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Why they are not refugees – Climate change, environmental degradation and population displacement
Increasing attention is given to the potential for environmental degradation and climate change to be instruments of population displacement. Those susceptible to displacement have been labelled “environmental refugees”. Whilst recognising the importance of protecting livelihoods, societies and human rights of people who might be displaced, the paper challenges this label. First the paper examines the derivation and origins of the label “environmental refugees”. Second the paper challenges the conceptual, normative and empirical basis for this terminology. The final section highlights the three “Rs” of “rights”, “resilience” and “resettlement” as a more proactive and comprehensive framework for responding to the impacts of climate change and environmental degradation and the challenges of displacement.
The politics of rights protection for environmentally displaced people
Drawing on empirical evidence from Bangladesh and Ethiopia, the paper challenges the largely apolitical and ahistorical conceptualisation of the nexus between climate and environmental change and population displacement. Focusing specifically on rights protection, the paper argues that the rights discourse reveals how environmental variables shaping mobility decisions are strongly mediated by national (macro) and local (micro) level structures of political and social power and disempowerment. Both current politics and migration histories shape the way in which migration policy regimes are conceived and framed, and how rights are articulated for those susceptible to displacement in a context of environmental stress and climate change. By analysing these political conditions we can better appreciate the dominant ”hinge points” of power and the paradox that governments of highly impacted countries resist the provision of legal and normative frameworks to protect those who are displaced.
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.
Finding space for protection: an inside account of the evolution of UNHCR’s urban refugee policy
This article examines the evolution of UNHCR’s urban refugee policy from the mid-1990s to the present. It focuses on the complex and contested nature of the policymaking process, analyzing the roles that internal and external stakeholders have played in it. At the same time, the article identifies and examines key developments in UNHCR’s operational environment that drove and constrained policymaking in this domain. The article is written from the perspective of a former UNHCR staff member who was substantively engaged in urban refugee policy.
Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System
Europe is facing its greatest refugee crisis since the Second World War, yet the institutions responding to it remain virtually unchanged from those created in the post-war era. As neighbouring countries continue to bear the brunt of the Syrian catastrophe, European governments have enacted a series of ill-considered gestures, from shutting their borders to welcoming refugees without a plan for their safe passage or integration upon arrival. With a deepening crisis and a xenophobic backlash in Europe, it is time for a new vision for refuge. Going beyond the scenes of desperation which have become all-too-familiar in the past few years, Alexander Betts and Paul Collier show that this crisis offers an opportunity for reform if international policy-makers focus on delivering humane, effective and sustainable outcomes - both for Europe and for countries that border conflict zones. Refugees need more than simply food, tents and blankets, and research demonstrates that they can offer tangible economic benefits to their adopted countries if given the right to work and education. An urgent and necessary work, Refuge sets out an alternative vision that can empower refugees to help themselves, contribute to their host societies, and even rebuild their countries of origin. [Published in the US and Canada as 'Refuge: Rethinking Refugee Policy in a Changing World' by Oxford University Press.]
Implementation of the 2015 Council Decisions establishing provisional measures in the area of international protection for the benefit of Italy and of Greece
This study, commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens' Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the LIBE Committee, examines the EU’s mechanism of relocation of asylum seekers from Greece and Italy to other Member States. It examines the scheme in the context of the Dublin System, the hotspot approach, and the EU-Turkey Statement, recommending that asylum seekers’ interests, and rights be duly taken into account, as it is only through their full engagement that relocation will be successful. Relocation can become a system that provides flexibility for Member States and local host communities, as well as accommodating the agency and dignity of asylum seekers. This requires greater cooperation from receiving States, and a clearer role for a single EU legal and institutional framework to organise preference matching and rationalise efforts and resources overall.
