Emeritus Professor Roger Zetter has a new article in the Journal of Refugee Studies that theorizes development-led responses to large-scale, protracted refugee crises. The article first sketches the emergence and characteristics of development-led responses to contemporary refugee crises, largely embodied in the 2018 Global Compact on Refugees and the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework. It then theorizes the structural determinants and interests that are driving this international engagement, locating this in the core-periphery/metropole-dependency model of economic dualism – a development theory popular in the 1970s to 1990s. Zetter argues that there are remarkable parallels with this model and how we might theorize the current refugee-response regime that subordinates impacted countries to economic-development and containment conditions applied by the advanced ‘imperial’ donor countries of the Global North.
Read the article:'Theorizing the Refugee Humanitarian-development Nexus: A Political-economy Analysis'