ETMU 2026

Trust in durable solutions: centring the voices of individuals and communities navigating refugeehood

Session convener: Camilla Marucco Al-Mimar, research fellow, Migration Institute of Finland, project “Endings: Refuge, Time, and Space” camilla.marucco@migrationinstitute.fi

Session description

Building on critical research regarding durable solutions (e.g. Brun & Fábos 2017; Chimni 2004; Maple & Hovil 2025; Saunders 2018), this workshop investigates the role of trust, broadly understood, in relation with possible solutions to refugeehood and forced displacement. We focus on both the more conventional and the more alternative forms of durable solutions that individuals, communities and institutions may pursue to end forced mobilities and migration. Our goal is to centre the voices of the people who navigate(d) refugeehood in the first person (Bradley et al 2019; Fee 2025), thus integrating existing, predominantly top-down approaches with bottom-up strategies and grassroots knowledge (Maple & Hovil 2025). We welcome researchers’, artists’, activists’, NGO and institutional workers’ inquiries into questions of e.g. trust, mistrust, distrust, belonging, hope, refusal, rule of law, accountability and protection in relation with ending forced mobilities and migration. In addition, we appreciate if workshop participants can reflect on the spatio-temporalities of trust and on the possible interconnections between the local and the global in yearned and enacted durable solutions.

Some of the questions that the workshop addresses include, for example:

  • Which disciplinary, theoretical and methodological approaches have been used and can be used to investigate questions of trust broadly understood in relation with ending forced migration and mobilities?
  • How do individuals and communities striving for durable solutions navigate trust, mistrust, distrust, belonging, hope, refusal, rule of law, accountability and protection?
  • How do institutional policies aimed at ending forced migration and mobilities shape trust, mistrust, distrust, belonging, hope, rule of law, accountability and protection?
  • What do relations of trust, mistrust and distrust look like in durable solutions at the local, national, transnational and global scales?
  • What spatial and temporal dimensions of trust, mistrust and distrust can be observed in durable solutions?
  • What (un)sustainable relations are desired, challenged and (re)created by individuals, grassroot communities and by institutions in their efforts to end forced migration and mobilities?

The primary language for this workshop is English.
Possible contributions in other languages can be considered, if the proponent can provide some form of translation into English, too. This workshop is part of the art and research project “Endings: Refuge, Time, and Space” (implemented at the Migration Institute of Finland, 2023-2026, funded by the Kone Foundation): the project has been investigating, through art and research, the question whether refugeehood may ever end and, if yes, when, where, how and for whom it ends.