Research in Brief: Decriminalising ‘Humanitarian Smuggling’
This research brief summarises the legal and policy findings from the RSC Working Paper no. 119, "The ‘humanitarian smuggling’ of refugees: criminal offence or moral obligation?" It outlines the concept of ‘humanitarian smuggling’, and then critiques smuggling prohibitions at the international and the EU levels. It argues that these prohibitions are overbroad and vague, failing to meet basic requirements of the rule of law. Moreover, they criminalise acts that fall outside the law’s stated purpose, acts that are often ethically defensible. Finally, the brief analyses existing proposals to improve the framework governing smuggling and provides additional recommendations to decriminalise ‘humanitarian smugglers’.
Transnationalizing the Arabian Peninsula: Local, regional and global dynamics
This seventh issue of 'Arabian Humanities' aims to explore the processes of regionalisation and globalisation in the Arabian Peninsula by focusing the analysis on the oil-exporting countries that are members of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). We decided to examine the dynamics of extraversion and integration of their economies, societies, cultures and political systems through the lens of “transnationalism”.
Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons
Chapter in: The Oxford Handbook of International Organizations (edited by Jacob Katz Cogan, Ian Hurd, and Ian Johnstone) About the book: Virtually every important question of public policy today involves an international organization. From trade to intellectual property to health policy and beyond, governments interact with international organizations in almost everything they do. Increasingly, individual citizens are directly affected by the work of international organizations. Aimed at academics, students, practitioners, and lawyers, this book gives a comprehensive overview of the world of international organizations today. It emphasizes both the practical aspects of their organization and operation, and the conceptual issues that arise at the junctures between nation-states and international authority, and between law and politics. While the focus is on inter-governmental organizations, the book also encompasses non-governmental organizations and public policy networks. With essays by the leading scholars and practitioners, the book first considers the main international organizations and the kinds of problems they address. This includes chapters on the organizations that relate to trade, humanitarian aid, peace operations, and more, as well as chapters on the history of international organizations. The book then looks at the constituent parts and internal functioning of international organizations. This addresses the internal management of the organization, and includes chapters on the distribution of decision-making power within the organizations, the structure of their assemblies, the role of Secretaries-General and other heads, budgets and finance, and other elements of complex bureaucracies at the international level. This book is essential reading for scholars, practitioners, and students alike.
#AlanKurdi: Presentation and dissemination of images of suffering on Twitter
On the morning of September 2, 2015, photojournalist Nilüfer Demir captured the image of a drowned three-year-old Syrian refugee, Alan Kurdi, washed ashore on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey. Spread virally through Twitter, the image quickly achieved iconographic status, becoming a symbol of multiple ‘crises’: the humanitarian crisis in the Mediterranean, the Syrian civil war, the failure of European Union (EU) protection, et cetera. Over a year later, the name Alan Kurdi remains familiar and is often invoked; his image is still a symbol for the crises in the Mediterranean. Given this sustained presence, it is opportune to look back with the benefit of hindsight at why the image of Alan’s dead body washed ashore went viral in the first place. Why did Alan’s image reach and resonate with an audience of millions, among countless other harrowing images capturing the crises? Existing literature on images of suffering offers accounts of why certain images invoke more responsiveness than others. However, these accounts have been insufficiently applied to the discursive space of Twitter. While we understand the mechanisms of how the image went viral, we explore what it is about the medium of Twitter that enabled the image of Alan to reach viral status and equally fleeting substantive outcomes. This analysis of the Alan phenomenon—the photo, his story, its viral spread throughout Twitter, the conversations that ensued on Twitter, his sustained presence—provides insights into responsiveness to images of suffering and Twitter as a medium for social change.
EU Asylum Policies: The Power of Strong Regulating States
This book fills a significant lacuna in our understanding of the refugee crisis by analyzing the dynamics that lie behind fifteen years of asylum policies in the European Union. It sheds light on why cooperation has led to reinforced refugee protection on paper but has failed to provide it in practice. Offering innovative empirical, theoretical and methodological research on this crucial topic, it argues that the different asylum systems and priorities of the various Member States explain the EU's lack of initiative in responding to this humanitarian emergency. The author demonstrates that the strong regulators of North-Western Europe have used their powerful bargaining positions to shape EU asylum policies decisively, which has allowed them to impose their will on Member States in South-Eastern Europe. These latter countries, having barely made a mark on EU policies, are now facing significant difficulties in implementing them. The EU will only identify potential solutions to the crisis, the author concludes, when it takes these disparities into account and establishes a functioning common refugee policy. This novel work will appeal to students and scholars of politics, immigration and asylum in the EU.
