Victoria Mason Dr

Numbering over 5 million people, Palestinians comprise one of the longest-standing refugee populations in modern history. This article argues that the ongoing dispossession of Palestinian refugees is the result of the liminality they have been accorded within international law and global politics. This liminality includes Palestinians being the only refugee cohort not explicitly protected by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) mandate; and their right to return to their homeland – one of the most widely recognised basic rights under refugee law – occluded and reframed as a matter for political negotiation with Israel. The liminality of Palestinian refugees, this article demonstrates, results from the dominant narrative concerning the displacement of Palestinians from their homeland in 1947–8; the role this narrative plays in the hegemonic discourse shaping Israeli-Palestinian relations more widely; and how this narrative and wider discourse are mutually reproducing, resulting in significant intergenerational injustice for Palestinian refugees.

While the gravity of the injustice and inequality experienced by Palestinians is now widely documented, evidenced, and acknowledged, when it comes to action the situation appears ‘impervious’ to international law and norms of global politics, with Israel largely enjoying impunity. This article argues that this state of affairs can be most coherently understood through a critical interdisciplinary emancipatory framework centred on ‘liminality’. Referring to situations and actors ‘betwixt and between’, the framework of liminality offers significant potential for understanding how particular actors and spaces are intentionally marginalised, disempowered, and silenced within global politics and international law. Furthermore, in revealing the root causes of liminality, and the inherent vulnerability of such spaces to contestation and subversion, the framework also opens up potential pathways of transformative emancipation. Applying the lens of liminality to Palestine, it is demonstrated that Palestinians have been deliberately corralled to a liminal space within international law and global politics in order to enable an expansionist Zionist/Israeli settler colonial enterprise. After exploring how Palestinian liminality manifests in global politics and international law, the article turns to a range of efforts to subvert Palestinian liminality and assesses prospects for a teleological emancipation for Palestinians.

H.G. Wells is best known as "the father of science fiction". However, the bulk of his writing is both non-fiction and concerned with social justice. While it is widely held that The Rights of Man (1940) helped shape the drafting of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this article argues that Wells' influence extended well beyond this. Through his contribution to rights-based debates concerning social liberalism, internationalism, liberal internationalism, and international law, between the late 1890s and his death in 1946, Wells made crucial interventions in emerging discourses around rights and was a significant actor in rights-based civil society.

“If only there was a Palestinian Gandhi.” In recent years this has been a common sentiment expressed by leading international figures such as United States President Barak Obama.¹ This is part of a wider liberal argument that failures to establish a sustainable peace between Israel and the Palestinians are primarily a consequence of Palestinian terrorism, and that if the Palestinians would embrace nonviolence, they would gain the support of the international community—including the USA—as well as find a resonant response within Israel itself. In reality, however, Palestinians have a long history of relying on nonviolence to resist oppression...

"If only there was a Palestinian Gandhi" has been a common refrain in recent years. Yet in reality, Palestinians have a long history of relying on nonviolence. However, this nonviolence has received no constructive response from either Israel or the international community. The failure to acknowledge and welcome the Palestinian nonviolent movement serves to prolong the conflict and its negative effects, and lays bare the refusal of the international community to address the rights abuses at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This article narrates Palestinian use of both violence and nonviolence in their struggle to achieve national self-determination and other basic rights, and assesses the potential of nonviolent action to enable a just resolution of their situation.

Australia’s approach to asylum seekers is a contested area of public policy and has been subjected to ongoing critique by human rights bodies, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and refugee advocates both at home and abroad. In 2012, after two decades of mandatory immigration detention, Australia remained far from addressing criticism and presenting alternative policy formulations that adhere to its obligations as a signatory to the Refugee Convention of 1951 and other international instruments. Developing a regional approach is a concept that is gaining traction among academics, NGOs and other actors. Despite some incremental advancement, the Regional Cooperation Framework (RCF) is currently...

Whether precipitated by political or environmental factors, human displacement can be more fully understood by attending to the ways in which a set of bodily, material, imagined and virtual mobilities and immobilities interact to produce population movement. Very little work, however, has addressed the fertile middle ground between mobilities and forced migration. This book sets out the ways in which theories of mobilities can enrich forced migration studies as well as some of the insights into mobilities that forced migration research offers.

The book covers the challenges faced by both forced migrants and receiving authorities. It applies these challenges to regions such as the Middle East, South Asia and East Africa. In particular, the chapter on Iraq to Jordan foced migration tests the sincerity of the concept of Pan-Arabism; the chapters on Bangladesh and Ethiopia deal with the more historically familiar variables of warfare and famine as drivers of forced migration.

