Communication as aid: giving voice to refugees on the Thai-Burma border

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Historically, humanitarian response has focused on the supply of goods such as food, water and shelter, while information and communication were seen as peripheral concerns. In the past decade, however, leading humanitarian organisations have reenvisioned communication as both a fundamental need of crisis-affected communities and a service that can improve the quality and effectiveness of humanitarian response. This thesis is a contribution to the emerging field of ‘communication as aid’, and focuses on a specific context of humanitarian response – refugee camps. The aims of the thesis are to address the following areas of inquiry: to understand how camp residents and humanitarian organisations perceive the role and importance of communication in a camp environment; to explore the ways that camp residents experience communication and how this varies according to social locations; and to describe perspectives concerning the challenges and barriers to building effective information and communication ecosystems. The research was guided by an ethnographic methodology involving fieldwork in refugee camps on the Thai-Burma border. Accounts were collected from 41 camp residents, 11 humanitarian practitioners, 16 community workers and eight journalists. Additionally, more than 100 hours of participant observation took place during visits to Mae La, Umpiem and Nu Po camps. Phenomenological data analysis guided the emergence of first-order and second-order constructs, which informed the research findings. The main findings of the research are that giving voice to camp residents – through direct engagement with humanitarian practitioners and support for humanitarian information services – can improve their capacity to cope with camp life. The accounts reveal moral, practical and psychosocial imperatives for the implementation of dialogic models of communication. However, as the thesis shows, humanitarian practitioners remain uncertain about how this could be achieved. In response to these findings, the thesis argues that communication is inherently linked to human rights, dignity and wellbeing, and thereby to protection, which is a guiding principle of humanitarian response to situations of forced migration