The French local elections – and a quiet revolution?

19/03/2014 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Chris Game

This Sunday, March 23, the French will be voting in their local/municipal elections, an occasion about as different from our forthcoming local elections on May 22 as it’s possible to be. There’ll be two rounds of voting – run-off ballots next Sunday, if required – party lists with alternating male and female candidates, proportional representation, winners’ bonuses, required voter identity proof, transparent ballot boxes, no postal voting, a nearly 70% turnout, and not one directly elected maire (mayor). Above all, though, it will actually feel local.

France has 36,682 communes with an average population of 1,780, a median population of around 400, and all will be elected, en bloc, for six-year terms. That’s it. Big numbers, but not, I’d suggest, greater complexity. England, the only part of Great Britain with local elections this year, has just 325 lower-tier and unitary councils, with an average population of 163,000 – yet it takes two semi-colons just to summarise in a single sentence who’s entitled to do what on May 22.

Depending on where we live, some of us will be electing, in addition to members of the European Parliament, all councillors in 32 London boroughs, and in two unitaries and two non-metropolitan districts where there have been boundary reviews and resulting changes in council size; plus one-third of the councillors in 36 metropolitan boroughs, in 17 (of 56) unitaries, in 68 (of 201) non-metropolitan districts, and half of those in a further 7 non-metropolitan districts; plus 5 elected mayors. And we wonder why bewildered residents sometimes ring somewhere called the Institute of Local Government Studies wanting to know if they’ve got a local vote this year.

Actually, I lied a little about the straightforwardness of what I should have called the French systems – plural. With so many very small communes, the French split their municipalities into two electoral groups, the dividing line now being a population of 1,000, and roughly 20% of the total, rather than the previous 3,500. Smaller communes will elect their 9- to 15-member councils by a single-district, multi-member plurality (first-past-the-post) system, with voters able to choose either a whole party list or candidates from more than one list. In larger communes the voter’s choice is restricted to complete party lists and seats are allocated through a proportional system, but one distorted by a 50% ‘winner’s bonus’. To ensure a working majority, the list with most votes is awarded half of the seats, with the remainder distributed proportionally among all of the lists including the winning list. In both systems the election can take up to two rounds.

The parallel existence of the two different systems offers a ready-made research design, but electoral reformers arguing that proportional systems stimulate turnout have received at best only modest support from such studies. Local turnout in both systems is consistently between 65 and 70%, confirming the phenomenon regularly found in cross-national surveys: that, to the French more than most – and certainly more than us – local politics really does matter.

In fact, the larger/smaller commune division has had a more decisive impact on attempts to redress women’s under-representation in French politics through the kinds of gender quotas that, as Catherine Durose and colleagues noted recently, are still being resisted by the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties here in Britain.

In 2000, to quite widespread surprise, France became the first country to introduce an electoral gender parity law. Parties were required to present an equal number of female and male candidates on their lists for all elections conducted by systems of proportional representation – i.e. for the European Parliament, most national Senate seats, regions and larger municipalities, but not, significantly, the National Assembly.

Though the law referred to female candidates, its immediate impact on those actually elected was considerable. In 2001 women councillors in municipalities with more than 3,500 residents rose from 26% to 48%, and the number of women Senators in parity seats quadrupled. Since then, electoral law has been tinkered with, some loopholes exploited by the parties have been closed, and, by the 2012 elections, the numbers of women National Assembly members had gradually risen to 27% (5% ahead of the UK), albeit thanks largely to that year’s sweeping Socialist victory. Furthermore, unlike his predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, President François Hollande honoured his pledge to have an equal number of women and men in both the cabinet and government.

His pledge, however, had a kick in the tail: “… which is not to say that they will have the same responsibilities” – and Hollande honoured that part too. All top ministries apart from Justice went to men, and Martine Aubry, ministerial author of the 35-hour working week law (‘la loi Aubry’) and his defeated challenger for the Socialist Party nomination, was passed over as Prime Minister for a personal friend.

If, as suggested, local politics matters more in France than in many European countries, then the most important political figure in most French citizens’ lives is the executive maire/mayor of their commune. Communes may be small, but those who attempt to equate them to our parish and town councils need to remember that they are responsible, individually or jointly, for elementary school buildings and equipment, youth services, recreation and sports facilities, tourism, local urban policy and planning, water sanitation and distribution, waste management, roads and public transport, public and social housing, police, traffic and parking.

