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Ensuring a human rights-compliant end to refugeehood through integration, naturalisation or voluntary repatriation
This thematic paper analyses the legal standards and human rights safeguards that must guide any cessation of refugee protection. Authored by experts in international refugee and human rights law, the paper provides a detailed examination of the conditions under which refugeehood may lawfully come to an end under international refugee and human rights law, and an overview of state practice in this context. This publication contributes to the Council of Europe’s broader efforts to support member states in implementing humane, lawful and coherent migration and asylum policies, in line with its rich acquis and the Council of Europe Action Plan on Protecting Vulnerable Persons in the Context of Migration and Asylum in Europe (2021-2025). By outlining clear standards and practical guidance, the thematic paper aims to assist national authorities, legal practitioners and other stakeholders in ensuring that decisions to end refugee status through integration, naturalisation or voluntary repatriation are guided by established standards and principles of international human rights and refugee law, in full respect for the dignity and safety of the persons concerned.
Exporting labour, importing risk: The paradox of the North Korean Overseas Labour Programme
North Korea’s overseas labour programme exposes a central paradox of totalitarian control: a state that demands absolute obedience at home deliberately sends its citizens abroad, risking ideological exposure in exchange for hard currency. Drawing on ten semi-structured interviews with former North Korean labourers dispatched to Russia between 2007 and 2021, this study investigates how the programme functions simultaneously as coercion, survival strategy, and site of awakening. Chapter One traces Pyongyang’s calculated export of labour and loyalty, highlighting recruitment, surveillance, and the diplomatic use of workers as bargaining chips. Chapter Two examines lived experiences abroad, showing how harsh quotas, surveillance, and forced remittances coexist with small acts of resistance, epistemic rupture, and decisions to defect or quietly return transformed. Chapter Three assesses international responses, sanctions, compliance regimes, and advocacy, arguing that interventions risk reinforcing state control even as they seek to dismantle exploitation. The study concludes that North Korea’s overseas labour system, while designed as a tool of extraction and control, paradoxically seeds its own ideological erosion.
The EU’s Normative Dissensus on Migration: How National Identities Shaped Responses to the European Refugee Crisis
During the so-called European refugee crisis of 2015–16, a ‘normative dissensus’ emerged between the EU member states located at the end of the Balkan route, Germany, Hungary, and Austria. This paper explores the roots of this normative dissensus by operationalizing post-functionalist propositions. It posits that national identity, and its domestic politicization during the late summer of 2015 generated the ‘constraining normative dissensus’ during the refugee crisis. To operationalize the link between identity, domestic politicization, and European dissensus, we employ moral-philosopher Christine Korsgaard’s concepts of ‘self-constitution’ and ‘practical identity’. We then apply this normative-constructivist approach to empirically demonstrate how the diversely constituted national identities of Germany, Austria, and Hungary led to different foundations for moral argumentation during the refugee crisis. As for the European integration process more generally, our findings highlight the importance of a shared European identity to achieve a normative consensus in areas that touch upon migration and citizenship.
Violence against Women and Regimes of Exception: Undoing Discrimination in Migration Law
This book analyses migration law’s treatment of women. It identifies patterns of disadvantage, scrutinises justifications for differential treatment, and argues for migration status reform. It conceptualises and then delineates obligations in relation to violence against women. Centrally, it brings together a series of distinct responses to violence experienced in the context of migration control and offers a new framework for their evaluation. To do so, it integrates doctrinal, empirical, and theoretical material to understand the difference that migration status makes to an experience of violence and to establish how the resulting compounded disadvantage should be remedied. The analysis starts in the UK and with the European Convention on Human Rights, broadening to connect with European Union law and the Council of Europe’s Trafficking and Istanbul Conventions. This approach provides valuable insights into the role and ability of national courts, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Court of Justice of the European Union to scrutinise different forms of discriminatory treatment. While this book focuses on rules and regimes in the UK and Europe, its arguments can be applied in a broader range of jurisdictions and contexts. Consonant with the feminist jurisprudence and approaches to international law with which it engages, the book is structured around the legal challenges that migrant women have brought to the rules that determine their status.
