Drawing together the work and ideas of a combination of the world's leading and emerging International Relations scholars, Refugees in International Relations considers what ideas from International Relations can offer our understanding of the international politics of forced migration. The insights draw from across the theoretical spectrum of International Relations from realism to critical theory to feminism, covering issues including international cooperation, security, and the international political economy.
Drawing together the work and ideas of a combination of the world's leading and emerging International Relations scholars, Refugees in International Relations provides a comprehensive and challenging overview of the international politics of forced migration.
Refugee and Forced Migration Studies has grown from being a concern of a relatively small number of scholars and policy researchers in the 1980s to a global field of interest with thousands of students worldwide studying displacement either from traditional disciplinary perspectives or as a core component of newer programmes across the Humanities and Social and Political Sciences. Today the field encompasses both rigorous academic research which may or may not ultimately inform policy and practice, as well as action-research focused on advocating in favour of refugees' needs and rights. This authoritative Handbook critically evaluates the birth and development of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies, and analyses the key contemporary and future challenges faced by academics and practitioners working with and for forcibly displaced populations around the world. The 52 state-of-the-art chapters, written by leading academics, practitioners, and policymakers working in universities, research centres, think tanks, NGOs and international organizations, provide a comprehensive and cutting-edge overview of the key intellectual, political, social and institutional challenges arising from mass displacement in the world today. The chapters vividly illustrate the vibrant and engaging debates that characterize this rapidly expanding field of research and practice.
‘The refugee problem’ is a term that it has become almost impossible to escape. Although used by a wide range of actors involved in work related to forced migration, these actors do not often explain what exactly ‘the problem’ is that they are working to solve, leading to an unfortunate conflation of two quite different ‘problems’: the problems that refugees face and the problems that refugees pose. Beginning from the simple, yet too often overlooked, observation that how one conceives of solving a problem is inseparable from what one understands that problem to be, Saunders’ study explores the questions raised about how to address ‘the refugee problem’ if we recognise that there may not be just one ‘problem’, and that not all actors involved with the refugee regime conceive of their work as addressing the same ‘problem’. Utilising the work of Michel Foucault, the book first charts how different ‘problems’ lend themselves to particular kinds of solutions, arguing that the international refugee regime is best understood as developed to ‘solve’ the refugee (as) problem, rather than refugees’ problems. Turning to the work of Hannah Arendt, the book then reframes ‘the refugee problem’ from the perspective of the refugee, rather than the state, and investigates the extent to which doing so can open up creative space for rethinking the more traditional solutions to the refugee (as) problem. Cases of refugee protest in Europe, and the burgeoning Sanctuary Movement in the UK, are examined as two sub-state and popular movements which could constitute such creative solutions to a reframed problem. The consequences of the ‘refugee’ label, and of the discourses of humanitarianism and emergency is a topic of critical concern, and as such, the book will form important reading for a scholars and students of (international) political theory and forced migration studies.
This revised and expanded second edition of The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) continues to offer a concise and comprehensive introduction to both the world of refugees and the organizations that protect and assist them. This updated edition also includes: up to date coverage of the UNHCR’s most recent history and policy developments evaluation of new thinking on issues such as working in UN integrated operations and within the UN peacebuilding commission assessment of the UNHCR’s record of working for IDP’s (internally displaced persons) discussion of the politics of protection and its implications for the work of the UNHCR outline of the new challenges for the agency including environmental refugees, victims of natural disasters and survival migrants. Written by experts in the field, this is one of the very few books to trace the relationship between state interests, global politics, and the work of the UNHCR. This book will appeal to students, scholars, practitioners, and readers with an interest in international relations.
This book contributes to a long-standing but ever topical debate about whether persons fleeing war to seek asylum in another country – ‘war refugees’ – are protected by international law. It seeks to add to this debate by bringing together a detailed set of analyses examining the extent to which the application of international humanitarian law (IHL) may usefully advance the legal protection of such persons. This generates a range of questions about the respective protection frameworks established under international refugee law and IHL and, specifically, the potential for interaction between them. As the first collection to deal with the subject, the eighteen chapters that make up this unique volume supply a range of perspectives on how the relationship between these two separate fields of law may be articulated and whether IHL may contribute to providing refuge from the inhumanity of war.
