international refugee regime midterm

Hamlin

• distinction between migrants and refugees is a legal fiction, the distinction doesn’t accurately reflect people’s experience but persists because it benefits powerful states by allowing them to restrict migration while appearing to uphold humanitarian obligations

• artifical because people migrate for overlapping reasons

EVIDENCE:

• cites a University of Warwick study interviewing people who crossed the Mediterranean into Europe.

• Respondents described combinations of political instability, insecurity, economic hardship, and other pressures —→ overlap, not exclusive migration for one reason.

EVIDENCE:

• asylum seekers from China had refugee recognition rates ranging from under 15% in Australia to approximately one-third in the United States and almost two-thirds in Canada.

• If refugee status simply reflected an objective distinction, recognition rates would not vary so dramatically across receiving states.

Legal recognition does not consistently correspond to the greatest humanitarian need. Access to protection can depend on wealth, geography, and government decisions.

• Wealthier Sri Lankans could afford to travel to Western countries, where they could apply for asylum and potentially be legally recognized as refugees.

• Poorer Sri Lankans often couldn't afford to reach those countries. Instead, they traveled to the Gulf and took jobs, so they were treated as migrant workers. (Major Gulf destinations, including Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar, were not parties to the 1951 Refugee Convention and generally did not operate comparable formal refugee-status determination systems so admitted as migrants)

Wealthy were able to recieve refugee protection but others who couldn’t go as far moved and took jobs so classified as migrants. The distinction between migrants and refugees isn't always determined by why someone left. It can also depend on where they end up and what legal protections are available there.

Price

Arguement:

• granting asylum is a political weapon, it is a way for one country to look at another and say your government is acting like an outlaw and breaking rules of human basic decency

• The distinction between persecution and hardship is important, because the 1951 Convention prioritizes persecution as a basis for refugee status and serves as a political remedy for state wrongdoing

• people fleeing disasters deserve protection just not asylum

Evidence:

• montserrat volcanic eruption: after 7 years with temorary protection status, volcano deemed eruupting for forseeable future and had TPS revoked since no longer temorary, cruel because people were allowed to build families and lives just to have it taken away

• Lautenberg Amendment (1989) → The Lautenberg Amendment presumed persecution for certain favored groups, making it easier for them to qualify, while people from other countries with potentially stronger claims didn't receive the same advantage.

  • refugee protection shouldn't depend entirely on politically influenced resettlement programs. Asylum must remain available as a separate pathway for people with valid persecution claims.

Arendt

Arguement:

• Human rights are supposedly universal, but in practice depend on belonging to a political community that can enforce them.

• When a person loses their country (becomes stateless), you should be able to fall back on basic human rights, but once thrown out of a country no authority exists to protect you and speak for you

• “Right to have rights”- the most fundamental right is belonging to a political community where your actions and opinions matter to others.

• Abstract humanitarianism—> You're human, so you have human rights. but arendt is like which political community is actually going to protect those rights?

Evidence:

• someone who committed a crime could have more legal recognition than an innocent stateless person, because the criminal still existed within a legal system.

• Jews and italy: rejected offer of mass citizenship because abstract humanitarianism rights given by random states are not secure, and only a community could give them secure rights —→ rejection illustrates how deeply people had come to associate secure rights with national belonging.

• Nazi extermination - jews stripped of citizenship and forced into statelessness, but no other country would claim them so they knew they could liquidate them without intervention —> human rights rights offered little practical protection once people lost membership in a political community capable of defending their rights.

said

Arguements:

• exile is a lasting rift between home, identity, and belonging.

• We shouldn’t romantize as a source of creativity because it minimizes suffering of displaced people.

• Exile strengthens national identity because losing your homeland can make belonging to it even more important.

Evidence:

• Rashid hussein- palestinian married a hewish woman and felt out of place in western american capitals, causing him to fall in a downward spiral and pass away from a fire illustrating a harsh reality

• Palestinians displaced from their homeland developed and maintained a strong Palestinian national identity through their shared experience of exile. However, this creates a bit of hostility as it can make them adopt an us vs. them (view others with suspicion) mentality excluding outsiders. —> They focus so intensely on the part (their own national group) that they can lose sight of the whole (the broader humanity they share with others).

hadaad

Arguement:

• refugees are not an anolmaly or sign of the international sytem going wrong, they are an inevitable and structural consequence of the modern international system

• Sedentarist bias- international system relies on a rigid “state-citizen-territory” trinity, where everyone is assumed to be stationary and boxed into a territory and protected by a government

• because the entire map is carved up by modern political borders, a breakdown in the domestic state-citizen contract forces people into physical motion and they fall into an unadministered no man’s land or gap between sovreigns.

