Values and Vulnerabilities: The Ethics of Research with Refugees and Asylum Seekers. Edited by Karen Block, Elisha Riggs and Nick Haslam.

Conditions for the world’s refugees and asylum seekers have seen important changes over the past 25 years. In the global North, states have become increasingly reluctant to allow access for asylum seekers and have introduced an alarming range of policies and programmes intended to prevent arrivals, punish those who manage to claim asylum, and contain refugees in their regions of origin. Australia’s policy of mandatory detention and extraterritorialization since the early 2000s is but one example of these policies. Partially as a consequence of these policies, more than 80 per cent of refugees are now found in states in the global South, with the average duration of a refugee situation now approaching 20 years—double what it was in the early 1990s. Many refugee-hosting states in the global South, like Kenya, respond to the prolonged presence of refugees by enforcing encampment policies, themselves seeking to contain refugees on the periphery of the state. An increasing number of refugees seek to escape this reality, and undertake perilous journeys to find protection and solutions elsewhere, either in urban areas, other states in the region, or onwards to the global North.