Refugees are Migrants: Refugee Mobility, Recognition and Rights (REF-MIG)

Project aims

The RefMig project aims to re-examine the global refugee regime through the lens of mobility and migration. In order to achieve a deeper understanding of the laws, norms, institutions and practices that govern refugeehood and the migration and mobility of refugees, the project examines the division between refugees and (other) migrants in several contexts. The project’s premise, that ‘refugees are migrants’, examines how refugees come to be recognised (or not), and opens up for scrutiny those practices that limit refugee flight and onward mobility, examining how migration control concerns have come to permeate the refugee regime.

RefMig has two main strands. Recognising Refugees is a comparative empirical study of diverse processes for recognising refugees, examining in particular group recognition practices and the role of UNHCR in Refugee Status Determination (RSD). The Organisations of Protection strand examines the role of international organisations in the global migration regime, and how that effects the scope of international protection. This strand currently focuses on the role of the IOM in particular, its obligations, ethos and accountability. Accountability is an overarching theme of RefMig. One of the first project outputs was the 2020 special issue of the German Law Journal entitled ‘Border Justice: Migration and Accountability for Human Rights Violations’.

The RefMig project is a collaborative project based at the RSC and the Centre for Fundamental Rights at the Hertie School in Berlin.