• Citizen can’t exist without inventing the “foreigner,” nation states dynamically require the refugee as a constitutive “other” to define internal boundaries, parameters, and national identity.

Examples:

• French huguenots—> fleeing catholic france because king louis revoked edict of names because france sought religious uniformity, defining national belonging through Catholicism and pushing Protestants to flee across borders so they are the earliest modern refugees —> used religious uniformity to define who was inside the nation forcing protestants across jurisdictional borders.

• French revolution- shifted international legitimacy from kings to “the people/nation” —> strict category of citizen vs. foreigner rendering royalists and aristocrats new ideological outsider. Refugees increasingly became a question of political allegiance and national belonging, not just religious persecution.

• british alien acts —> Introduced registration and monitoring requirements for foreigners arriving in Britain, including French émigrés. Asserted state authority to regulate entry and distinguish between different categories of foreigners. Refugee admission became subject to government discretion rather than an automatic entitlement to protection.

Abdelaaty

Arguement:

• a country’s choice to accept or reject asylum seekers is driven by foreign policy goals and ethnic policies, rather than material wealth or humanitarian compassion.

• States favour refugees from rival countries becasue it shames and condems the sending country —> states treat refugees from geo-political rivals generously to weaken those regimes and discredit them globally and sponsor opposition activities (also reject refugees from friends to avoid conflict)

• Favour people from same ethnic groups to protect domestic ethnic balance in favour of ruling coalition and helps them to stay in power (reinforces size of ethnic community and thus reinforces political support).

Evidence:

• Cuba vs. hatian admittance: US welcomed cubans seeking asylum to hit back at communist popponents, but shut out haitians fleeing a friendly regime. Accepting Cubans helped discredit communist Cuba, whereas Haitians offered less geopolitical advantage.

• Kosovo crisis: displaced kosover albanians refugees were welcomed in Albania but faced resistance in Macedonia, where authorities feared strengthening the ethnic Albanian minority. —> refugee admissions can change domestic ethnic balances and affect political power.

Kalin

Arguement:

• Internally displaced persons (IDPs) deserve recognition as a distinct group of concern because displacement creates specific protection needs that ordinary humanitarian assistance may not address.

• To be considered IDP:

  • involuntary/coerced movement

  • moving away from home

  • occuring within multiple contexts (rarely a single cause, conflicts, violence, disasters, development projects

• sovreignty must be understood as responsibility, the international comunity can hold states accountable to respect, protect, and fufill rights of displaced populations through human rights treaty bodies and peer review mechanisms.

• Hathaway argues element of containment, where kalin argues that both IDP and refugees should exist at same time because not everyone who is displaced can safely remain in their own country, but not everyone needs to cross a border to find safety.

Evidence:

• Port au prince earthwuake: after earthquake there were arguements about who counted as an IDP…losing social network, assets and safety is what makes you displaced even if you never leave your neighbourhood. —> Definitions of displacement need to reflect people's actual circumstances, not simply how far they traveled.

• Ukranian IDP certifiacte system: ukraine forced idp’s to register and get certificate and those displaced without were blocked from recieving welfare so backfired —> IDP rights should arise from their existing human rights and circumstances, not depend on the government officially recognizing them as displaced.

Batchelor

Arguement:

• nationality should be about anyone having a geniune and effective connection to a state rather than depend solely on legal rules

  • Jus soli: passport based on birth

  • Jus sanguinis: passport on parents

• International community is too focused on high profile, political banishments and is blind to wave of defacto statelessness (high passport fees, banned citizen, collapsed state)

• Citizenship laws can create statelessness, legal nationality does not always mean effective protection

Evidence:

Nottebohm case: baseline international lawsuit where a german living in an guatemala applied for liechtenstein passport despite limited connections to country, and guatemala treated him as a german enemy national. UN ruled that nationality requires a genuine social attachment and connection of existence. He had citizenship legally, but his actual life, residence, and connections were overwhelmingly elsewhere.

