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Book Review: Transitional Justice and Displacement
This book brings together two fields of humanitarian assistance that have until now occupied separate operational spheres. Transitional justice is concerned with responding to serious human rights violations through measures such as criminal prosecutions, truth-telling, reparations, institutional reform and/or commemoration. By ‘dealing with the past’, transitional justice policies seek to embed future peace and promote development. In contrast, responses to displacement primarily focus on the present context and immediate protection needs of refugees and other displaced populations. Despite the different goals and modes of operation, there are many ways in which these sectors could and should intersect, as this book makes clear. Refugees and other forced migrants have often fled serious human rights violations and share many concerns with populations who remained in their homes, yet they have rarely been included in transitional justice debates and policies. This book presents a reasonable and persuasive case that failure to consider displaced populations in transitional justice policies and policy-making is both illogical and likely to lead to unfair results, such as reintegration programmes which provide support to returning combatants but fail to consider returning refugees.
Book Review: International and Comparative Criminal Justice and Urban Governance: Convergence and Divergence in Global, National and Local Settings
This is a highly successful collection of contributions from leading scholars addressing some of the most pressing questions in governance research. At first glance, it may be difficult to see a unifying logic for discussing ‘international criminal justice’ and ‘comparative criminal justice’ together with ‘urban governance’. However, an excellent introduction by Crawford pulls out synergies between these diverse sectors – shifting conceptions of state sovereignty, relationships between global/local, the control of territory and space – and other authors fulfil the promised exploration of both micro- and macro-dimensions of multi-layered governance.
Protracted refugee situations: politics, human rights and security dimensions
Over two-thirds of the world’s refugees are trapped in protracted refugee situations, struggling to survive in remote and insecure parts of the world. This volume brings together a collection of eminent scholars and practitioners to explore the sources, nature and consequences of these situations and the record of the international community’s attempts to find durable solutions. On this basis, the volume presents new thinking to address protracted refugee situations that incorporates security and development—as well as humanitarian—actors and attempts to reconcile the policy difficulties which have obstructed progress for many years.
Protection and Humanitarian Action in the Post Cold War Period
In recent years, several influential commentators have stated or strongly implied that the advanced industrial democracies are today being overwhelmed by a host of problems - including rapid population growth, the breakup of multi-ethnic states, environmental degredation, and increasing economic differentials between the "developing" and "developed" worlds - for which no effective solutions are at hand. The migration-inducing potential of these post-Cold War developments has been a particular source of concern. This volume provides a counter-catastrophic view of developments and a more sober and balanced assessment of the challenges the United States and other industrial democracies face in the sphere of international migration than that offered in recent years. The first part is devoted to a diagnosis of the problem, revalution of the notion of a "migration crisis" by examining the likely consequences of population growth, environmental degredation, and political conflict in the developing and post-communist worlds. Special attention is also given to the manifestations of these forces in the western hemisphere where they may have direct consequences for immigration to the United States. In the second part the implications for U.S. policy are considered, ranging from promotion of democracy and development of strategies for minimizing international migrations and refugee flows to the intricacies of humanitarian relief and intervention when preventive measures prove ineffective.
UNHCR and World Politics: State Pressures and Institutional Autonomy
This article situates the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) within the context of world politics. States remain the predominant actors in the international political system. But this does not mean that international organizations like the UNHCR are completely without power or influence. Tracing the evolution of the agency over the past half century, this article argues that while the UNHCR has been constrained by states, the notion that it is a passive mechanism with no independent agenda of its own is not borne out by the empirical evidence of the past 50 years. Rather UNHCR policy and practice have been driven both by state interests and by the office acting independently or evolving in ways not expected nor necessarily sanctioned by states.
State Responses to Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Europe
Few, if any phenomena affecting Western Europe as a whole since 1945 have been more far-reaching in their immediate effects or more potentially destabilizing to politics and society over the long term than the accumulative experience of immigration. Messina and his contributors analyze why the major immigrant-receiving states of Western Europe historically permitted and often abetted relatively high levels of postwar migration, and they assess how contemporary governments attempt to govern immigration flows and manage the domestic social and political fallout which it inevitably yields. The central purpose of the volume is to address these questions within the context of the decision-making logics that have demonstratively governed postwar migration to Western Europe in each of its three distinct, but interrelated waves or phases-labor migration, family migration, and humanitarian or forced migration. Messina demonstrates that postwar migration to Western Europe, in all of its phases, has been governed by a set of mutually reinforcing and mostly compatible logics. Of these—the economic, the humanitarian, and the political—the political has predominated over time and is likely to continue doing so into the indefinite future. A major cross-disciplinary analysis that will appeal to political scientists, sociologists, and general researchers and scholars of ethnicity, race relations, and comparative public policy.
