Amidst heated debate on immigration to countries of the Global North, asylum and refugee protection is becoming increasingly restricted and difficult to access. In a context of multiple global conflicts, violence, and persecution of different social groups, increasing poverty, and the impacts of climate change, nearly 120 million people are forcibly displaced around the world. But the political responses to displacement – both at national and international levels – have shifted increasingly towards protection of borders rather than protection of those trying to cross them to reach safety.
Many of the world’s wealthier countries are in the process of building walls and reinforcing border security in an attempt to prevent refugees from reaching their territory. How and why have we come to this point? And what can we do to change or resist these exclusionary policies? These are two of the central questions addressed by the various contributors to our Research Handbook on Asylum and Refugee Policy.
The Eurocentric foundations of the international refugee regime are evident in current debate and research on asylum and refugee policies.
Offering a comprehensive multi-disciplinary analysis with contributors drawn from different regions and varying academic disciplines, the volume explores national, regional, and international responses to refugees and forced migration. It examines how asylum and refugee policies have evolved since the adoption of the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, and how and why gaps in protection are increasing today.
The book also tries to include voices from outside academia, and we are pleased that some of the chapters were authored or co-authored by contributors who themselves have migration experience, or experience within civil society organisations working with asylum seekers and refugees.
Understanding the Historical Context of the Refugee Regime
To understand the current debates and evolutions in asylum and refugee policies it is important to place these in historical context and to understand the ways that refugee policies and laws have been shaped by both geopolitics and the growth of the humanitarian industry.
Morris, for example, argues that asylum has grown both as a result of the institutionalisation of the refugee industry and the desires of nation states (principally in the Global North) to control their borders. It is important also to understand the way in which the 1951 Refugee Convention was adopted following the Second World War, at a time of mass displacement in Europe, and the start of the Cold War, but also as many countries in the Global South were struggling for independence from colonisation.
Gender-related persecution against women remains inadequately addressed in asylum and refugee regimes.
It can be argued that the varying ways in which those fleeing from these different conflicts were treated in terms of access or not to refugee protection, illustrates the colonialist, racist, and exclusionary assumptions on which the Convention is based. The Convention thus continues to marginalise States and refugees in and from the Global South.
The Eurocentric foundations of the international refugee regime are evident in current debate and research on asylum and refugee policies, where there is a continuing focus on the “refugee receiving” countries in the Global North, with a mobilisation of discourse of “crisis” to describe the supposed pressures experienced by these countries in the face of growing numbers of people arriving to seek asylum.
However, this Eurocentric viewpoint ignores the fact that the majority of refugees remain in the countries of the Global South and in their regions of origin. In doing so it renders invisible various alternative refugee responses and protection regimes which are developed worldwide. Countries of Latin America, for example, have asylum and refugee regimes, including some good practices which are frequently ignored or misunderstood by those outside of the region.
Securitisation and Violence
The above-mentioned “crisis discourse” concerning the arrival of asylum seekers and refugees in countries of the Global North has been instrumentalised by governments to limit the number of those who are granted protection. Increasingly these countries are closing their borders and putting into place policies and laws which make it quasi-impossible for racialised migrants from the Global South to gain protection.
This is shown by the externalisation of asylum policy, with States attempting to push the responsibility for border control onto neighbouring countries and to process asylum claims outside of their own territories. Externalisation involves a range of different policies and instruments (formalised migration policies and visa regimes, bilateral and multilateral policy initiatives between states, ad hoc policies and practices), but they all have the goal of limiting the number of migrants arriving in a country’s national territory and placing the responsibility of ‘controlling’ migration on third countries.
The US, for example, has put huge pressure on Mexico to prevent refugees from crossing borders, whilst the European Union has made deals with neighbouring countries such as Turkey, Morocco, or Tunisia, paying their governments huge sums to prevent migrants from leaving these countries to arrive in the EU. And the UK under the previous Conservative Government, adopted legislation aiming to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda.
This securitisation and militarisation of borders has made journeys for those seeking asylum longer, more difficult, and more dangerous, with increasing numbers of deaths at borders and on migration journeys. But asylum seekers and refugees should not be viewed as merely vulnerable victims, and it is vital to understand their strategies of survival and of resistance to these violent regimes.
There has also been a growth in varying forms of solidarity practices with asylum seekers and refugees, some of which might be seen as a challenge to the violent and exclusionary forms of refugee governance, and which can experiment with new practices and imaginaries of migration and refuge.
An Intersectional Approach to Asylum
The impacts of restricted access to asylum and refugee protection and of securitised and militarised borders are not experienced in the same way by all. A person’s gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, social class, (dis)ability, sexual orientation etc, will all impact on the way that they experience the asylum and refugee regime.
Held and Apata show that an intersectional lens needs to be combined with a postcolonial analysis to truly understand the experiences of queer refugees in asylum systems which are fundamentally unjust. They show the ways in which gendered and sexualised stereotypes within asylum systems support gender binary and heteronormative frames which exclude and marginalise racialised queer asylum seekers and refugees.
Similarly, the continuing persistence of gendered stereotypes and patriarchal structures, mean that gender-related forms of persecution against women are still not taken seriously in asylum and refugee regimes. The 1951 Convention does not mention gender (or sex), and despite the publication of various Guidelines and Directives by UNHCR and national and regional governments, asylum systems still exclude many women who are seeking protection from gendered forms of violence.
New Challenge and New Solutions?
In addition to new and continuing conflicts around the world, the worsening impacts of climate change add a new challenge regarding displacement and refugee protection.
National, regional and international laws remain largely inadequate in the face of this growing challenge of people displaced by climate change.
Research in contexts of forced migration raises particular ethical challenges.
Even the term to use to describe people displaced by climate change remains a point of controversy. And in a global context of restriction of asylum and refugee protection there seems to be little will to find a collective solution to protect those impacted by climate change.
There is clearly a need for ongoing research to highlight the failures and gaps in asylum and refugee policies, and the different forms of marginalisation, violence and exclusion faced by those seeking refugee protection. However, research in contexts of forced migration raises particular ethical challenges.
Clark-Kazak calls for a radical ethics of care in forced migration research, making visible asymmetries of power and focusing on reciprocal relationships. She argues that it is vital to amplify and cite ethical perspectives from people with lived experience of forced migration and in languages other than English.
Conclusion
The recent election of Donald Trump as president of the US has again highlighted the precarious nature of protection of forced migrants, with the threat to end the Temporary Protected Status that has been used for those who are already in the US and cannot return to their countries of origin due to natural disaster or armed conflict.
This threat, if enacted, would render thousands without protection and liable to arrest and deportation. At the same time, the European Union is putting into action its New Pact on Migration and Asylum which will reinforce barriers to those trying to reach Europe to claim asylum and enact what have been called “unworkable and inhumane” policies against those deemed to be trying to enter Europe “illegally”.
Faced with these increasingly violent and non-protective asylum and refugee policies we believe that it is important to understand how and why we got here in order to try and work out what we as researchers can do to resist and to support those who are in need of protection. We hope our book is a small contribution to this endeavour.