This book will be of value to practitioners in the area of human rights and to scholars of racial and ethnic politics, human geography and globalization.

This book was published as a special issue of Mobilities.

Executive summary
Access to legal services is an important aspect of both citizenship and the right to justice. Existing evidence suggests that people with learning disabilities face barriers to accessing legal services. This report presents the findings of a short research study commissioned jointly by the Legal Services Board (LSB), the Legal Services Consumer Panel (LSCP) and Mencap designed to explore the experiences of people with learning disabilities when seeking legal assistance. The study aimed to:
• Identify barriers and positive experiences of people with learning disabilities and their families or carers who have used legal services
• Identify barriers which may have prevented people with learning disabilities and their families or carers who needed but did not use legal services
• Identify good and bad practices in working with people with learning disabilities by services which provide legal advice.

The research entailed running 18 focus groups involving a total of 90 people with learning disabilities, conducting 26 interviews with family carers of people with learning disabilities and 9 interviews with legal services professionals.
Key findings of the research are:
• Very few of the people with learning disabilities who took part in the study had initiated contact with a legal service themselves. Most of those who had done so had used Citizens Advice Bureaux or a solicitor known to their family. People with learning disabilities raised numerous issues which could have led to them seeking legal advice. Some of these were ones affecting all citizens: divorce, wills and probate and alleged criminal behaviour. Others were related to being a citizen with learning disabilities:
parenting issues, bullying and hate crime and discrimination.
• Family carers also used legal services to make arrangements to secure their disabled relative’s future by making wills and trusts. They were more likely than our learning disabled participants to use a legal service on behalf of a relative to challenge decisions
or actions made by a public body, to uphold a relative’s rights or to use the provisions of the Mental Capacity Act.
• Most people with learning disabilities were unclear about the role of legal services and did not understand when recourse to legal advice might be considered. They relied upon people they trust to know what to do when confronted with a problem. However, these supporters were not always equipped to recognise the need for legal assistance or how to access a service.
• Family carers used websites, helplines and forums provided by national learning disabilities charities, carers’ organisations and support groups and networks to get information and advice about legal matters. They valued advice and information given by
other family carers who had experienced similar situations to their own.
• Participants in the study reported difficulties in getting specialist advice about those aspects of the law that are particularly relevant to people with learning disabilities, such as community care, welfare rights and public law.
• Law centres and legal aid firms were valued for offering services in these areas but concerns were expressed about the future coverage in the shadow of changes to legal aid and reduced public funding for law centres and Citizens Advice Bureaux.
• The potential outcomes of using a legal service were not well understood by people with learning disabilities, but were better understood by family carers. The positive effects of getting the right legal assistance were said to be relief, improved quality of life and a sense of empowerment.
• The major barriers to getting a legal service were said to be lack of clear pathways to getting the right support, especially for specialist legal services that may not be available locally. Anxiety about the process, fear of consequences arising from taking legal action and the potential costs involved in doing so, especially following changes to legal aid, were all cited as barriers. The lack of accessible advice and information was also an inhibiting factor for people with learning disabilities.
• The research highlighted good practice as including legal services that make adjustments such as producing information in accessible formats, being respectful to learning disabled
clients, explaining legal terms in plain language and allowing time for meetings. It was suggested that good practice can be promoted through collaboration between legal services and learning disability and carers’ organisations.

Conclusions
The research confirms the findings of previous research that access to legal services for people with learning disabilities remains problematic. The study adds detail and depth to our understanding of the barriers that they face, but also furnishes some of the potential solutions. It highlights the different needs of people with mild learning disabilities and those with more complex disabilities who rely on others to act on their behalf.

Recommendations
The report makes recommendations which centre on:
• Developing accessible information for people with learning disabilities about the purpose of legal services and how they can be used
• Developing information and resources to clarify the routes that family carers and others can take to access specialist legal services on behalf of others
• Strengthening the awareness legal professionals have about learning disabilities through professional training and guidance
• The promotion of collaborative working between legal services and the social care sector.

As the editors of this excellent interdisciplinary volume note, the Middle East with North Africa is both a major producer and host of refugees, hosting approximately 30 per cent of the world’s refugees (p. 276). A deeper understanding of forced migration in the region is required, especially in order for ‘human security, legal protection, coping, resilience, and resistance’ to better inform policy decisions (p. 13). To this end, the volume is divided into four thematic sections on displacement, repatriation, identity in exile and policy issues. Cutting across these sections, however, are a wealth of interlinked case studies highlighting the underlying complexities of these themes: Iraqi, Afghan, and Palestinian refugees, Turkish settlers in Northern Cyprus, and Sahrawi refugees...