Time for Rights/Rights for Time Network Plus

The Time for Rights/Rights for Time Network Plus, is an AHRC-funded programme that is commissioning research on humanitarian protection. This Global Challenges Research programme represents an interdisciplinary intersectoral research that has the main purpose of supporting economic, social, and policy impacts focusing upon humanitarian protection and human rights.

Background

Humanitarian policy and practice are driven by the immediacy of crisis and urgency. But in contexts of protracted conflict and displacement, it is often the hidden damage that takes place over time that sets the terms for future violence, change, and possible peace. One of the major stumbling-blocks to protection is the failure to measure and identify needs and problems not currently obvious to external actors in policy, law, and local contexts. Aid and protection that reacts to only the most 'recent' abuse or threat not only fails to understand the nature of injury, but limits the sustainability of possible solutions. Uncovering layers of time and hidden damage will reveal the specific needs of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised.

What is our main aim?

We will co-create a research network+ that supports and delivers a new understanding of how time conditions war, displacement, and violence, and shifts the possibilities and frame of action for humanitarian protection and human rights. 

What will we do?

Our network will stimulate and support interdisciplinary, case- based research, drawing together in-country partners from low to middle income countries (LMIC), including, Rwanda, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Kenya, and academic experts from literature, political science, psychology, social policy, law, refugee studies, biology, and human rights. Focusing our work upon vulnerable groups, such as refugees, displaced people, women, and children. We will develop the concept of 'Rights for Time' that can bring the hidden legacies of conflict directly into humanitarian protection, and human rights policy and practice. 

What will the Rights for Time Network+ look like after 4 years?

Co-Investigators based at the universities of Birmingham, KCL, SOAS, Taghyeer (Jordan), and the Centre for Lebanese Studies will work with 6 Project Partners to establish the Network. Partners include the Wangu Kanju Foundation, We Love Reading, the Palestine Trauma Centre, the African Initiative for Mankind Progress, and the Kigali Center for Photography. We started with a series of case studies, which will inform the research projects we will commission in LMICs. The projects will generate new evidence bases, make a meaningful difference to communities, and develop new policy and practice to make the forms of injury of protracted violence culturally visible at local, national and international levels. In doing so, partner countries will have the necessary tools and an increased ability to develop effective protection solutions for those most affected by conflict and violence, especially vulnerable groups, such as refugees, people living in informal settlements, women, children, the elderly, and those in 'extreme poverty'.

How will this be done?

The network will:

  1. Fund and support research projects that address protection and the long times of violence for vulnerable communities;
  2. Undertake a range of activities that create change and in policy for vulnerable communities;
  3. Guide partners and academics to reach their potential via research and grant writing workshops;
  4. Use creative ways of engaging with people, particularly those who are hard to reach.

Research Team