At 75 years old, Dr. Barbara Harrell-Bond is still looking forward. An advocate, activist and academic, she is often said to be the architect of the discipline of refugee studies. She has authored several revolutionary books and articles on the subject and has helped develop academic programs and aid organizations around the world.

After spending eight years here — helping to develop a refugee studies program at the American University in Cairo (AUC), starting a refugee legal aid organization, and, most recently, helping Iraqis who have fled their country — Harrell-Bond left AUC and Egypt in September. Something of an institution in the world of refugees, her unconventional and unrelenting approach to aiding the displaced and her sharp critique of traditional humanitarianism and international institutions, has made her as unique as she is accomplished.

In 1982, Harrell-Bond, who holds a PhD in anthropology, founded the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford using only her fellowship money and a one-time £1,000-stipend for a typist. It was the world’s first academic center to deal specifically with refugees, a field then so neglected that initially, the program could not spend its library budget.

In 1986, Harrell-Bond published Imposing Aid: Emergency Assistance to Refugees based on her work with Ugandan refugees who had fled into southern Sudan. The book took a hard swing at the way humanitarian organizations were operating; Harrell-Bond was one of the first to look critically at the practices of groups that claim to be doing good in the world.

“Basically, refugees emancipated me,” says Harrell-Bond. “I was a good Oxford-trained anthropologist, an observer. Don’t muck around with the local culture. Just watch and study. [...] Being among the Ugandans in southern Sudan emancipated me from this.”

At age 65, she retired from Oxford and in 1997 she took a position as a visiting professor at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. There she started the Refugee Law Project, which combines scholarship with legal aid, and did research for Rights in Exile: Janus-Faced Humanitarianism, a book she co-authored with Guglielmo Verdirame, which explores the extent to which refugees enjoy their rights in Kenya and Uganda. Harrell-Bond calls the book “a catalogue of the violations.”

Three years later, she was recruited by AUC to develop what is now called the Center for Migration and Refugee Studies (CMRS). “I came here in April [of 2000] and I had to work like hell. There were no books, no staff, no syllabus and just one person in Cairo who knew about refugees,” says Harrell-Bond, who was a distinguished adjunct professor in the department. The program now attracts students and top faculty from around the world.

“I wasn’t going to do legal aid [in Egypt but], people from here, Sudanese, Ethiopians and so on, called their relatives from Kenya, [] and said ‘Barbara’s in Cairo’ — so I was found,” says Harrell-Bond. “Legal aid is such a high priority and there was no place for people to get legal aid, [so] we had to start.”

Promoting legal aid has been one of Harrell-Bond’s major endeavors, particularly in developing countries, which host the vast majority of the world’s refugees. This is also the focus of Harrell-Bond’s latest project, the Southern Refugee Legal Aid Network (SRLAN), which will be based at Oxford. The network will bring together organizations working in the field, allowing them to share information and resources. The network has developed the Nairobi Code, a code of ethics for practitioners of refugee legal aid.

When the project, then called Refugee Legal Aid, began here in 2000, there were no Egyptian lawyers trained in refugee law, so Harrell-Bond pulled foreign volunteers to Cairo to help. The first year, only one law student came, recalls Harrell-Bond. “He walked in the door and said ‘where is the legal aid?’ and we said, ‘you’re the legal aid.’”

Lacking both funding and space, the project set-up in Harrell-Bond’s Garden City apartment, and later squatted in buildings at AUC. Most refugees seeking assistance came from Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia and Eritrea, and needed help getting recognized by the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) and accessing the limited services that were available to those with refugee status. Ten years ago, the UNHCR was hostile to the idea of having lawyers represent asylum seekers. Today, they ask lawyers to train UNHCR staff on how to work with legal representation.

In 2001, the project received funding from the Danish Embassy and the UK-based Amberstone Trust; the following year they had 14 foreign volunteers. Refugee Legal Aid became Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance (AMERA) in 2004, and is now one of the world’s most established refugee legal aid organizations.

“Barbara, in building organizations, tends to create, and thrive [...] in kind of a glorious chaos, that is sort of her natural habitat,” says Michael Kagan, senior international human rights law fellow at AUC and former program director of AMERA. He first met Harrell-Bond in 2001 after corresponding with her by email about starting legal aid here. “When she had made her first visit to Cairo, it was as if [people here] were describing the arrival of a hurricane or a major weather pattern.”