1997 european convention on nationality: 10 years of habitual residence is indication of link, entitling statelss to facilitate citizenship processing.

de jure statelessness

refusing citizenship legally, if your parents aren't of nationality of country even if born there or you’re born abroad and the country doesn’t grant citizenship to children born abroad

niether country considers the baby a citizen.

de facto statelessness

citizen on paper, but not effectively in practice. You qualify for citizenship but can’t get it, or your country refuses to let you enter.

Orchard

arguement:

• International refugee protection evolves through crises that expose weaknesses in existing arrangements, allowing states, institutions, and norm entrepreneurs to reshape the norms governing refugees. These changes can expand protection or restrict it, depending on which norms states adopt.

• States engage in “schizophrenic dual practice” —> rhetorically and financially support 1951 framework & unhcr while also designing domestic non-entrée strategies to prevent seekers from stepping onto territory to claim rights

Evidence:

• Huguenots: receiving states offered protection through domestic law, helping establish refugees as a distinct category of people needing protection outside their own state —> emerged through changing state pracitce rather than convention

• Russia refugee crisis: before protection mainly each state responsibility, but revolution produced massive displacement rendering existing institutions not strong enough. So norm entrepreneurs helped persuade states that refugee protection should not be handled exclusively through individual national policies. —> cooperation wasn’t automatic but opportunity for persuasion was created.

norm entrepreneurs

These are individuals or organizations that promote new understandings of appropriate state behavior. UNHCR

McAdam

Arguement:

• The right to leave your country is protected but no one has to let you in. —> UDHR Article 13 (2), limited by state sovereignty

• Even right to leave is not always respected, and states have repeatedly restricted ability to leave

• “climate refugee” has zero international standing because you can’t get asylum unless fearing persecution

Evidence:

• Nazi germany’s restrictions on freedom of movement during WWII helped motivate the inclusion of the right to leave in a modern international human rights law —> If governments have unrestricted power to decide whether their citizens can leave, they can effectively trap people within a country where they're being persecuted.

• UNDHR drafting: USSR argued for strict national sovreignty to restrict freedom of movement including right to leave, however the broader attempt to make that be under unrestricted state control was rejected.

• Article 12(3) permits certain restrictions if they meet legal requirements like necessity to protect national security or public order.

• historical rules requiring military service before departure and, in some countries, husbands' permission for married women to emigrate.

  • The conflict between individual freedom and state control existed long before modern border restrictions.

• Tetiota v. new Zealand: Tetioa fled to NZ and applied for refugee status bc of rising sea levels etc. and NZ courts and UN human rights committee rejected claim bc not facing human persecution

International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Article 12(2) of the ___ protects the right to leave any country, including your own.

But there's a catch: states can impose certain restrictions, provided they meet the treaty's legal requirements.

treaty = binding

UDHR

Declares the fundamental human rights everyone should have. It's not itself a binding treaty. Declaration = not binding

Schwartz

Arguement:

• return without refoulement: pressuring of refugees into returning to countries of origin while maintaining appearence of complying with international law —> appearence vs. reality

• West uses non-entrée while global south uses return w/o refoulement.

  • constructive refoulement: host state using indirect means (like creating harsh living condiitons or indefinite detention) to coerce asylum seeker to “voluntarily return” to country where they face persecution.

• states investing in legal loops proves non-refoulement norms are so strong states have to be creative to appear to comply while not actually

Examples:

• Tanzania to Burundi: welcomed 200,000 burundian refugees prima facie and shut down camp institutions & markets, the rumors of camp closure forced people to return after deeming burundi “safe” despite ongoing human rights violations.

• Lebanon’s dyrian de-registration campaign: allowed unhcr to register refugees, but then wanted to reduce so they prssured UNHCR to reasses whether registered syrians actually qualified (circular travel trap, individual risk assessment, refugees who worked deemed migrants and refugee status revoked)

Matthews

Arguement:

• Although non-refoulement has expanded through international treaties, customary law, and court decisions, states continually develop strategies to avoid their obligations, including offshore interceptions, territorial loopholes, and coercive policies that effectively force refugees to return.

• International law exapnds refugee protection while states find new ways to restrict it.

• Indirect refoulement: state can not evade duties by sending to third country, must be safe

• states must execute individual status determination before executing any return —→ must interview

Evidence:

Hirsi Jamaa v. Italy: italy intecepted asylum seekers and returned to libya without assessing protection needs, ruled italy violated obligations even though interception was outside italian territory. —> Italy attempted to prevent asylum seekers from reaching its borders, but the court found that Italy's control over the intercepted people triggered its human rights obligations (state excercisises absolute jurisdiction over any individual on board its military vessels)

M.S v Belgium: iraqi asylum seeker locked in indefinite immigration detention with no real prospect of freedom so consented to going back—>The European Court of Human Rights found that his return did not constitute free consent.

