Quasi‐Customary Dispute Resolution Mechanisms in Israel's Darfuri Refugees

Abstract

About 3,500 Darfuri male (and a few female) asylum seekers live in Israel. The majority are 25 to 40 years old. Older men, including village and community dignitaries, stand little chance of surviving the brutal trek.In Darfur, where most inhabitants live in small villages, inter‐ and intracommunal conflicts are traditionally resolved through the customary justice process of Judiya. But in Israel, Darfuri asylum seekers no longer reside with their kin groups (villages, tribes, clans); instead they often cohabit with asylum seekers from other tribes, clans, and villages, living in crowded conditions, mostly in the poor south side of Tel Aviv—a situation that gives rise to multiple small conflicts.In the absence of their familiar tribal structure, dignitaries, and other interveners, the refugees have no access to the traditional dispute resolution mechanisms they have grown up with. Furthermore, these asylum seekers avoid bringing their conflicts to the attention of the Israeli authorities, for fear of endangering their asylum petitions. The result is that this community finds itself trying to cope with difficult, intracommunal, conflict‐rich conditions, without being able to use either traditional conflict resolution mechanisms or local formal justice processes.The response of the Darfuri asylum seekers community to this circumstance has been to develop their own multitier, quasi‐customary intracommunal dispute resolution mechanism. This new mechanism combines elements of their traditional, Darfur‐based processes, along with newly constructed modifications designed to compensate for the missing elements (e.g., lack of village elders) and make use of available resources (e.g., young community activists).This article employs analysis of multiple interviews and review of relevant literature to identify and describe the unique, informal dispute resolution mechanism that the Darfuri community developed in Israel.Insights developed in this article may help community activists, municipalities, policy makers, nongovernmental organizations, and other individuals and organizations in understanding and facilitating alternative dispute resolution mechanisms within similarly structured and similarly affected displaced persons and asylum seeker communities around the world.