‘ Any place could be home’: Embedding refugees’ voices into displacement resolution and state refugee policy

Abstract

This article explores refugees’ views about the ‘durable solutions’ or three Rs – Voluntary Repatriation, Local or Re-Integration and Resettlement – underscoring the need for refugees’ voices to inform policy actions taken on their behalf. Central to discourses on the right to return and the policy practice of voluntary repatriation is the salience accorded the nation-state of which territorial boundaries are an important defining feature. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with Liberian refugees in the Gomoa-Buduburam camp in Ghana, this article elucidates the effects of essentialist assumptions about territory, nation-state, home and enforced repatriation on the rights of refugees. By studying practices around and responses to the so-called solutions to displacement, especially VR, insights are gained into various ways in which space is reproduced and contested by international/local implementers and refugees, respectively, in the search for solutions. Importantly, the extent to which the views of displaced persons are allowed to shape such practices is highlighted. The article concludes by encouraging an embedding of refugees’ views about the three Rs into reformulating state policy expressions in displacement interventions. Including refugees as active participants in resolving their own problems, it is suggested, is one sustainable way to address the canker of protracted displacement in our times.