Refuge, Overlooked

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) continues to face overlapping political, economic, humanitarian, and security crises that have produced some of the world’s most persistent patterns of forced displacement. By mid-2025, more than 17.8 million people were forcibly displaced or stateless across UNHCR’s MENA operational region, with millions more affected across the wider geography encompassed by this series, including Türkiye and Iran.

Yet displacement across the region is neither equally visible nor equally documented. Over the past decade, international attention, humanitarian funding, media coverage, research, and opportunities for authorship have often clustered around crises understood as particularly urgent or geopolitically significant. Other refugee and displaced communities have consequently received far less sustained attention, despite facing protracted insecurity, shrinking protection spaces, deteriorating livelihoods, and increasingly limited access to rights and services. The conflicts, political conditions, and structural inequalities that shape these forms of displacement can therefore remain at the margins of international debate even as their consequences endure for years or decades.

Launched on World Refugee Day in 2023, Refuge, Overlooked. is a guest lecture series jointly hosted by the Institute for Migration Studies (IMS) at the Lebanese American University and the Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS) at York University. The series brings greater visibility to underreported and underexamined refugee and displacement contexts across the MENA region by creating a platform for scholars, practitioners, advocates, and people with lived experience to examine communities and crises that too often remain outside dominant refugee narratives.

Through online guest lectures co-hosted by IMS and CRS, Refuge, Overlooked. seeks not only to draw attention to overlooked displacement situations, but also to question how some refugee crises become internationally visible while others remain peripheral to research, policy, humanitarian funding, and public debate.

For the purposes of this series, the regional focus also includes Türkiye and Iran.

Please direct your pitches for a lecture and queries to Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab and Prof. Nergis Canefe.

Past lectures under this series:

• Lecture 1. “Lives Outside the Return Story: Syrian Refugees and the Contested Temporality of Homecoming”