Time for Rights/Rights for Time: Responding to the times of violence, conflict, and displacement

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. Multiple, layered and even simultaneous experiences of violence, displacement, and generational trauma persist into future generations, creating new challenges and blocking change. What is our main aim? The Rights for Time/Time for Rights Network Plus (R4T+) 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? We will meet these challenges by developing a network that stimulates and supports interdisciplinary, peer-peer, case-based research, drawing together 6 in-country partners from 5 DAC-list countries, including Rwanda, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan, and Kenya, and academic experts from the arts and humanities, psychology, medical anthropology, refugee studies, gender studies, human rights, transitional justice, humanitarian law, and protection policy. We have chosen to work both within and across specific contexts where the long periods of violence produce enduring and intractable challenges, particularly for vulnerable communities and groups, such as refugees, people who have been displaced, women, and children. We will develop the concept of 'Rights for Time' to build a network+ that can bring the hidden legacies of conflict directly into humanitarian protection, and human rights policy and practice. What will the network+ look like? Co-Investigators based at the universities of Birmingham, KCL, SOAS, Taghyeer (Jordan) and the Lebanese American University will work with 6 Project Partners to establish the Network+. Partners include the Wangu Kanju Foundation, We Love Reading, BLAST, the African Initiative for Mankind Progress and the Kigali Center for Photography. We will begin by piloting a series of initial case studies. These will inform the research projects we will commission in our countries of focus as well as in other DAC-list countries as the network grows. The projects will generate new evidence bases, impact communities at the ground level, 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: - Fund and support research projects that address protection and the long times of violence for vulnerable communities; - Undertake a range of activities that create change on the ground and in policy for vulnerable communities, such as through workshops, a Research Summit, a dedicated website and social media; - Build the capacity of partners and academics to fully reach their potential via training; - Use creative ways of engaging with people, particularly those who usually miss out.