Protection Where? - or When?: First asylum, deflection policies and the significance of time

Abstract

In a forthcoming book on ‘Regimes as Practice: International Institutions and Refugee Protection’, a few political scientists and at least one lawyer will attempt to bear out the claim that the international refugee regime offers a particularly useful context within which to revisit the core tenets of regime theory. The analysis revolves around three dimensions of states’ and international organisations’ practice, namely: vertical (from the global to the local); horizontal (connecting to other issue-areas); and temporal. With regard to this last dimension, what matters is not only how the regime has evolved over time, but how it ‘manages’ time within any given refugee situation. This is a critical dimension indeed, given that the regime's stated ambition is to lead refugees, and the states involved in their causation or their protection, to solutions. Refugee situations are exceptional circumstances in international relations, in the same way as refugeehood is an anomaly in...