Research Handbook on EU Labour Law
Globalisation of the economy and increased integration in Europe has led to a stronger focus on EU labour, employment and equality law. The Research Handbook on EU Labour Law draws together contributions from leading academics in this field at an important historic moment in its development. As well as assessing the ‘state of the art’, they identify key research questions for the future. Split into four distinct parts, this Research Handbook provides a comprehensive examination of the major topics in EU labour, employment and equality law. Part One addresses cross-cutting themes, such as the relationship between EU law and national law, the role of human rights in EU labour law and the impact of austerity measures. The subsequent parts offer in-depth treatments of specific topics: Part Two focuses on various issues in individual and collective labour law at EU level, including working time and job security; Part Three provides an analysis of collective labour law, including its implications for trade unions and industrial democracy; and Part Four explores the EU’s interventions in equality law, considering its impact across a range of different protected characteristics.
Safe country? Says who?
Part of a Special Issue in Honour of Professor Guy S Goodwin-Gill. In 1991, Professor Guy S Goodwin-Gill reflected on the emerging safe country of origin (SCO) practices in an editorial in the International Journal of Refugee Law, entitled ‘Safe Country? Says Who?’. This article reflects on developments regarding SCO practices since his prescient editorial, focusing on both Europe, where they originated, and Canada. The article first explores how SCO practices have developed in European law and practice since their inception, including the role of European courts in assessing their legality. This European experience is then contrasted with Canada’s short-lived experiment with its analogous Designated Country of Origin (DCO) system, which, in 2015, was deemed unconstitutional by the Federal Court of Canada.
The Common European Asylum System – Where did it all go wrong?
Chapter in 'The European Union as an Area of Freedom, Security and Justice' (editors, Maria Fletcher, Ester Herlin-Karnell, Claudio Matera). The Common European Asylum System (‘CEAS’) is neither common nor a system. This chapter outlines the content of the legal measures that fall under the CEAS, and the fissures that these measures create in the Area of Freedom, Security and Justice (‘AFSJ’), and indeed in relations between the EU Member States. In Part I, we begin by sketching the legal contents of the CEAS, providing a chronological account of their development. While many important questions concerning process, status and rights both during and after recognition or rejection as a refugee have been harmonised, as asylum processes remain national, many divergences in outcomes and treatment of refugees persist. In Part II, we identify the main structural shortcomings, namely (1) the lack of legal access routes to the EU to claim asylum, (2) tensions between legal duties at borders (such as non-refoulement, the prohibition on collective expulsion and other human rights obligations) and political framings of the nature of ‘effective border controls’ and (3) the pathologies of the Dublin System. This part explains how the fissures in the CEAS became fractures and schisms in 2015, when the EU was faced with large numbers of protection seekers, predominantly arriving irregularly in Greece. The CEAS, as currently designed, makes responsibility-sharing less likely, exacerbating the crisis for those seeking protection. Part III examines the legal responses adopted thus far to deal with the crisis. These include (1) a range of unilateral measures, some legal, some blatantly illegal under EU and international law, and (2) various attempts to respond to the crisis at the EU level on an ad hoc basis, including EU relocation, resettlement and the EU-Turkey ‘deal’; and (3) in May 2016, a package of proposals for harmonisation and centralisation of the CEAS. Our concluding observation is that as yet the EU has not addressed the structural problems identified in Part II.
