How Can Participation Be Reimagined For Refugees?

🌍 How Can Participation Be Reimagined For Refugees?

🗣️ A Roundtable on Democracy, Rights & Belonging

Participation is frequently conceived as a binary — something you either have access to or are shut out from, within a single, unified legal and political framework. Yet for refugees, this picture rarely holds. Their lived reality unfolds across a patchwork of overlapping authorities, where international conventions, national legislation, and local governance intersect — often without alignment.

🔍 The Core Challenge

Legal frameworks in this space don't operate in isolation, nor do they yield clear or consistent results. They blend, come into tension, and are constantly reinterpreted on the ground. Refugees must navigate between these layers, where:

• ✅ Rights may exist in one context but remain severely limited in another
• 🏠 Access to housing, work, and civic life depends on how different systems interact
• ⚖️ Responsibilities are diffuse and no single authority fully governs the conditions of engagement

This means participation for refugees is neither simply granted nor denied — it is unevenly distributed and continuously negotiated, emerging in the gaps between systems where rules are inconsistent and overlapping.

🤝 What This Roundtable Explores

Bringing together practitioners and researchers working directly with refugee communities, this roundtable investigates how participation is both practiced and reimagined under these complex conditions. Spanning perspectives from municipal governance to civil society initiatives, the discussion asks:

How does democratic engagement become possible when it must take shape across fragmented and intersecting regimes of rights?

📚 Part of the Series: On Air: Redesigning Democracy

🎙️ This event is the 3rd and final talk in the three-part series "On Air: Redesigning Democracy" — a programme exploring how democratic structures can be rethought and renewed for our time.