Global Refugee Policy Research Articles

The 2021 UNHCR-IE SOGI Global Roundtable on Protection and Solutions for LGBTIQ+ People in Forced Displacement: Toward a New Vision for LGBTIQ+ Refugee Protection

Abstract This field reflection critically examines how emerging international norms concerning forcibly displaced people of diverse sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) were negotiated during the 2021 UNHCR-IE SOGI Global Roundtable on Protection and Solutions for LGBTIQ+ People in Forced Displacement. I argue that the Roundtable was a crucial site of norm contestation on queer refugee intersectionality and inclusion within the global refugee policy regime, particularly among stakeholders grounded in two interconnected, mutually responsive policy ecosystems: (1) refugee rights and assistance and (2) LGBTIQ+ human rights. Through an intersectional queer feminist understanding of complex adaptive systems, I show how Roundtable stakeholders constructively challenged precepts of impartiality, neutrality, and a charity model of needs-based humanitarianism. Finally, I propose several ways to effectively innovate the international norms that will impact LGBTIQ+ refugees, asylum seekers, internally displaced people, and stateless people in coming years.

“It’s my life, not theirs!” Therapeutic itineraries and refugee reflections on referral health care in western Tanzania

Globally, refugees number over 25 million. Yet, little attention has been paid to how refugees access referral health care in host countries. By referral, I mean the process by which a patient deemed too sick to be managed at a lower-level health facility is transferred to a higher-level facility with more resources to provide care. In this article, I provide reflections on referral health care from the perspective of refugees living in exile in Tanzania. Through qualitative methods of interviews, participant observation, and clinical record review, I trace how global refugee policy on referral health care manifests itself in the lives of refugees locally in a country like Tanzania that has strict policies and limitations on freedom of movement. In this space, refugees experience complex medical problems, many of which began prior to or during their flight to Tanzania. Many refugees indeed are approved to be referred to a Tanzanian hospital for further treatment. Others are denied care or pursue other therapeutic itineraries outside the formal system. But, all are subject to policies of Tanzania that restrict freedom of movement and almost all experience delays on several levels (e.g., waiting for a referral, waiting at the referral hospital, waiting for follow-up appointments). In the end, refugees in this context emerge not simply as passive beings upon which biopower is enacted, but also as active agents, sometimes circumventing a system of power in their pursuit of their right to health, all in the context of strict policy that seeks to enforce state security over one's right to health. In the process, refugee experiences with referral health care become a window into the larger politics of refugee hosting in Tanzania in the present day.

From Vulnerability to Empowerment: Critical Reflections on Canada’s Engagement with Refugee Policy

The making and implementation of global policy are prominent areas of activity for the global refugee regime, with a specific focus on policy relating to the categories of vulnerable refugees. Recent collective efforts globally have highlighted the importance of meaningfully including refugees themselves; and a discursive shift away from the language of vulnerability towards that of empowerment in policy making, and humanitarian assistance. Despite this, efforts to implement these commitments have largely been unsuccessful, raising questions about how refugees are engaged in these processes, and in what ways the label of vulnerable continues to influence the making and implementation of global refugee policy. Using the case of Canada’s engagement with the global refugee regime, and with refugee women in particular, this article argues that the continued framing of refugee women as vulnerable has impeded progress, and that for transformative policy to be realized, refugee women must be seen as actors with capacity to participate, and must be included in all processes of policy making, implementation and evaluation. A feminist geopolitical framework is presented as a way to decenter states and institutions in favor of centering the individual embodied experiences of refugee women in global refugee policy making. By doing so, empowerment can be realized in policy and practice.

Therapeutic citizens or therapeutic refugees? An examination of triage, refugeehood, and referral health care in Tanzania

Referral health care refers to the movement of populations between different levels of a health care system, often to seek specialized care at higher level centers. It requires mobility of populations. Critical questions on the shortcomings for accessing referral health care, especially for refugees in sub-Saharan Africa, remain unexplored. How do global guidelines on referral health care play out in the local context of a country like Tanzania, where refugees are not legally allowed to leave the refugee camp without permission? How do health care providers navigate this complex space, and how can we leverage anthropological theories of biopower and therapeutic citizenship to better understand this context? Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork in Tanzania between 2011 and 2021, I trace how global refugee policy manifests itself locally. I argue that referral for refugees in Tanzania is as much a political and social process as it is medical. The bureaucratic process favors certain pathologies over others and creates significant delays in referral. Triage takes on nuanced forms whereby a certain aspect of a patient's case (i.e., prognosis, cost, age) is privileged in a context of strict refugee policy that restricts independent care-seeking. Most patients are approved for referral, but many are denied. A patient may not be sick enough to merit timely referral, or they may be deemed too sick to prevent referral altogether. Challenging other arguments of therapeutic citizenship where people living with certain health conditions acquire access to certain therapies and their right to health, I show how refugees with certain pathologies are actually excluded from care. These therapeutic exceptions produce consequences whereby bureaucracy and security have prevailed over the right to health and reinforced the power of state sovereignty in what may best be understood not as a therapeutic citizenship, but instead as a therapeutic refugeehood.

