Collateral Repair Podcast

Collateral Repair Project (CRP)

The Collateral Repair Podcast aims to share the stories of refugees living in Jordan. Season 2 (2024), "The Waiting Station," examines Jordan's policy landscape. In a country hosting more than 600,000 refugees, few can work and even fewer have prospects of return or resettlement. Through interviews with community members and experts, we'll examine how refugees navigate this 'limbo.' Episodes every two weeks beginning January 10, 2024. Season 1 (2018-2019) featured monthly interviews with members of Jordan's refugee communities. Spotify / Google / Anghami

  1. 03/20/2024

    Season 2, Episode 6: The Border Inside: Notes from Belgrade and El Paso

    Season 2 (2024): Episode 6, “The Border Inside: Notes from Belgrade and El Paso” It might seem strange for a podcast about displacement in the Middle East to suddenly pivot to two other continents. But that’s exactly what we’re doing here! In Belgrade, Serbia, Zach talks to his friend Zaki, who left Afghanistan to seek safety in Europe. And from El Paso, TX, USA, Zach speaks to Jesús de la Torre and Aimée Santillán of the HOPE Border Institute to reflect on what’s happening at the U.S.-Mexico border. The point of this journey is to see how migration policies around the world are interconnected. Too many governments have bought into the same erroneous philosophy: the idea that a security response can answer humanitarian and political questions. How can we rethink migration, and our policy approach to it, so that displaced people can restart their lives again, meaningfully and on their own terms?  Background reading Host Zach Goodwin spent a year as a Fulbright scholar in Belgrade, Serbia, where he put together a collection of refugee oral histories, including a contribution from interviewee Zaki. Read the collection here.  Curious to learn more about the journeys of Afghan refugees? Two books explore this in great detail: The Lightless Sky by Gulwali Passarlay and The Naked Don’t Fear the Water by Matthieu Aikins. This op-ed from The Atlantic dives into the narrative of the ‘migrant crisis.’ Is it really what politicians say it is? Many asylum-seekers arrive in the U.S. and have no one to guide their entry. How can we change that? This white paper from HOPE Border Institute gets the ball rolling.

  2. 02/21/2024

    Season 2, Episode 4: Refugees and Jordan's Economy with Shaddin al-Masri

    Season 2 (2024): Episode 4, “Refugees and Jordan’s Economy with Shaddin al-Masri.” To survive in today’s world, you need money. And to make money, you need a job. But this is not a simple proposition for Jordan’s 700,000 refugees, the majority of whom face exclusion from Jordan’s formal economy. In this episode, we talk to Shaddin al-Masri, a PhD student at Danube University Krems whose research focuses on nationality-based discrimination in humanitarian aid and labor market integration for refugees. We break down Jordan’s kafala sponsorship system, its uneasy relationship with refugees, and certain initiatives that have created limited paths for refugees to work. Given the academic nature of this episode, we hope the reading list below will help you get caught up to speed. Background reading: The basic framework governing foreign labor in Jordan is the kafala system. But what is the kafala system, a private sponsorship structure predominant in the Arab world? Around 2016, visits from academics and donors spurred conversations around economic self-reliance for Syrians in Jordan. These conversations created groundbreaking, if fragile, employment schemes for Syrians.  But this 2016 ‘compact’ only served Syrians and left other refugees in the dark. Shaddin wrote more about it here.  Nowadays, limited entrepreneurship, cash-for-work, and volunteering programs provide refugees with economic lifelines — but for how long?

About

The Collateral Repair Podcast aims to share the stories of refugees living in Jordan. Season 2 (2024), "The Waiting Station," examines Jordan's policy landscape. In a country hosting more than 600,000 refugees, few can work and even fewer have prospects of return or resettlement. Through interviews with community members and experts, we'll examine how refugees navigate this 'limbo.' Episodes every two weeks beginning January 10, 2024. Season 1 (2018-2019) featured monthly interviews with members of Jordan's refugee communities. Spotify / Google / Anghami