Who speaks for forced migration? Epistemic justice and the politics of knowledge production

Israa Elkhalil

Photo by cottonbro studio from Pexels

When discussions of forced migration enter public debate, they often begin with numbers: How many people have crossed borders? How many remain displaced within their own countries? How many require shelter, food, healthcare, or protection? These figures are indispensable. They help governments, humanitarian organisations, and international agencies respond to crises of immense scale. Yet statistics tell only part of the story.

Every account of displacement is shaped by choices about what deserves attention, whose experiences become evidence, and which perspectives are treated as authoritative. Those choices influence far more than public understanding. They shape humanitarian priorities, policy responses, research agendas, funding decisions, and, ultimately, the futures imagined for displaced communities.

Knowledge, then, is never simply descriptive. It carries power. It determines which realities become visible and which remain at the margins.

This is where epistemic justice enters the conversation. Broadly understood, epistemic justice concerns fairness in the production, recognition, and use of knowledge. It asks whose experiences are considered credible, whose expertise informs decision-making, and whose perspectives shape collective understanding.

Within discussions of forced migration, these questions acquire particular significance. People living through displacement are frequently invited to recount their experiences. Their testimonies appear in humanitarian assessments, academic research, policy consultations, and media reports. Far less common are opportunities to influence the frameworks through which those experiences are interpreted or the assumptions that underpin research itself.

Quantitative evidence reveals patterns across populations. Institutional analysis identifies structural challenges. Lived experience captures the everyday negotiations, relationships, losses, and forms of resilience that rarely fit neatly within predefined categories. A fuller understanding of forced migration emerges when these perspectives inform one another rather than compete for legitimacy.

Consider a woman describing her experience of displacement through fractured family relationships, the erosion of community ties, or the loss of language, identity, and belonging. Those realities may define the experience as she understands it. Once translated into a humanitarian assessment, however, they often appear through operational categories such as protection risks, shelter conditions, or food insecurity. These categories are indispensable for coordinating assistance, but no assessment can fully encompass what displacement means to the people living through it.

The challenge, therefore, extends beyond representation. It concerns the relationship between knowledge and authority. The experiences that become recognised as evidence often shape political attention, humanitarian investment, and international priorities. Some realities acquire institutional recognition, while others continue to circulate within families, communities, and local organisations beyond the boundaries of official understanding. Epistemic justice offers a way of recognising this imbalance without dismissing the value of academic research, humanitarian expertise, or policy analysis. The challenge arises when any single perspective becomes so dominant that alternative ways of knowing struggle to influence how displacement is understood.

This raises a simple but far-reaching question: Who has the authority to shape what the world knows about forced migration?

The answer lies less in the intrinsic value of knowledge than in the institutions through which it travels. Research agendas are shaped by funding priorities. Academic publishing remains concentrated within a relatively small number of institutions. International conferences, editorial boards, and policy forums often depend on mobility, financial resources, and professional networks that many displaced scholars, practitioners, and community leaders cannot easily access. Conflict compounds these barriers by disrupting universities, civil society organisations, archives, and the relationships that sustain intellectual life.

These conditions influence more than who participates in research. They shape which questions receive sustained attention, which methods are considered rigorous, and which forms of evidence become influential. Yet those standards also reflect histories, institutions, and unequal distributions of power. The authority attached to particular forms of expertise is therefore neither accidental nor evenly distributed.

This becomes especially significant in contexts of forced migration, where displaced communities often occupy a paradoxical position. Their experiences underpin humanitarian assessments, academic studies, and policy discussions, yet they remain less visible in defining the concepts, priorities, and interpretations that organise those conversations. Participation frequently begins once the research agenda has already been established.

This understanding has important implications for debates on localisation. Too often, localisation is reduced to questions of implementation: who delivers assistance, who manages programmes, or where resources are allocated. These concerns remain essential, yet they address only one dimension of power.

Localisation also concerns intellectual authority. It asks who participates in framing problems before solutions are designed, whose analysis informs policy, and whose interpretations shape international responses. A humanitarian system that decentralises operations while leaving expertise concentrated within the same institutions has only partially addressed the inequalities localisation seeks to confront.

Across displacement settings, local organisations document violations, collect data, sustain essential services, negotiate access, and maintain relationships long after international attention has shifted elsewhere. Their work generates cumulative insight into the political, social, and cultural dynamics of displacement. Treating these organisations solely as implementing partners overlooks their role as producers of knowledge.

The same principle applies to displaced communities themselves. Experience does not confer infallibility, nor does institutional expertise. Each reflects a different kind of proximity to displacement. Bringing them into conversation strengthens both. Research becomes more responsive when informed by lived realities, while experiential knowledge gains wider influence when recognised as a source of analytical insight rather than merely empirical evidence.

More inclusive migration governance depends upon expanding the spaces in which knowledge is produced, interpreted, and debated. Participation acquires greater significance when it extends beyond consultation into the shared work of defining the issues that demand attention in the first place.

Sudan offers a compelling illustration of these dynamics.

Since the outbreak of war, public attention has understandably focused on the scale of displacement, humanitarian need, and the collapse of essential services. These realities demand urgent action. Less visible are the insights emerging within communities as people navigate conflict, displacement, and uncertainty.

Across Sudan, women have coordinated mutual aid, documented human rights violations, established informal learning spaces, supported survivors of gender-based violence, and sustained community networks under extraordinary pressure. Much of this work unfolds beyond formal institutions. It depends upon relationships of trust, local knowledge, and continuous adaptation to rapidly changing circumstances.

The expertise developed through these experiences is rarely recognised in conventional accounts of displacement. Yet it offers detailed understandings of protection, mobility, social cohesion, informal governance, and community resilience. These insights are not incidental to humanitarian response; they are produced through the practical work of sustaining communities when formal systems have fractured.

Conflict also transforms the conditions under which knowledge is preserved and shared. As communities become geographically dispersed, they carry locally embedded knowledge across borders and into unfamiliar contexts. Some forms of expertise adapt and endure, while others become increasingly difficult to sustain as local institutions and community networks are disrupted. This quieter dimension of forced migration receives comparatively little attention, yet it reminds us that displacement can also erode the relationships, collective memory, and systems through which knowledge is transmitted. Recognising this broadens the scope of epistemic justice to include safeguarding the knowledge embedded within communities before it is diminished through prolonged displacement or institutional collapse.

Sudanese women illustrate this with particular clarity. Their work documents events that might otherwise remain unrecorded, preserves community histories, strengthens local accountability, and sustains the relationships that enable collective action. These contributions generate insights whose significance extends far beyond the immediate context in which they emerge.

Ultimately, the question "Who speaks for forced migration?" is not about identifying a single authority. It is about recognising that knowledge is shaped by who defines the questions, contributes to the evidence, and helps interpret its meaning. Epistemic justice is fundamentally about broadening who has the authority to shape what the world knows about forced migration. It calls for a more inclusive process of knowledge production—one in which displaced communities help define the questions, interpret the evidence, and shape humanitarian action, policy, and public understanding.

Israa Elkhalil  

Israa is a Sudanese humanitarian practitioner and researcher. She has experience in humanitarian action, policy analysis, and advocacy. In this article, she examines how structural systems, including mobility regimes and global governance frameworks, shape access, participation, and knowledge production. Drawing on professional experience across African contexts, she contributes to advancing locally grounded approaches to inclusive governance.