Gibney

Arguement:

• argues that Western states undermine asylum through non-arrival measures that prevent refugees from reaching protection, create spaces of reduced legal accountability, and unfairly shift responsibility onto poorer countries.

Evidence:

sale v hatian council: The United States intercepted Haitian asylum seekers on boats in international waters. It returned them to Haiti without assessing their individual asylum claims. The US government argued that non-refoulement did not apply outside US territory.

European roma rights v prauge airport: british excercising control over refugee ability to escape persecution even though not on british territoryj

hyndman and mountz

Arguement:

• Australia and the EU use geographical strategies to externalize asylum, preventing refugees from reaching territories where they can claim legal protection. This process, which the authors call neo-refoulement, shifts asylum from a rights-based legal system to a securitized political system focused on exclusion.

• Neo-refoulement-Preventing access to asylum by returning asylum seekers to transit countries or regions of origin before they reach a territory where they could make a claim.

Evidence:

• Australia excised several islands from its migration zone and transferred asylum seekers to offshore processing centers, including Nauru and Manus Island. People processed offshore faced restricted access to Australian asylum procedures, lawyers, and advocates —> chauka please tell us the time.

• also these excised islands caused them to apply a more difficult method of getting refugee status due to location

abdelaaty 2

arguement:

Violating refugees' rights is generally ineffective at deterring asylum applications or refugee arrivals. Deportation, detention, and restrictions on freedom of movement do not consistently reduce refugee flows and may even be associated with more arrivals. Restrictions on employment are the main exception, but their estimated deterrent effects are small.

evidence:

Trump/mexico situation: Officials explicitly justified detention as a way to discourage other families from arriving but didn’t work because refugees have limited information and existing social networks can matter more than specific asylum policies.

lightfoot

Arguement:

Indigenous nations can exercise sovereign authority and international political identity alongside existing states, challenging the Westphalian assumption that sovereignty belongs exclusively to territorially bounded nation-states.

Evidence:

• Hudenosaunee Confederacy's use of its own passports.

• Guswentah (Two Row Wampum): A 17th-century treaty with Dutch colonists envisioning two peoples traveling side by side, neither interfering with the other's governance.

barnett and finemore

Arguement:

International organizations (IOs) are not simply instruments of states. As bureaucracies, they develop their own authority, expertise, rules, and organizational cultures, enabling them to act independently of states. But it can develop a “pathological behaviour (IO's internal rules and subcultures can take on a life of their own, leading to unintended and harmful outcomes)” causing it to act in ways undermining own mission.

examples:

UNHCR rohingya repatriation: supposed to protect refugees, but returned to unsafe conditions in Burma as preferred form of protection to prioritize its insitutional preference. They feared bangladesh would try to forcibly return refugees again so they thought it was best choice to organize it themselves and monitor.

Feldman

Arguement:

• Humanitarian organizations don't just identify refugees but actively shape refugee lives rights and political identities.

• classifying palestinian refugees has 3 major consequences:

  • new forms of governance- become subject to bureaucratic monitoring and regulation

  • new experiences of loss- changes in eligibility can strip refugees of services and assistance even though their displacement hasn’t changed

  • new opportunities for political claims- becomes a way for refugees to demand rights including return and compensation

example:

lebanese family of 9- unrwa reduced allocation to 5 rations after investigated income, and mother argued cutting rations violated rights, and UNRWA defended saying limited resources and need to go to poorer families. —→Refugees can lose material security through changes in administrative eligibility even though they remain refugees.

• additional form of dispossession: people already displaced from their homes become vulnerable to losing the assistance on which they rely.

• Wanted to register all palestinians becasue could doccument displacement and support claims concerning return and compensation but other officials resisted because UNRWA’s mandate focused on relief than political claims.

Bradley

Arguement:

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) has evolved from a state-serving migration logistics agency into a powerful global organization that increasingly recognizes responsibilities toward migrants themselves. However, its constitution still prioritizes member states, and its dependence on government-funded projects creates tensions between managing migration for states and protecting migrants' rights. BUT this doesn’t mean it just has no HR obligations.

evidence:

• 1951 founding outside of the UN- IOM originated as a state-serving logistical organization shaped by Cold War interests. State interests not independent.

