This blog was co-written by Professors Maha Shuayb and Cathrine Brun, Centre for Lebanese Studies. They would like to express their heartfelt gratitude to Cyrine Saab for her invaluable contributions to this study, whose insights and expertise greatly enriched the research. The blog was originally published on the Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) website on 18 December 2024.

In this blog, we summarise insights from the research programme Decolonising Knowledge Systems. Specifically, we focus on the field of education of forced migrants and the rise and quick growth of the field over the past 20 years.

We sought to uncover patterns in knowledge production, examining the role of colonial legacies and how they manifest in the type of knowledge produced — and how the knowledge is produced. To achieve this, we analysed 779 English-language articles and 91 Arabic-language articles focused on refugee education, utilising the SCOPUS and ERIC databases for the English articles and the SHAMAA database for the Arabic articles.

Below, we present the main features of the knowledge produced in the field of forced displacement, namely: the depoliticisation (the conscious act of removing the political dimension), the influence of Western humanitarianism, and unequal voices between the Global North and the Global South.

Read the full text on UKFIET The Education and Development Forum