West's finger is on trigger, but will it help Iraqi victims?
War in Iraq would spark an exodus of refugees, but the West is unlikely to welcome the displaced with open arms. Gil Loescher reports.
War in Iraq: An Impending Refugee Crisis? Uncertain Risks, Inadequate Preparation and Coordination
As military and diplomatic plans develop for a US-led attack against Iraq, there has been little public discussion about the possibility of a mass exodus of Iraqi refugees as a consequence of this conflict. Nor has there been any consideration given to the implications of a refugee crisis on the security and stability of Iraq’s immediate neighbors in the Middle East. This is surprising, because for the last decade or more there have been massive cross-border flows of Iraqi refugees to neighboring states, creating regional instability and imposing social and economic strains on host countries. Iraqi nationals have also been among the highest number of asylum seekers in Europe. There is also surprisingly little public discussion of the current state of preparedness for a humanitarian crisis in Iraq. Yet, as past humanitarian crises clearly demonstrate, early planning for the uncertainties of military action, especially a refugee crisis, is essential.
Iraq: Refugees, Be Prepared
The pitiful sight of many thousands of Iraqi refugees moving into the mountains on the Turkish border after the 1991 Gulf war touched prime ministers and presidents worldwide. The policy of safe havens was born. But planning for any new refugee crisis is woefully inadequate.
The missing link: the need for comprehensive engagement in regions of refugee origin
Asylum policies in Britain and in the countries of its EU partners are failing to cope with the demands made upon them. With migration pressures mounting and opportunities for legal immigration to many EU states restricted, larger numbers of potential migrants are turning to alternative means of entry and access, namely irregular migration and asylum channels. The responses of states to these challenges have been to adopt more restrictive policies and practices that have considerably changed the balance between immigration control and refugee protection. While states have the right to control entry and enforce their borders, the restrictive measures that have come to dominate policy-making and recent immigration enforcement initiatives in Britain and its European partners do not sufficiently discriminate between asylum seekers and other kinds of migrants, thereby failing to safeguard the right of refugees to seek protection. Current British proposals to move asylum seekers to 'safe areas' in regions of origin fail to understand the burdens, pressures and priorities of countries in the regions, fail to ensure effective protection for those in need, and are unlikely to deliver the UK policy objective of substantially reducing the numbers of illegal entries to Britain. What is needed is an approach that reduces the number of individuals seeking protection in Europe while maintaining the European tradition of providing asylum to those in genuine need. The 'missing link' in asylum policy that would respond both to the concerns of states and to the protection needs of refugees is more comprehensive engagement in regions of refugee origin. It is in this way that western asylum countries, including the UK, may best address the challenge of providing international protection to victims of persecution and respond to their own concerns about asylum.
The Need to Address Conditions in Regions of Refugee Origin
This publication formed part of a report on the conference 'Listening to the evidence: the future of UK resettlement', held in London on 6 February 2003. As the United Kingdom embarks on a new refugee resettlement programme, it is important to consider the conditions of reception, the protection environment and quality of asylum, the processing of refugee claims, and resettlement opportunities in regions of refugee origin. To ignore what is happening in these regions is to risk future failure of resettlement policy and to place refugees and asylum seekers in greater danger. In 2001 and 2002, as part of a team of researchers for the European Council on Refugees and Exiles and the US Committee for Refugees, Professor Loescher conducted field research in Kenya, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon in order to examine what is possible in these regions of refugee origin in terms of conditions of reception, protection environment, and quality of asylum, processing of refugee claims and resettlement opportunities. While refugee status determination (RSD) is carried out in all these states, primarily by UNHCR, and resettlement to the West does take place, including by a selective number of European states, the conditions to carry out refugee processing and resettlement in these regions are barely permissible by international standards and are extremely undependable.
Refugees as grounds for international action
The orthodox definition of international security puts human displacement and refugees at the periphery. In contrast, Refugees and Forced Displacement demonstrates that human displacement can be both a cause and a consequence of conflict within and among societies. As such, the management of refugee movements and the protection of displaced people should be an integral part of security policy and conflict management. Refugees and forcibly displaced people can also represent the starkest example of a tension between human security where the primary focus is the individual and communities and more conventional models of national security tied to the sovereign state and military defence of territory. This book explores this tension with respect to a number of pressing problems related to refugees and forced displacement. It also demonstrates how many of these challenges have been exacerbated by the war on terror since September 11, 2001. The analysis of conflict and human displacement has changed, particularly concerning the links between security and migration. In seeking to address the nexus between security concerns and migratory flows, Refugees and Forced Displacement argues for a reappraisal of the legal, political, normative, institutional and conceptual frameworks through which the international community addresses refugees and displacement.