One might expect, and many suppose, the French mayoralty to be a directly elected office – but it’s not. Mayors are formally elected by their fellow councillors, although, with the various parties’ candidates for mayor heading their respective candidate lists and having already selected their proposed adjoints (equivalent to committee chairs), many municipal elections give every appearance of being what in reality they are: virtual direct mayoral elections. However, with indirect elections not covered by the parity law, there are, in contrast to the pattern of councillor representation, proportionally more women mayors of smaller communes, proportionally fewer of larger ones, and just one in the 12 largest cities – Martine Aubry in Lille.

That, however, is about to change dramatically – and I’ve no journalistic excuse for taking so long to get to what will undoubtedly be the topic of Monday morning’s headlines. But, so hyper-personalised and sickeningly sexist has the media coverage of the Paris mayoral contest become that I promised myself I’d write at least 800 words exceedingly unsensational stuff about these local elections before I mentioned it – which, if you’ve read this far, you’ll realise I’ve easily managed. And, bad news, the unsensational stuff will continue for at least another paragraph.

Like all French mayors, the mayor of Paris is also indirectly elected – though in this case by 163 of the councillors elected to the councils in the 20 arrondissements (districts) into which Paris is divided. The real battle, therefore, faced by the Conservative challenger – though you’d never guess it – is to win not a city-wide personal popularity contest ‘to become the new face of Paris’, but enough seats in the arrondissements in which the Socialist Party of the President and the current city mayor holds today a majority of the mayoralties.

The strong probability is that that battle will be decided in a run-off ballot next Sunday between the Socialist Party’s Anne Hidalgo, Spanish-born two-term deputy to the retiring mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, and Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, widely (and thankfully) known as NKM, of the Conservative opposition party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UPM), who was a minister in the Sarkozy government, spokesperson during his re-election campaign, and is mayor of the southern Parisian suburb of Longjumeau. Given the unpopularity of President Hollande and his government, the UPM could well regain most or even all of the party’s 2008 municipal losses, but still fall short of the biggest prize of all.

There are several other candidates, representing parties from the Left Front and the Ecologist/Green Party across to the Centrist Alliance and the National Front, but they go almost entirely unmentioned. There is some serious coverage of the principal candidates’ policies, but the enduring images (literally) of this campaign seem more likely to be those of ‘the Heiress vs the Harpist’.

Hidalgo, of course, is the Heiress – ‘la dauphine’ to and protégée of Delanoë, and whose TV latex puppet on France’s version of Spitting Image is usually depicted trailing behind or agreeing with his. The ‘aristocratic, Botticelli-haired’ NKM had the misjudgement to pose for a Paris Match photo spread, pregnant, nymph-like and with an abandoned harp in the middle of a forest, apparently proclaiming that ‘My first baby is politics’.

Despite such coverage, and whatever the outcome, an effectively all-female contest for such a major office – and one traditionally seen as a springboard to the Presidency – does constitute a sizable step in the hitherto fairly quiet revolution in the role of women in French politics, and one that should contribute to greater female representation in both national and government. An even bigger step, though, as observed by former Justice Minister and early mayoral candidate, Rachida Dati, will be when journalists stop talking altogether about candidates’ gender, and concentrate on their competence and experience.

Chris Game is a Visiting Lecturer at INLOGOV interested in the politics of local government; local elections, electoral reform and other electoral behaviour; party politics; political leadership and management; member-officer relations; central-local relations; use of consumer and opinion research in local government; the modernisation agenda and the implementation of executive local government.

Three problems with the impact agenda

19/03/201417/03/2014 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Katherine Tonkiss

In a recent post for the LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog, I argued with Catherine Durose that while the idea of delivering policy relevant research is positive, too often our claims to relevance do not deliver genuine impact. A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to revisit this issue when I spoke on the PSA Postgraduate Network impact panel, and here I reflect on some of the themes that emerged.

‘Impact’ is a response to the perception that academic work suffers from a relevance gap – that research is not relevant beyond academia and that therefore we should work to address this problem by producing research which has an impact on the wider world. This claim of a relevance gap has been critiqued on the grounds that it may not be true – many disciplines including feminism, and many policy-relevant academic departments (such as INLOGOV) have long had impact beyond their academic niche.