Jordan’s refugee experiment: a new model for helping the displaced in Jordan
The Syrian refugee crisis has attracted Western attention largely because of its modest spillover into Europe. But this spillover represents a mere fraction of the misery caused by mass displacement today: only around 15 percent of Syria’s 5.8 million refugees have attempted to reach Europe, and the Syrian refugee surge is itself only one of several around the world. The challenge of mass displacement is largely one of geographical concentration: nearly 60 percent of the world’s refugees are hosted by just ten haven countries, each bordering a conflict zone. It is in these countries—Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, in the case of the Syrian civil war—where new approaches are most direly needed. In October, Foreign Affairs published our proposal for a new approach to the Syrian refugee crisis. By allowing displaced Syrians to work in special economic zones (SEZs) in Jordan, we argued, Amman could provide displaced Syrians with the jobs, education, and autonomy they need while advancing its own industrial development. Since our article was published, our idea has gained political traction.
Refugee Economies: Forced Displacement and Development
Refugees have rarely been studied by economists. Despite some pioneering research on the economic lives of refugees, there remains a lack of theory and empirical data through which to understand, and build upon, refugees' own engagement with markets. Yet, understanding these economic systems may hold the key to rethinking our entire approach to refugee assistance. If we can improve our knowledge of the resource allocation systems that shape refugees' lives and opportunities, then we may be able to understand the mechanisms through which these market-based systems can be made to work better and turn humanitarian challenges into sustainable opportunities. This book adopts an inter-disciplinary approach, based on original qualitative and quantitative data on the economic life of refugees, in order to begin to build theory on the economic lives of refugees. It focuses on the case of Uganda because it represents a relatively positive case. Unlike other governments in the region, it has taken the positive step to allow refugees the right to work and a significant degree of freedom of movement through it so-called 'Self-Reliance Strategy'. This allows a unique opportunity to explore what is possible when refugees have basic economic freedoms. The book shows that refugees have complex and varied economic lives, often being highly entrepreneurial and connected to the global economy. The implications are simple but profound: far from being an inevitable burden, refugees have the capacity to help themselves and contribute to their host societies - if we let them.
Local communities: first and last providers of protection
It is often people’s immediate community that provides the first, last and perhaps best tactical response for many people affected by or under threat of displacement. In the 23 feature theme articles in this issue of FMR, authors from around the world – including authors who are themselves displaced – explore the capacity of communities to organise themselves before, during and after displacement in ways that help protect the community. FMR 53 also includes eight ‘general’ articles on other aspects of forced migration.
Thinking ahead: displacement, transition, solutions
The new issue of FMR explores the ideas and practices that are being tried out in order to engage both development and humanitarian work in support of ‘transitions’ and ‘solutions’ for displaced people. What we need, says one author, is “full global recognition that the challenge of forced displacement is an integral part of the development agenda too”. FMR issue 52 includes 32 articles on ‘Thinking ahead: displacement, transition, solutions’, plus ten ‘general’ articles on other aspects of forced migration.
Destination: Europe
Europe is experiencing the mass movements of displaced people in a way that it has largely been immune from for decades. The manifestations of the ‘migration crisis’ are as disparate as the building of fences to stop people crossing normally peaceful borders, the deaths of people transported by smugglers in unseaworthy boats, EU political leaders bickering over a Common European Asylum System and the numbers they will or will not allow into their respective countries, and contentious responses to the disaster that continues to unfold in Syria. Alongside this we also see an upsurge of grass-roots compassion, solidarity and assistance to those whose human suffering on a grand scale in and around Europe constitutes the reality behind the rhetoric. FMR 51 includes 43 articles on ‘Destination: Europe’, plus five ‘general’ articles.
Dayton +20: Bosnia and Herzegovina twenty years on from the Dayton Peace Agreement
Twenty years on from the signing of the Dayton Peace Agreement in November 1995, the consequences of conflict – including the long-term effects of displacement – are still being felt in the Western Balkans. FMR 50 examines the case of people who were displaced from and within Bosnia and Herzegovina as a result of the 1992-95 war, and reflects on the lessons that may be drawn from the successes and failures of the Agreement. FMR 50 includes 20 articles on ‘Dayton +20’, plus five ‘general’ articles.