4 Migration research and analysis: Growth, reach and recent contributions

4 Migration research and analysis: Growth, reach and recent contributions

UNHCR’s Origins and Early History: Agency, Influence, and Power in Global Refugee Policy

This article assesses the role and functions of UNHCR during its formative years and explores its agency, influence, and use of power in global refugee policy. During most of the Cold War, UNHCR’s first four high commissioners employed delegated authority and expertise on refugee law and protection, thereby convincing states of the Office’s usefulness to international stability and ensuring its survival, growth, and power. It concludes by arguing that the Office should use the lessons of this early period of its history to explore ways to exercise similar attributes today.

Power in the Global Refugee Regime: Understanding Expressions and Experiences of Power in Global and Local Contexts

Since the late 1980s, scholars have highlighted the role of diverse conceptualizations of power in explaining the functioning of the global refugee regime. Part of this literature has examined the functioning of power in global contexts, while another part has explored expressions and experiences of power in local contexts. While these approaches illustrate how power may be expressed and experienced in the diverse contexts of the regime, can we conceptualize power in a way that engages with the functioning of the refugee regime in both global and local contexts? Can a more disaggregated understanding of power, sensitive to form and context of expression, open new areas of enquiry into the functioning of the regime and help explain its ability and inability to fulfill its core mandate of protection and solutions for refugees? In response, this article draws on the literature on power in global governance to propose a heuristic framework for understanding power and influence in the diverse context of the global refugee regime. It argues that various forms of power co-exist within the regime, and that further research could usefully examine the manifestations and implications of these forms of power through the making and implementation of global refugee policy.

The End of the Deterrence Paradigm? Future Directions for Global Refugee Policy

The End of the Deterrence Paradigm? Future Directions for Global Refugee Policy

The End of the Deterrence Paradigm? Future Directions for Global Refugee Policy

Asylum seekers and refugees continue to face serious obstacles in their efforts to access asylum. Some of these obstacles are inherent to irregular migration, including dangerous border crossings a...

Lessons from the Global Public Policy Literature for the Study of Global Refugee Policy

Lessons from the Global Public Policy Literature for the Study of Global Refugee Policy

Introduction: Understanding Global Refugee Policy

Researchers visiting the Headquarters of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva will frequently encounter discussions about efforts to develop ‘global refugee policy’. These efforts may relate to changes to existing UNHCR programmes, such as its approach to refugees in urban areas, or to new areas of activity, such as the organization’s response to displacement resulting from natural disasters. These efforts become ‘refugee policy’ when they result in a formal statement of a problem relating to protection, solutions or assistance for refugees or other populations of concern to the global refugee regime and a proposed course of action to respond to that problem. According to Soroos (1990: 318), this policy is ‘global’ when it takes the form of ‘either regulations that define the limits of permissible behavior for national governments and those under their jurisdiction or, alternatively, as programs administered by international agencies,’ such as UNHCR.

Building Consensus within UNHCR's Executive Committee: Global Refugee Norms in the Making

UNHCR’s Executive Committee is the only specialized multilateral forum which contributes to the development of international guidance on refugee protection. Based on observation of the negotiation of ExCom Conclusion No. 107, this article examines global refugee norms in the making. It argues that empirical studies can further our understanding of global refugee policy, by re-embedding norms and policies that claim to be global into the specific configurations of state and non-state actors that produce them. The ethnographic approach in particular sheds light on how different stakeholders’ conflicting interests, beliefs and legal frameworks are turned into a depoliticized and consensual narrative of global refugee protection, having an apparently positive and ambitious connotation. These narratives produce a hegemonic ‘truth regime’ on refugee issues but also windows for contestation. Moreover, the article illustrates how global refugee norms may not necessarily be about improving refugee standards for decision-makers but may be used for other, implicit, reasons such as perpetuating narratives, maintaining social prestige, making claims for political consideration, or legitimizing new bureaucratic interventions.

Can Global Refugee Policy Leverage Durable Solutions? Lessons from Tanzania's Naturalization of Burundian Refugees

When Tanzania announced its willingness to naturalize some of the 220,000 Burundian refugees it had hosted since 1972, this became a test of a new global policy on protracted refugee situations and its ability to leverage durable solutions for refugees. This article examines the impact of global policy on naturalization in Tanzania, and argues that while global policy partially contributed to the formulation and early implementation of Tanzania’s naturalization policy, it has not been able to ensure the full implementation of the policy in light of increased domestic opposition to local integration. In contrast, a range of domestic factors, especially within Tanzanian politics, more fully explain the formulation and uneven implementation of the naturalization policy. As such, the case of Tanzania illustrates the challenges associated with implementing global refugee policy in a domestic context and underscores the importance of ongoing political analysis in the future study and practice of global refugee policy.