Despite this critique, the imperative to create impactful research is not necessarily something to be avoided. Not all research has to create impact, but it is a good thing that some research does, and maybe more research should do. Impactful research drives a democratisation of knowledge, enabling wider society to challenge and press for change.

There are, however, three key problems with the impact agenda.

1. Privatisation of knowledge

Impact is intended to democratise academic knowledge – to allow it to reach wider audiences. However, as Martin Eve has argued, the need for impact has arisen because of the privatisation of higher education which is privatising knowledge and therefore giving rise to the need for impact. Discussion at the PSA impact panel centred on how, for many, their biggest impact came from teaching but that this form of impact is, in their view, being curtailed. This is not an argument against impact, but rather the narrow way in which having an impact is understood.

2. Quantifying impact

Yesterday, Kate Dommett described in her blog post the various ways in which the impact of academic work is being measured. The problem with this is that, by demanding that impact must be quantifiable and suited to specific measures, we may miss quite a lot of the benefit and value of our research. Again, this is not an argument against impact, but rather what counts as impact. This is particularly evident in how we treat activities such as blogging and engaging with the media. As I argued with Catherine Durose, too often we count hits and retweets as measures of impact, rather than the less quantifiable and more long term dialogue that is opened up by engaging with these media. As such, we are performing claims to relevance rather than genuinely being relevant.

3. Doing research faster

Patrick Dunleavy has recently stated that research should be ‘shorter, better, faster, and free’, and that this should have implications for how research projects are constructed. Dunleavy wants information available to policymakers as quickly as possible and critiques social scientists still ‘trundling on’ doing three year studies and not getting results to policymakers in time for them to be relevant.

Rethinking how we construct large research projects is to be welcomed. However, the claim that this should mean producing research more quickly potentially undermines the quality and rigour of our academic work, as well as the depth that we are able to reach. Rather than thinking about how to shorten projects and deliver results more quickly, a more fruitful avenue may be to think about how to include those affected by the research in that research as it happens. This means co-designing research projects with participants and working with them closely throughout. In an article we wrote for Political Insight, Kate Dommett and I have described how we have taken this approach in the research project that we are currently working on.

Despite the three problems I have described, I do think that there is value in research which creates impact – that is, where it involves participants in the research process and aims to stimulate dialogue beyond the ivory tower. We need to avoid thinking about impact solely as fast research and performances of claims to relevance, but genuinely impactful research can have a positive effect.

Katherine Tonkiss is a Research Fellow in INLOGOV. She has research interests in normative and empirical questions surrounding migration, citizenship and identity, particularly in the UK. Her first book, Migration and Identity in a Post-National World, was published in 2013. Follow Katherine on Twitter @ktonkiss.

Embarking on impact: why do it and what to consider

18/03/201417/03/2014 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Katharine Dommett

The impact agenda has emerged as a prominent component of academic life. Over the last few years alongside the pressures of writing, teaching and administration scholars have been encouraged (if not expected) to conduct impact and public engagement activities. The origins of this agenda are manifold but derive in the main from the Research Excellence Framework which assesses academic departments on their ‘impact case studies’ and ‘environment statement’ as well as research. In an era of austerity it is being made clear to academics that high quality research is no longer enough, scholars must also demonstrate the public value of their work and the return produced on public money.

This logic has permeated the ethos not simply of evaluation but also of research grant capture. As a statement from the Research Councils UK website says:

‘The impact of a piece of research is a key determinant of its value to a university department given the difference between a 3* impact rating and a 4* impact rating can mean as much as an £80K difference in its annual income. In addition, the impact element has also been fully recognised by each member of the Research Councils UK (RCUK) so the potential impact of research is now a significant factor in assessing whether a funding bid will be successful’

In this context Universities are directing increased resources towards impact activities and training, particularly targeting ‘enthusiastic’ early career academics likely to embrace and pursue publically engaged research. Yet, in spite of these developments few opportunities have been provided for early career academics to engage in debates about the underlying questions of:

Why they should engage with these activities (beyond the need to fulfil REF requirements and gain research grants) and
How they can do so in the most meaningful way possible.