• 2012 MCOF & 2015 MiGOF-: IOM adopted internal frameworks explicitly committing the organization to humanitarian principles, international standards, and migrants' rights. International organizations can develop new protection commitments through internal policies even without formally changing their constitutions.

• 2016 joined UN- IOM's pursuit of legitimacy and influence encouraged stronger human rights commitments, but its financial dependence on states continued to create accountability concerns.

turner

Arguement:

• argues that humanitarian organizations' portrayal of Syrian refugees as hardworking entrepreneurs reproduces colonial racial hierarchies by presenting Syrians as more capable and deserving than African refugees.

• He also argues that celebrating entrepreneurship reflects neoliberal humanitarianism, which emphasizes refugees' economic independence rather than their political rights and need for protection.

evidence:

• humanitarian workers comparing syrian and african rfugees, saying syrians wanted jobs where as refugees in kenya only wanted more aid —> reproduces colonial racial hierarchy

• Pizza shop tweet by UNHCR- Humanitarian organizations market Syrians as economically productive and relatable to Western donors, positioning them closer to ideals associated with whiteness.

• Za’atari’s 3,000 businesses established in a camp - Celebrating refugees' self-reliance can obscure structural barriers and shift responsibility for survival away from states and humanitarian organizations.

Sadiq & Tsourapas

Arguement:

• Postcolonial states use migration and citizenship policies to build national identity and assert sovereignty, but in doing so, they often reproduce colonial systems of control and inequality.

  1. Nation-building vs. weak institutions: They want to control borders and define citizenship but initially lack the capacity to do so.

  2. Territorial sovereignty vs. cross-border identity: They want clearly defined national borders while also recognizing ethnic, religious, or cultural communities that extend beyond those borders.

Examples:

• Nasser's government introduced a residency requirement dating back to 1900, allowing authorities to deny citizenship to Jewish and foreign-descended Egyptians who could not produce documentation. —> Postcolonial governments used citizenship and migration controls to construct national identity through exclusion, reproducing colonial-era practices.

• India's Emigration Act (1983): India required special emigration clearances for lower-skilled workers traveling to the Gulf while exempting higher-skilled emigrants from those requirements —> Postcolonial migration states reproduced colonial labor hierarchies by subjecting different groups of migrants to unequal levels of surveillance and control.

1951 UN convention

• Five grounds of persecution: Race, religion, nationality, particular social group, political opinion.

• Must cross an international border.

• Non-refoulement (Article 33): Generally prohibits returning refugees to territories where their life or freedom would be threatened.

• Originally contained temporal (when occurred, so only applied to people who became refugees because of events before 1951) and optional geographic limitations (States could choose to apply the Convention only to people displaced by events in Europe, or to people displaced by qualifying events anywhere in the world), substantially removed by the 1967 Protocol.

1969 OAU convention

• Applies to refugee protection in Africa.

• Does not require individualized persecution when the expanded grounds apply (expands protection from persecution-based claims to people fleeing broader crises that force populations across borders)

• Recognizes displacement arising from broader political and security crises.

• Retains the requirement of crossing an international border.

1984 cartagena

• Developed in response to displacement and civil conflicts in Central America.

• Does not require individualized persecution under its expanded definition.

• Includes people fleeing widespread violence and serious human rights violations.

• Non-binding declaration, unlike the 1951 and OAU conventions, although many Latin American countries have incorporated it into domestic law.

2009 african union kampala convention

• The key difference is that IDPs remain inside their country.

• It is a legally binding regional treaty for states that are parties.

• Requires states to prevent arbitrary displacement, protect and assist IDPs, and support durable solutions.

• Recognizes that displacement can result from conflict, disasters, and development projects.

nation building vs. weak institutions

they want to control borders and define citizenship but initially lack the capacity to do so.

territorial sovreignty vs. corss border identity

They want clearly defined national borders while also recognizing ethnic, religious, or cultural communities that extend beyond those borders.

Sedentarist bias

international system relies on a rigid “state-citizen-territory” trinity, where everyone is assumed to be stationary and boxed into a territory and protected by a government

this is a hadaad mention and said

Neo-refoulement

hyndman and mountz idea- states use measures outside their territory to prevent asylum seekers from reaching places where they could claim protection.

return without refoulement

States can pressure recognized refugees into returning home without formally deporting them, allowing governments to evade the prohibition on refoulement.—> schwarts idea