would be of interest to academics in the areas of international relations, refugee/migration studies and global Governance as well as practitioners in both humanitarian response and development

Evangelicals, Islamists and the globalisation of apocalyptic discourse

After 9/11, it has become increasingly obvious that strongly held religious convictions about the end of the world cannot be dismissed as the predictable consequences of deprivation, as several generations of social scientists once claimed. Instead, it has become clear that these kinds of ideas, having a life of their own, may establish discourses which may have extraordinary capacity to cross nations, cultures and even religions, encouraging passive withdrawal from the political world as well as inspiring vicious and sometimes violent attempts at its subjugation, underwriting the ‘war on terror’ as well as inspiring some of those intent on the destruction of the United States. This article describes one of Ireland’s most successful intellectual exports – a very specific system of thinking about the end of the world known as ‘dispensational premillennialism.’ And the article will move from county Wicklow in the early nineteenth century, through the troubled decades of American modernity, to arrive, perhaps unexpectedly, in the company of the soldiers of radical jihad. The article will describe the globalisation of a discourse which was developed among the most privileged classes of early nineteenth-century Ireland to explain and justify their attempt to withdraw from the world, and which has more recently been used to explain and justify sometimes violent political interventions by both prominent Western politicians and some of the most marginalised and desperate inhabitants of our broken twenty-first century.