This assertion does not deny the ever increasing online debate about impact (not least on the LSE impact blog) but rather highlights how within departments and specifically PhD training there are few opportunities to explore these issues.

Following this logic a recent roundtable event held by the PSA post-graduate network at the University of Birmingham sought to encourage young PhD scholars to critically consider the impact agenda. The three speakers, Dr Helen Turton, Dr Katherine Tonkiss and Dr Matthew Wood, each have different research backgrounds and perspectives on the impact agenda and provided thoughtful and personal experiences of their early career engagement with impact. Each speaker presented their own account of what they thought impact was, whether they thought it was beneficial and how it could be delivered in practice.

Through critical analysis of this agenda and the sharing of personal experiences each speaker made the audience think about the virtues and vices of the impact agenda, and offered tips to help scholars make conscious choices about whether, why and how to engage with the impact agenda in the future.

In the wake of this conference our three speakers have written up their thoughts and ideas as blog posts aimed at continuing the debate and stimulating ongoing discussion about why to engage and what to consider when dealing with impact. These will be posted here over the course of the next week.

Katharine Dommett is a Research Fellow at the University of Sheffield. She recently convened and chaired the workshop at the University of Birmingham entitled ‘Why Bother with Impact’. She has also written about her experiences of impact with her colleague Dr Katie Tonkiss for PSA’s Political Insight Magazine. Katharine is currently developing training for academics on how to do impact in her role as Deputy Director of the Sir Bernard Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics at the University of Sheffield. For any questions contact [email protected]

Sustainable construction and local authorities: a failed experiment

17/03/201417/03/2014 / inlogov / Leave a comment

Max Lempriere

Sustainable housing policy is a hot-topic at the minute. The autonomy that local authorities have had from central government since 2007 to require local energy efficiency and sustainable construction that supersede those in national building regulations is set to be revoked. The government has raised concerns that because so few local authorities are embracing this autonomy there is a hotchpotch of standards in different parts of the country, creating an un-even playing field and raising costs for developers. The decision to strip local authorities of this legislative independence represents a serious blow to the question of whether the sustainability of housing can be raised but, importantly, it also forces us to ask why the uneven playing field was created in the first place.

This experiment to involve the local level in the design and adoption of sustainable planning policy has failed not because of a lack of environmental concern amongst local authorities but because central policy makers and academics alike are unaware of the social, economic and political factors that affect the ability of local government to embrace any autonomy they are granted. They failed to see that conditions on the ground simply weren’t right for a significant number of local authorities to face up to developers and require more from them. Political, institutional, economic and sociotechnical barriers prevent a large number of local authorities from raising local standards, even when the will was there.

In my PhD research I attempt to increase our understanding in this regard by focusing on the barriers faced by local authorities. Up until now there hasn’t been much work that looks at what factors encourage or inhibit local government to legislate in pursuit of environmental goals, so my research doesn’t just help us understand this policy area but helps us refine our analytical models of the politics local government in processes of sustainable development.

It is becoming clear that for change to occur policy champions must push sustainable construction proposals through the local legislative process, there must be a culture of innovation and sustainability and a sense of ecological optimism in the council and proponents of change must be organised and resourced well enough to counter any challenges. It looks like these conditions simple weren’t there in the majority of local authorities to the extent required for reform of spatial planning policies.

Of course this provides only a snapshot of a bigger, far more complex picture. Spatial planning in particular and sustainable development in general cuts across many areas of policy, economics, society, technology, history and geography and the answer to why a local authority is more or less willing to legislate for either goal lies in a particular combination of factors drawn from all of these areas.

My work is therefore part of a bigger picture, one that policy makers and academics alike need to start painting. We need to recognize the important role that local government plays in the transition towards a more sustainable society and ask how we can understand the barriers they face in order to encourage more, and better, policy.

That brings me on to the main point I want to make here: If we are to prevent a repeat of this failed experiment then we need to increase our understanding of whether and why local authorities embrace the legislative autonomy granted to them in the context of environmental policy. Doing so will allow us to increase our certainty that future devolutions from the national to local level will be successfully endorsed. If, alternatively, we continue along our current trajectory of ignorance of the politics of local government’s role in legislating for sustainable development then we can expect any future experiments to fail.

Local authorities have an enormously important role to play in the provision of sustainable development and we cannot afford to ignore the mechanisms that permit or prevent them exercising that role.