The Bali Process and Global Refugee Policy in the Asia-Pacific Region

This article examines the role of two regional actors in the Asia–Pacific region, namely the Bali Process and the Asia Pacific Refugee Rights Network (APRRN), a platform of civil society organizations, as two very different models of mechanisms and agenda-setting on Global Refugee Policy (GRP). The Bali Process has limited actors and a narrow discourse on refugees which reflects a hierarchical agenda-setting process or ‘steering mode’. By contrast, the APRRN is a non-state network actor which works through non-hierarchical mechanisms as a transnational activist network (TAN) and has a normative agenda. This article demonstrates the tension within GRP which is being created within the region through these two intermediaries between the global North and the global South.

Wither Policy? Southern African Perspectives on Understanding Law, 'Refugee' Policy and Protection

Global, regional and national refugee law and policy present important sites for contestation, agenda setting, normative pronouncements and symbolic action. But international and even domestic legislation seldom realize the promises of protection. In the kind of weakly legalized environments in which many self- settled refugees reside, progressive protection regimes may be far removed from the realities of refugees’ lives. Drawing primarily on research from South Africa, this paper makes a two-part argument. The first highlights the narrow practical and analytical value of focusing on legal reforms and formal ‘refugee’ policy as determinants of protection, given that legal status and documentation have only limited practical protection effects. The second argument is that even in analysing refugee policy, we must grant considerable space for bureaucratic autonomy. The paper concludes with a dual call: first, to broaden our focus of refugee law and policy to include a range of other social and political policy fields so that formal commitments to refugee protection can be translated into practical protection; second, it asks analysts to take sub-national bureaucracies far more seriously as sites of policy formation and practice. Such a perspective requires introducing a spatialized, socialized and politicized understanding of institutional incentives and operations. Together these will offer a more realistic understanding of protection possibilities through policy and illuminate the practices associated with state actions relating to the displaced.

Media Perceptions: Mainstream and Grassroots Media Coverage of Refugees in Kenya and the Effects of Global Refugee Policy

Media Perceptions: Mainstream and Grassroots Media Coverage of Refugees in Kenya and the Effects of Global Refugee Policy

Introduction: Continuity and Change in Global Refugee Policy

This special issue of the Refugee Survey Quarterly brings together a selection of thepapers from the conference on “Understanding Global Refugee Policy” organized by the Refugee Studies Centre to celebrate its 30th anniversary. One of the many notable themes to emerge from the conference was the extent to which that period hasengendered continuity or change in global refugee policy. How has the agenda changed? Has the nature of the challenges facing policy-makers shifted over the last three decades? Has refugee policy become more politicised? Has finding solutions to refugee situations become more difficult? To what extent are main actors different? Is it still a fundamentally state-centric policy field? How have the main forums and institutions within which policy is made changed? The papers in this collection offer a window onto that question of continuity and change. In doing so, they address a range of important emerging themes and cover a wide set of geographical regions.

Bibliography

Bibliography

Global Refugee Policy: An Agenda for the 1990s

From February 20-22, 1992, 30 participants gathered at the Wye Center in Queens town, Maryland for a conference on Global Refugee Policy: An Agenda for the 1990s. The meeting was organized by the Program on International and U.S. Refugee Policy of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. The purposes of the conference were to review developments concerning refugees and other forced migrants over the last decade, take stock of the current worldwide refugee situation, consider the policy challenges of the 1990s, and formulate policy options to meet the new demands on die international system. Participants came from thirteen countries and included representatives of governments (9), international organizations (5), nongovernmental organizations (2), foundations (4), uni? versities (8), and policy/research organizations (2). In preparation for the discussions, participants received the draft of a monograph on Global Refugee Policy: An Agenda for the 1990s.2 and ten background papers. The Pew Charitable Trusts and The Whitehead Foundation provided the funding for the conference and the preparation of materials. Travel funds for a number of participants were provided by The Exxon Education Foundation.

Global Refugee Policy: The Case for a Development Oriented Strategy


 
 
 Global Refugee Policy: the Case for a Development Oriented Strategy", a public issues paper of The Population Council (a John D. Rockefeller III, in- dependent non-profit organization in- stituted in 1952) prepared by Charles Keely with Patricia Elwell, proposes a shift in focus from relief and resettlement to development. The study is divided to four parts: (1) a discussion of the inter- national definition of a refugee; (2) an overview of their numbers, location and origin; (3) a sketch of the international response to refugees; and (4) conclu* sions arising from these discussions. The central issue is dealt with in the first sec- tion, and the historical background isrelegated to the third section.