What is a Refugee?

289 Pages·2016·3.496 MB·English

by  William Maley

WHAT IS A REFUGEE?

WILLIAM MALEY
What is a Refugee?
A
A
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
William Maley.
What is a Refugee?.
ISBN: 9780190652388
Printed in the United Kingdom on acid-free paper
In affectionate memory of
William Alexander Higgie, OAM
7 November 1923—7 September 2015

CONTENTS
Preface and Acknowledgements ix
1. Introduction 1
Some categories and distinctions 6
Some recurring themes 9
The objectives and structure of this book 12
2. Defining ‘Refugees’ 15
International refugee law: origins 16
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner
 for Refugees (UNHCR) 18
The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees 20
Broader legal definitions 24
Refugee protection under other branches of law 28
Status determination by states 31
Ordinary language understandings of ‘refugee’ 37
Philosophical definitions of ‘refugee’ 40
3. Exile and Refuge: A Brief Overview 43
Political violence, marginalisation and the human
 experience 44
Exile and ideology from the seventeenth to the early
 twentieth centuries 48
Russian and German refugees between the World Wars 56
vii
CONTENTS
Postwar refugee resettlement 62
Internal conflict and refugee movements in the late
 twentieth and early twenty-first centuries 68
4.  States and Refugees 75
The Westphalian system 76
Bureaucracy and its failings 81
Individual initiatives 89
People smuggling: a product of state inaction 94
5.  Roots of Refugee ‘Crises’ in a Globalised World 101
State disruption and violent conflict 102
The fear of ‘terrorism’ 111
Transport, the wherewithal to travel, and human mobility 117
Globalisation and its impacts 120
6.  Diplomacy and Refugees 127
Frameworks for negotiation over refugees 128
‘Burden sharing’ and its dilemmas 135
The temptation of ‘easy options’ 141
Refugees as agents 148
7.  Refugees, Intervention and the ‘Responsibility
to Protect’ 155
The use of force 156
The idea of humanitarian intervention 161
The Responsibility to Protect 167
‘Intervention’ as a solution 174
8.  ‘When Adam Delved and Eve Span …’: Some Reflections
on Closing and Opening Borders 181
The costs of controlled borders 182
The moral costs of refugee exclusion 188
Confronting the ‘Birthright Lottery’ 193
A final word 195
Notes 199
Index 253
viii