Max Lempriere is a second year PhD student in the Department of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Birmingham. His research interests include the politics of planning and construction, local government innovation and ecological modernisation.

The Political Colour of an English Parliament

07/03/201407/03/2014 / inlogov / 6 Comments

Chris Game

One of the closing questions put to Professor Eastwood following his recent Distinguished Lecture on The British State: Past, Present and Future concerned the place, if any, of an English Parliament in the kind of future federal or quasi-federal Britain about which the lecture had speculated. Pressure of time permitted only a brief answer, but one reason proffered for what I took to be Professor Eastwood’s instinctive scepticism concerning such an institution was that it would be likely to have “a permanent Conservative majority”.

Even here in the Midlands, which could lay claim to be its most obvious location, a separate English Parliament has hardly captured the popular imagination as being the answer to Britain’s unfinished devolution project. Much preferred, certainly within the present Government, would be ‘English votes for English laws’ – English MPs having the final say on purely English legislation – which has the considerable advantage that it wouldn’t itself require legislation, simply a change in the Standing Orders of the Commons. Some suspect that an English Parliament would undermine the Union almost as seriously as Scottish independence. Still, that’s no reason not to consider what politically an English Parliament might look like, if there were one.

I’ll take the most improbable scenario first. If a devolved English Parliament were to comprise all the 533 English constituency MPs elected at the 2010 General Election, the Conservatives, even with their 39.5% of the English vote, would indeed have an overall majority – with 297 seats to Labour’s 191 (from 28% of the vote) and the Liberal Democrats’ 43 ( from 24%). It’s even further from proportional representation than was the actual Westminster result, thereby avoiding the need for any coalition negotiations. That, however, with great respect to the Vice Chancellor, is about as far as a permanent Conservative majority goes. In 1997, 2001 and 2005 Labour would have had very comfortable overall majorities of 127, 117 and 43 respectively.

It is, though, politically inconceivable that a new, devolved English Parliament would contain anything approaching the present number of English MPs – which would put it amongst the dozen largest national lower chambers in the world. For illustrative purposes, therefore, I will use a 180-seat chamber, loosely modelled on the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly, as proposed in a 2011 policy paper by The Wilberforce Society. Obviously, if that two-thirds cut in membership were the only change posited, then the same results in recent General Elections would produce the same outcomes: overall, if numerically smaller, majorities for the Conservatives in 2010 and for Labour previously. But it wouldn’t be the only change.

Like the Scottish and Welsh devolved bodies, a devolved English Parliament would almost certainly be elected by some system of Proportional Representation (PR) – not least to reduce the prospect of any one party being able to obtain an overall majority on the basis of a minority vote. The Wilberforce Society’s model uses the Scottish and Welsh Additional Member System (AMS), in which each elector has two votes: a constituency vote and a party vote. 120 of the 180 MDEPs (Members of the Devolved English Parliament) would be elected from single-member constituencies, and the remaining 60 additional or ‘top-up’ members from regional party lists, in such a way as to make the Parliament’s final membership as proportionally reflective as possible of the party votes cast.

It needs to be remembered that PR isn’t itself an electoral system, but simply the broad aim of many different systems, some more perfectly arithmetically proportional than others. The German system, used to elect the Bundestag, is almost perfectly proportional, having exactly equal numbers of constituency and top-up members. The Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly systems aren’t, with only 43% and 33% of top-up members respectively, which partly explains how the Scottish National Party, despite having only 44% of the party vote in 2011, achieved 69 of the 129 Parliamentary seats and an overall majority.

It would be possible, therefore, for a single party – say the Conservatives – to win an overall majority even in an English Parliament elected by a supposedly proportional electoral system like AMS. It would also be possible to prevent it: simply by adopting the German, rather than the Scottish, variant.

Migration, citizenship and diversity: questioning the boundaries

06/03/2014 / inlogov / 2 Comments

Katherine Tonkiss and Nando Sigona

In recent decades, a significant transformation in the meanings, practices and experiences of membership in contemporary Western democracies has taken place. These transformations have challenged traditional conceptions of state membership which have typically assumed the existence of a nation-state, with a burgeoning line of scholarship challenging the significance of the nation-state in determining membership and endowing rights. This literature argues that recent trends in globalisation, human rights and multiculturalism have made state borders less important.