The welfare and market effects of delays in humanitarian assistance
Delays in aid delivery are common, yet their impacts on households and markets remain theoretically ambiguous and empirically understudied. The Permanent Income Hypothesis predicts consumption smoothing, while models with financial constraints or present bias predict sharp consumption declines. We test these pre¬dictions using high-frequency data and random interview timing in a large refugee camp in Kenya. While households smooth consumption under regular aid cycles, delays reduce food consumption and well-being, with downstream effects on in-tertemporal preferences and cognitive function. Local prices respond to aid timing, and credit access mitigates impacts, but at a 17% premium. Results support credit constraint models.
Refugee Governance in the Arab World: The International Refugee Regime and Global Politics
The Arab region has played an oversized role in hosting refugees. Yet a paucity of literature exists on how the region has contributed to shaping the international refugee regime. This anthology presents the first comprehensive study of how Arab states interact with the international refugee regime. It offers a multidisciplinary perspective bringing together historical, political, legal, sociological, and anthropological approaches. Through a wide range of case studies, the anthology explores how Arab states have created norms and practices of refugee governance beyond – and not necessarily aligned with – international refugee law. It also analyses how Arab states have negotiated and contested international agreements and processes. In doing so, the book 'de-exceptionalizes' the Arab region, positioning states and societies as norm shapers with an impact on global politics beyond the Arab world.
Managing forced migration: an alternative to dangerous journeys?
Can the international refugee protection system be reoriented in a way that enables the victims of persecution and violence to find safety in other States without risking their lives on hazardous routes?
Refugia - a reflection five years on
Refugia: Radical Solutions to Mass Displacement was first published in English by Routledge in 2020. That short book was conceived as a challenge to the conventional arguments of the time, which, we thought, gravely underestimated the gravity, magnitude, and increasing salience of mass displacement caused particularly by conflict, persecution, and other factors. At the same time, advocates for refugees and many scholars misjudged the extent of the shift to the populist right that was already evident in many receiving countries, a shift that has accelerated and resulted in the increasingly harsh treatment of refugees, asylum-seekers, and irregular migrants. We proposed an innovative solution – a transnational network of many refugiums, collectively described as Refugia, where, alongside existing nation-states, displaced populations could develop their own self-organised and self-governed polities. Several responses to this idea were sceptical, as was only to be expected, but we had a good reception in the Global South, a Turkish translation, and some useful critiques, most of which are posted at this URL: https://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/project/the-refugia-project. This Working Paper comprises the English version of the Afterword to a French edition, to be published five years after the original edition. We review the continuing deterioration of the global landscape, including the impact of COVID-19, the increasing restrictiveness of national immigration policies, and the extensive conflicts driving migration. The responses by refugees and their supporters are also discussed, including the use of digital networks, the rise of refugee-led organisations, the development of cities and universities of sanctuary, and the emergence of nascent Refugia-like polities. We continue to affirm the relevance of radical ideas, such as Refugia, and briefly suggest ways in which they might develop.
What happens when humanitarian aid is cut or delayed?
Humanitarian aid systems are under mounting pressure, with key donors like the US and UK cutting funding despite growing needs. New research in one of the world’s largest refugee camps shows that aid cuts and delays have dramatic impacts on food consumption, food insecurity, and overall welfare, while also straining local food and credit markets.
Bonded citizenship: Caste, Partition, and the prevention of exit
Historians of the Indian Partition focus on the permit systems the governments of India and Pakistan put in place to stem refugee entry and prevent the return of evacuees. However, the prevention of exit became, alongside non-entrée and the prevention of return, part of an official strategy of immobility in South Asia directed at marginalized castes. At Partition, Pakistan saw the labour of ‘non-Muslim’ marginalized castes as essential to its national wealth. It believed it had to retain them at all costs. On the other side of the border, the article discusses the Indian government’s laggardly, and often indifferent, response to the struggles of caste-oppressed groups trying to migrate to India. The article builds on scholarship on mobility capital and partial citizenship in the aftermath of Partition to argue that with the prevention of exit, citizenship incorporated an imposed nationalization that embodied the status of marginalized castes as more than a minority and produced a form of bonded citizenship.
