Kaldor Centre Annual Conference 2017

In 2018, world leaders will adopt two landmark documents – a Global Compact on Refugees, and a Global Compact on Safe, Regular and Orderly Migration.

Amidst debate about what these agreements should contain and how ambitious they should be, the Kaldor Centre Conference 2017 takes stock of where we are so far, and anticipates what developments we will see in the lead-up to their adoption in 2018.

Will the Global Compacts represent a turning point in the global governance of human movement?  Will they promote new international standards and responses?  Or will they simply reflect the status quo?  And what will this mean for Australia and the world?

With more people on the move than ever before, the Kaldor Centre Conference 2017 will bring together leading international and local experts involved in the process to share their insights and projections.

Keynote Speakers

Professor Elizabeth Ferris is internationally recognised as a leading expert on forced migration. She has been closely involved in a range of international negotiations relating to displacement, including the 2016 UN Summit on Refugees and Migrants in New York.

She is a research professor at Georgetown University and a non-resident senior fellow in Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution. She served for nine years as a Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the Brookings Project on Internal Displacement and as an adjunct professor in Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service. Professor Ferris previously spent 20 years working in the field of international humanitarian response. She has served as Chair of the International Council of Voluntary Agencies, as Research Director for the Life & Peace Institute in Uppsala, Sweden, and Director of the Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program in New York. She has been a professor at several universities in the United States and served as a Fulbright professor to the Universidad Autónoma de México in Mexico City. Her current research interests focus on the politics of humanitarian action and on the role of civil society in protecting displaced populations.

Professor Ferris has written extensively on humanitarian and human rights issues, and is the author of the Kaldor Centre Policy Brief, In search of commitments: The 2016 refugee summits.

Ambassador David Donoghue has had a long and varied career in Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs, having been involved in, among others, the Northern Ireland peace process and the ground-breaking Good Friday Agreement (1998). He has served as Irish Ambassador in Russia, Germany and Austria, was Director General of Ireland’s development co-operation programme from 2001-2004, and Political Director with responsibility for Ireland’ s overall foreign policy from 2009-13. From 2013-2017 Ambassador Donoghue was the Permanent Representative of Ireland to the United Nations in New York, where he served as co-facilitator (with Kenya) for the UN negotiations leading to adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development in 2015. He was also co-facilitator (with Jordan) for the negotiations which produced the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2016. Notwithstanding his retirement in September 2017, Ambassador Donoghue remains actively involved in the follow-up to the New York Declaration and the two Global Compacts, one on Refugees and one on Migration, each of which will be completed in late 2018. Besides these two initiatives, he also continues to contribute to the challenges associated with implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Download the Conference Program including biographies of speakers.

Audio from the event: 

The Kaldor Centre would like to thank: 

• Wotton+Kearney,not-for-profit sponsor, for their support enabling community organisations to participate in the Kaldor Centre Conference 2017
• Hall&Wilcox, not-for-profit sponsor, for their support enabling community organisations to participate in the Kaldor Centre Conference 2017
• The Ian Potter Foundation for their support enabling the participation of international speakers in the Kaldor Centre Conference 2017