Building on a trans-disciplinary, feminist project that foregrounds the bodies of those at the ‘sharp end’ of various forms of international activity, such as immigration, development and warfare, the chapters included in this book cover a variety of sites, concerns, and hopes. These range from the fraught geopolitics of marriage and birth in Ladakh, India, to the fate of detained migrant children in the U.S., and from the human rights abuses of women and children in Uzbekistan to the body politics of aid workers in Afghanistan. The collective aim is to expose the force relations that operate through and upon those bodies, such that particular subjectivities are enhanced, constrained, and put to work, and particular corporealities are violated, exploited, and often abandoned. Oriented around issues of security, population, territory, and nationalism, these chapters expose the proliferating bodies of geopolitics, not simply as the bearers of socially demarcated borders and boundaries, but as vulnerable corporealities, seeking to negotiate and transform the geopolitics they both animate and inhabit. This book was originally published as a special issue of Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography.
What explains the variety of responses that states adopt toward different refugee groups? Refugees might be granted protection or turned away; they might be permitted to live where they wish and earn an income, pursue education, and access medical treatment; or, they might be confined to a camp and forced to rely on aid while being denied basic services. However, states do not consistently wield their capacity for control, nor do they jealously guard their authority to regulate. In this book, Lamis Elmy Abdelaaty asks why states sometimes assert their sovereignty vis-à-vis refugee rights and at other times seemingly cede it by delegating refugee oversight to the United Nations. To explain this selective exercise of sovereignty, Abdelaaty develops a two-part theoretical framework in which policymakers in refugee-receiving countries weigh international and domestic concerns. Policymakers in a receiving country might decide to offer protection to refugees from a rival country in order to undermine the sending country's stability, saddle it with reputation costs, and even engage in guerilla-style cross-border attacks. At the domestic level, policymakers consider political competition among ethnic groups--welcoming refugees who are ethnic kin of citizens can satisfy domestic constituencies, expand the base of support for the government, and encourage mobilization along ethnic lines. When these international and domestic incentives conflict, the state shifts responsibility for refugees to the UN, which allows policymakers to placate both refugee-sending countries and domestic constituencies. Abdelaaty analyzes asylum admissions worldwide, and then examines three case studies in-depth: Egypt (a country that is broadly representative of most refugee recipients), Turkey (an outlier that has limited the geographic application of the Refugee Convention), and Kenya (home to one of the largest refugee populations in the world). Discrimination and Delegation argues that foreign policy and ethnic identity, more so than resources, humanitarianism, or labor skills, shape reactions to refugees.
The movement of displaced people, migrants and refugees has become increasingly important around the world, leading to a need for increased scrutiny of global responses and policies towards migration. This book focuses on the Middle East, where many nations are part of this global phenomenon as both home, transit and/or host country. Refugee Governance, State and Politics in the Middle East examines the patterns of legal, political and institutional responses to large-scale Syrian forced migration. It analyses the motivations behind neighbouring countries' policy responses, how their responses change over time and how they have an impact on regional and global cooperation. Looking in particular at Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, three of the world's top refugee hosting countries, this book explores how refugee governance differs across countries and why they diverge. To theorize variations, the book introduces multi-pattern and multi-stage refugee governance models as two complementary analytical frameworks. The book further argues that each of these three states’ refugee responses is constructed based on three main factors: internal political interests, economic-development related concerns, and foreign policy objectives as well as interactions among them. The book’s categorizations and models (on policy fields, actors, stages, patterns and driving forces) provide analytical tools to researchers for comparative analyses. Scholars and students of Comparative Politics, International Relations, Refugee Studies, Global Governance and Middle Eastern Studies will find this book a useful contribution to their fields.
UN Global Compacts is a concise introduction to the key concepts, issues, and actors in global migration governance and presents a comprehensive analysis of the New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, the Global Compact on Refugees, and the Global Compact for Migration. The book places the declaration and compacts within their historical context, traces the evolution of global migration governance, and evaluates the implementation of the compacts. Ultimately, the global compacts were the result of three wider shifts in global governance from hard to soft law, from rights to aid, and from Cold War politics to nationalism. The book is an important contribution to international relations and migration studies and provides essential information on the NY declaration and the global compacts, in addition to an examination of the: • Negotiating blocs and strategies • Populist backlash to the Global Compact for Migration • Responsibility sharing for refugee protection • Human rights of migrants • Principle of non-refoulement • Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework • UNHCR, IOM, and the UN Network on Migration The book will be of interest to practitioners, students, and scholars of international cooperation, global governance, migrants, and refugees, and will be essential reading for graduate and undergraduate courses on international law, international organizations, and migration.