UK-France Cooperation on Border Control: Efficacy, Deterrence and Human Rights
The UK and France have worked together to jointly control their borders since the authorisation for construction of the Channel Tunnel in 1986. In the past 20 years, this cooperation has been significantly reinforced and expanded upon. The UK and France have engaged in an array of measures to achieve their aim of preventing ‘irregular’ migration from France to the UK. This includes the establishment of joint mechanisms to police and securitise the northern French coast, joint surveillance operations and the expansion of British-run detention facilities. This paper demonstrates that cooperation between the UK and France has not been successful in achieving its aims of preventing and deterring ‘irregular’ migrants from entering the UK. The measures taken under this cooperation create and reinforce harmful conditions for asylum seekers. I argue that the only way in which bilateral cooperation externalisation policies like those between the UK and France can achieve their aims is through the violation of the human rights of asylum seekers. Furthermore, I contend that the cooperation between the UK and France should partially be seen as a political façade, which demonstrates to the British public that the government is taking strong action against ‘irregular’ migration.
Parenting dilemmas: Syrian refugee families resettled in the UK
Drawing on ethnographic research, we explore challenges associated with parenting practices within Syrian refugee families who came to Oxfordshire, UK, through a third-country resettlement programme. Adapting to a new living environment with differing socio-cultural norms, parents experienced dilemmas and difficulties related to transmitting Arab-Islamic cultural values and religious practices to their children while simultaneously wishing for their children’s smooth integration into the host country. Some challenges were exacerbated by declining parental authority and the absence of extended family support, on which their previous child-rearing practices were based. Because resettled refugees arrived in the UK with little knowledge of the host society, unlike immigrants who choose their destination based on existing knowledge and networks, child-rearing by resettled refugee parents can be overwhelming and stressful, and should be understood differently from that of immigrant parents.
Humility, autonomy, and simplicity: three principles for humanitarian design
This article proposes three key principles for humanitarian design, drawing on historical and ethnographic research into previous attempts to produce innovations in the nutrition and shelter sectors. It begins by recounting a post-war scheme for humanitarian nutrition in order to illustrate three recurring failings in innovation: triumphalism, under-representation, and over-complexity. The first failing can be seen when ideas are inappropriately and publicly celebrated as game changing while delivering only marginal improvements and leaving structural inequalities intact. The second occurs when designs are created without consulting the final recipient, whose desires and needs are assumed from limited knowledge. The third is apparent when a design introduces complicated and burdensome elements that make it inappropriate for the task at hand. After outlining these three problems the article moves to consider some more recent shelter projects, particularly those developed after the 2015 ‘summer of migration’ in Europe. From these examples, the article draws out three corrective principles for humanitarian design: humility in approach, simplicity in application, and the promotion of autonomy as a final aim. The article develops these in detail and then concludes that such principles can help re-orient humanitarian practice.
Refugee mobility and livelihoods in Uganda
Refugees in Uganda predominantly reside in rural settlements, but they are free to move within the country and engage in income-generating activities. Given the limited availability of farmland and livelihood opportunities within settlements and the gradual reductions in the humanitarian aid provided to refugees, freedom of movement can play an important role in their economic lives. To evaluate how freedom of movement contributes to the livelihoods of settlement-based refugees in Uganda, the Refugee Economies Programme conducted mixed-method research among South Sudanese and Congolese refugees in two refugee settlements in Uganda’s borderlands: Pagirinya and Kyangwali. Across communities and sites, movement between settlements and urban areas is uncommon and very rarely undertaken in order to engage in income-generating activities. Trips to urban areas are mostly undertaken to access health or education services. In some cases, refugees are more likely to undertake trips to their country of origin than to urban areas in Uganda. Short-distance, daily movements around the settlements are common, with most refugees reporting leaving the settlement several times in the past month. However, such movements are undertaken almost exclusively in order to exploit resources such as vegetation and land, engage in low-paying and irregular casual labour, and, to a more limited extent, engage in small-scale, informal trade. Settlement-based refugees mostly move in order to survive under conditions of extreme precarity. Maintaining humanitarian aid while providing sustained and tangible support to agricultural and off-farm enterprises that target customers and markets outside the settlements are essential for promoting more sustainable and dignified livelihoods for refugees.