In this context, several questions emerge about the interplay between forms of contemporary membership, migration governance, and the politics of belonging:

What is the position of the non-citizen in contemporary immigration and emigration states?
How can the nexus between human mobility, immigration control and citizenship be best conceived?
How can we resolve the tension in policy and practice between coexisting traditions and regimes of rights; and the intersection of ‘race’ and other social cleavages and legal status?

We invited four speakers to participate in a seminar series at the University of Birmingham earlier this year, to explore these issues through a focus on the boundaries between migration, citizenship and diversity. Each speaker brought a distinctly different perspective, yet some common themes emerged.

Our first speaker was Phillip Cole (University of the West of England). Phillip’s talk was on ‘unreason’ in the UK immigration debate – that is, the reluctance of people to abandon myths about immigration despite the prevalence of evidence that shows these myths to be false. He described how much of the immigration debate is imbued with ‘Heimat’ – a nostalgic idea of belonging to the nation based on an imaginary ideal of the past. Immigration is problematized because it is seen to bring change which pulls us further from this imaginary past.

Phillip’s seminar contributed insights into the politics of belonging and how emotional belonging intersects with the processes of immigration to shape migration governance. Here, such emotional belonging is seen to affect the emergence of different regimes of migration governance as a result of its effects on the political debate.

In her talk, Madeleine Reeves (University of Manchester) explored the boundaries between immigrant ‘legality’ and ‘illegality’ in the context of the territory of the former Soviet Union. Her presentation provided a rich account of migration and immigration governance in what is to date an under researched region in migration studies. By focusing on passports and papers, she drew attention to the hyper-documentation of so called ‘undocumented’ migrants. Her contribution to the debate on ‘illegality’ is especially valuable because it questions assumptions around the significance of legal documents and the role of the state. By shifting the focus, Madeleine reveals the legal and historical production of ‘illegality’ and its significance in the everyday lives of migrants in contemporary Russia.

In her talk, Agnieszka Kubal (University of Oxford) examined the criminalization of migration and migrants and how the incorporation of criminal law into the immigration domain serves to demonstrate government’s firm grip over immigration. But how do migrants respond to this increasing conflation between criminal and immigration domains in the wider social context? Drawing on in-depth interviews with 270 return migrants, Agnieszka demonstrated how migrants’ responses to the stigmatizing force of criminalisation do not always mean resistance, but quite often are placed on a continuum between the contestation and the reproduction of the stigma.

Sarah Neal (University of Surrey) was the final speaker of the series. Her talk focused on the everyday experience of superdiverstity; specifically, how do people live and negotiate cultural difference? Sarah drew particular attention to the apparent absence of ‘race’ in contemporary discussions of superdiversity, and demonstrated through her own research how race has a continued presence as a construct that shapes social relations.

Drawing on her research on ‘living multicultures’ in different urban contexts, Sarah’s talk explored some of the complexities surrounding the relationship between migration and other social cleavages such as race, and during the discussion we also focused on class as another often absent dynamic in debates about diversity. Challenges may arise when we talk about ‘cohesion’ because this fails to capture the enduring complexities of superdiverse communities.

The talks in this series, jointly organised by the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) and the School of Government & Society, raised important and timely questions of the changing relationship between migration and citizenship, and between the alien and the citizen. They revealed the power and limitations of the law, the impact of migration myths and the roots of widespread anti-immigration sentiments. They also highlighted the importance of paying attention to national, regional and neighbourhood contexts in order to understand how immigration regimes operate and intersect other spheres of public life at different scales and in different locales.

Nando Sigona is Birmingham Fellow and Lecturer in the Institute for Research into Superdiversity (IRiS) and the School of Social Policy at the University of Birmingham. He is Research Associate at the Refugee Studies Centre and Centre on Migration, Policy and Society, both at the University of Oxford. Nando is co-author of Sans Papiers. The social and economic lives of undocumented migrants, Pluto Press 2014 (forthcoming) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook on Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, Oxford University Press 2014 (forthcoming) and of the special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Power and Culture on ‘Ethnography, diversity and urban space’, 2013. Follow Nando on Twitter @nandosigona and on http://nandosigona.wordpress.com.

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