Resilience Development Initiative Urban Refugees Research Group is honored to be granted a research grant by Sasakawa Peace Foundation. Sasakawa Peace Foundation was established on September 1, 1986 in Japan. Sasakawa Peace Foundation is committed to responding to the changes in the environment, contributing to the sound and sustainable development of human society, and building a new governance system for human society by promoting research activities, making policy recommendations, and supporting international cooperation and exchange projects. This research grant has marked the second grant for Resilience Development Initiative Urban Refugees Research Group to sustain the research on urban refugees following the previous research on Creative Placemaking Project.
This research project aims to understand how cities in transit countries are responding to the global trend of forced migration. As an ancillary agenda, this research will probe how social integration can be provoked to help both refugees and host communities coexist during the refugees transit period. The goal is to document, find overlaps and gaps in refugee management at local level, as well as share lessons learned and extract recommendations from several case studies to be potentially useful for other cities in similar transitory contexts. By documenting the process and output, sharing lessons, and extracting recommendations, we hope to engage stakeholders in Indonesia in a discussion on displacement and migration management for better-coordinated response and preparedness and increased urban resilience. We also hope to strengthen the relationships and networking with other stakeholders, primarily researchers but also practitioners, who are working on topics relevant to refugees in-transit. We will also look at how refugee management continues at a time of global crisis (COVID-19).
