Global Compacts or containment?

Abstract

Extended exile is the rule, not the exception. The exclusion of asylum seekers from Western countries and the production of precarity are generated by design, not by accident. The average period of displacement for refugees continues to grow, averaging 20 years. Some 90% of the world's 25 million refugees reside in the global South; millions more are displaced but do not ‘count’ as refugees. This chapter explores current diagnoses and antidotes for the current ‘refugee crisis’, addressed by the Global Compacts on Refugees and for Migration. Most of the proposed solutions, but not all, are generated by academics in the global North. Neoliberal capitalism, in the form of loans to countries that host refugees, is being floated as the new ‘solution’ to people displaced throughout the world. The new Global Compacts ‘on’ refugees and migrants do little to change the terms or unequal conditions of containment by states in their regions of origin. Like much of South Asia, Lebanon is outside the Occidentalist legal framework of international refugee law, specifically the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol. And yet, the country provides safety for huge numbers of people, mostly Syrians, hosting more displaced persons per capita than any country in the world. Likewise, the governments of Bangladesh, Thailand and India all offer protection to people displaced on their territory without legal obligation. In November 2018, the Kolkata Declaration was issued to re-orient migrant-refugee security in new ways. What can we learn from this and related interventions that do not attempt to ‘fix’ the problem, but rather to recast the scale and conversation around violence, migration and protection? Extending the notion of urban recovery in this volume, a process unleashed by ruptures of different kinds, this chapter focuses on the meanings of recovery in international (geo)political context. The recovery of refugee-migrant subjectivity, refugees as city makers, pushes against a status quo of Occidentalist humanitarianism.