Forced Migration Review: Enhancing Southern Capacity: Rhetoric and Reality

Forced Migration Review provides a forum for the regular exchange of practical experience, information and ideas between researchers, refugees and internally displaced people, and those who work with them.

Virtually every humanitarian agency talks about their commitment to building – or enhancing – Southern capacity. Several readers and advisors encouraged us to produce an issue looking at the complex issues around this much-used but rarely-defined term. To our surprise, our call for papers did not produce the flood of articles we expected. The only previous occasion on which we received so few theme articles was when we published an issue focusing on older displaced people. Perhaps this tells us something about lack of fit between rhetoric and reality? Do international agencies still define ‘capacity building’ in a way which implies that Southern recipients have no capacity to start with? Is the capacity-building industry a North-driven, patronising and uni-directional transfer of knowledge? Is there genuine commitment to helping nationally-based organisations respond to future crises? The articles in this issue address these and other questions.