Almost a decade later, on the verge of another retirement, Harrell-Bond is still practicing her gonzo approach to refugee assistance. For the past year-and-a-half, she has been devoted to helping the estimated 150,000 Iraqi refugees in Egypt. Shortly after 7am on a Saturday morning, just days before her departure, Harrell-Bond has two open packs of gold and white Marlboro lights on her desk and is squinting at the screen of a laptop in her Garden City flat. Her apartment has become the home of her latest migration start-up, the Iraqi Information Office (IIO).

Harrell-Bond is fixated on her newest clients and rattles off a series of stories illustrating the plight of the Iraqis, who are forbidden to work here and face endless obstacles to resettlement. “They don’t want to stay here in Egypt, they have no rights here,” says Harrell-Bond.

Iraqis require a different type of assistance; if they choose to register with the UNHCR they are recognized automatically, allowing them temporary residency in Egypt and access to meager medical and financial resources. Most Iraqis here are professionals, many of whom came with enough savings to support themselves and their families. Five years after the U.S. invasion, money is running out and the continued violence has made return an unattractive, if not deadly, option for most Iraqis. Harrell-Bond and IIO’s interns provide Iraqis with information and legal advice on resettlement to a third country — which is not part of AMERA’s mandate.

By 9am, help-seekers and volunteers are filling the apartment’s living room and setting up on the couches and tables. The IIO is still looking for funding and Harrell-Bond has left the nascent project in the hands of Jeffrey Handcuff, a 26-year-old American who will run the center from a cramped caravan in the courtyard of St. Andrew’s Refugee Services.

Amer Al Tamimi is one of thousands of Iraqis who are in Cairo awaiting resettlement. Until 2003, he taught high school in Baghdad. After the invasion he worked with the US military, various media organizations and the US Embassy. He fled Iraq with his family in 2006, after receiving threats because of his involvement with the Americans.

“Most of the Iraqis call her the Mother Theresa of Iraqis,” says Al Tamimi, who met Harrell-Bond in March 2007 and says she’s helped more than 150 Iraqi families in Egypt. “There were some destitute families that didn’t have money to eat. She helped them and gave them money from her own savings. [...] She helped them find a job and even shelter.”

This personal and passionate approach to refugees is what makes Harrell-Bond unique among scholars. “Most of us who work with refugees will tend to see a refugee as part of a larger phenomenon and because we are always strained, it’s hard for us to ever look at a refugee as a person,” says Kagan. “Barbara is anatomically incapable of thinking of refugees or refugee policy in this way [...] that is both what is beautiful and genius about what she does, but it’s also what’s infuriating. It’s also the source of why she sometimes can’t get along with [the] UNHCR.”

Harrell-Bond’s keen criticism hasn’t been reserved solely for large institutions; her approach has also led her to criticize organizations that she founded, like AMERA. “She challenges everybody, she pisses everybody off and she makes everybody a better refugee advocate,” says Kagan. “Even if [...] you end up disagreeing with Barbara, having Barbara around can make you a better advocate because at least you know why you disagree with her.”

Harrell-Bond’s critiques were truly groundbreaking and have changed the way people think about and treat refugees, Kagan says.

“Before Barbara’s work, people [] thought refugee camps are good, refugee camps are a form of charity; we set up the camps so the refugees have a place to go,” he says. “Barbara helped to teach the world that no, this is treating human beings as zoo animals. Refugee camps are [] designed to leave refugees dependent and unable to do things for themselves. And they benefit, the aid agencies who get lots of money to run the camps.”

Kagan also says that while Harrell-Bond is a tireless advocate for refugees, she is also a tough critic. “You can’t understand Barbara until you’ve sat in her living room and heard her berate a refugee for the choices they made, for refugees adopting a position of dependency,” says Kagan, repeating a story Harrell-Bond tells about herself where she scolds a group of refugees who were protesting near a water source, demanding that the UN build them a watering hole.

“Barbara describes herself [...] going up to them and saying ‘you’ve been spending a lot of energy protesting, demanding someone else dig you a watering hole. Let me ask you a question. Before you were a refugee, when you lived back in your village, did any anyone dig your watering holes for you? [...] So why now, as a refugee, can’t you build your own hole?’”

In 2005, her contributions to refugees and migration studies earned her the title of officer of the Order of the British Empire. But despite her effort, and the effort of others, to protect and assist refugees in Egypt, the situation is getting worse. Deportations are replacing Egypt’s earlier ambivalence to asylum seekers, and dozens of African migrants have been shot trying to cross the border into Israel.

“I wish I could tell you that refugees are so much better off than they were eight years ago before Barbara came. I can’t tell you that because they are probably worse off. It’s not Barbara’s fault,” says Kagan. “I can’t say that the lives of refugees have improved in Egypt because of Barbara being here, but I do think that they would be worse if Barbara was not.”  et