Refugees in Extended Exile

Living on the Edge

Jennifer Hyndman, Wenona Giles

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317209706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book argues that the international refugee regime and its 'temporary' humanitarian interventions have failed. Most refugees across the global live in 'protracted' conditions that extend from years to decades, without legal status that allows them to work and establish a home. It is contended that they become largely invisible to people based in the global North, and cease to remain fully human subjects with access to their political lives. Shifting the conversation away from the salient discourse of 'solutions' and technical fixes within state-centric international relations, the authors recover the subjectivity lost for those stuck in extended exile.

The book first argues that humanitarian assistance to refugees remains vital to people's survival, even after the emergency phase is over. It then connects asylum politics in the global North with the intransigence of extended exile in the global South. By placing the urgent crises of protracted exile within a broader constellation of power relations, both historical and geographical, the authors present research and empirical findings gleaned from refugees in Iran, Kenya and Canada and from humanitarian and government workers. Each chapter reveals patterns of power circulating through the 'colonial present', Cold War legacies, and the global 'war on terror".

Seeking to render legible the more quotidian struggles and livelihoods of people who find themselves defined as refugees, this book will be of great interest to international humanitarian agencies, as well as migration and refugee researchers, including scholars in refugee studies and human displacement, human security, globalization, immigration, and human rights.

1 Introduction

Invisible lives and silent disasters

People who are displaced from their home countries and live in long-term exile become largely invisible to the outside world. Once refugees are “saved” from violence, hunger and imminent death, an assumption is often made that the humanitarian crisis is over and human suffering ends. For most refugees, this is not the case. At the beginning of 2016, more than 12 million people live in extended exile.¹ Most are prima facie refugees, designated en masse as legitimately fleeing persecution, acute violence, or human rights abuses, but provided with only temporary sanctuary and minimal material support. Having ensured the “right to life” for these people in the short term, humanitarian intervention provides no assurance that they will have the right to live with a modicum of normalcy, independence or recognition in the medium to long term.

This book uses social theory and social science to make the case that refugees in long-term exile cease to be constituted as liberal democratic subjects, even though they are scripted as such through international law and by the United Nations (UN) agencies mandated to support them. The erratic subjectivity of refugees in extended exile presents a dilemma that underscores their “life in liminality” (Ramadan, 2012) in relation to rights and international protection emerging from a largely Western sensibility after World War II. Speaking of displacement in and the role of postcolonial states, Ranabir Samaddar (2015: 2) asks “what is the nature of power and responsibility at the margins, rather than power and influence at the centre, which is called by that euphemism, regime?”² Many refugees facing protracted displacement in global South contexts discursively disappear as subjects of the international refugee regime and its member liberal democratic states. Refugees may be counted as humanitarian beneficiaries, but they often do not count as rights-bearing subjects, nor even as recognizably human, like us.

To decenter prevailing state-centric and global North accounts of the international refugee regime, we question the salient language of the regime that focuses primarily on policy and technical fixes for “protracted refugee situations” and the lack of “durable solutions” for refugees. Membership in the international refugee regime is for states, not people, and is premised on a seamless patchwork of liberal democratic countries that promises protection for refugees persecuted or abandoned by the guarantor of their protection, namely their own governments. The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol codify a laudable set of protections and entitlements for refugees whose cases are adjudicated on an individual basis, but the vast majority of those fleeing their homes cannot access this status. They are literally caught in a web where they lack permanent legal status, experience restricted livelihoods in their place of temporary refuge, and are unable to return home. Our aim is to render visible the spaces in which these refugees dwell, highlight their stories in places off the newsworthy maps of “emergencies,” and at the same time critically analyze the geopolitics of their displacement in relation to state strategies that keep them in place.

What roles do humanitarianism, geopolitics and the so-called “war on terror” play in producing and effacing refugee lives? The vast majority of people displaced outside their countries of origin lack a place to call home in more than 30 recognized crises of indefinite exile (Long, 2011). People began leaving Somalia more than 25 years ago, before the 1991 coup d’état. Afghans have been displaced for more than three decades. The former UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, referred to Afghans and Somalians as “quasi-permanent refugee populations” (UNHCR, 2009a). In 2014, these two groups, together with Syrians, comprised 53% of refugees under the auspices of UNHCR (UNHCR, 2015a). The persistence of their displacement is matched by the scope and scale of these humanitarian crises. In 2014, 51 million people, including internally displaced people (IDPs), were exiled from their homes—more than any period since World War II.³ Of these, some 16 million were refugees, including 5 million Palestinians. Fully three-quarters were in conditions of protracted displacement (UNHCR, 2014a, 2014b).

Palestinians residing in various countries of the Middle East remain the most protracted group of all facing displacement, having endured generations of exile. UNHCR acknowledges that while the Palestinian refugee situation is the most prolonged in the world, their plight remains outside its mandate and hence beyond its statistics. While Palestinian refugees should not be treated as a unique situation, they often tend to be considered separately because administratively they fall under the auspices of a different UN agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). UNRWA reports that there are 5.1 million Palestinian refugees according to its count (UNHCR, 2015a). Approximately three-quarters of the Palestinian population are displaced, and they represent 30% of the world’s refugees (Dumper, 2008). Many have integrated into Jordanian and Syrian society, only to be displaced again in the more recent Syrian conflict. Palestinian refugees in Lebanon are more likely to live in camp settings (Ramadan, 2012), whereas Syrians living there do not. Like most other refugees, Palestinians face an unresolved political situation where they cannot return home and often lack permanent legal status in the countries in which they reside.⁴

As scholars, we are at once critical of liberal democratic framings of justice that assume a universal, mobile right-bearing subject, but also pragmatic and cognizant of Hannah Arendt’s experience and writings after World War II: “the right to have rights” is all important when one is dispossessed of citizenship (Arendt, 1958). Human rights and norms are worthless without a guarantor to ensure one’s access to them.

If a human being loses his political status, he should, according to the implication of the inborn and inalienable rights of man, come under exactly the situation for which the declaration of such general rights provided. Actually the opposite is the case. It seems that a man who is nothing but a man has lost the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow human being.

(Arendt, 1968: 300)

Refugees facing extended exile without the backing of a state become objects of a “politics of pity,” a spectacle of “distant suffering” (Arendt, 1990; Boltanski, 1999: 3). Indefinite exile among the displaced persists in part because they have no recourse to a greater authority that can end their “permanent temporariness” (Bailey et al., 2002). Many refugees live in camps, others in cities and informal settlements that vary in character and condition, but all such persons are deprived of the full de jure (official) protection of a government that can guarantee the necessities of life. Some thrive without official and permanent legal status, especially in cities, but many who experience encampment and containment through isolation do not.

Almost all prima facie refugees caught in conditions of long-term displacement are protected from forced return, a principle known also as non-refoulement, yet this promise along with sufficient food to survive is a minimalist interpretation of refugee “protection.” Crisp (2003: 11) notes that those in extended exile are usually protected from forced return to their country of origin, “[b]ut the right to life has been bought at the cost of almost every other right.” As noted, a tiny minority of displaced individuals outside their country of origin is granted Convention Refugee Status, a designation that affords human rights such as permanent residence, the right to work and a host of other protections not available to prima facie refugees in conditions of extended exile.

Guy Goodwin-Gill wrote, “[w]here there is law and principle, so there is strength and the capacity to oppose. Where there are merely policies and guidelines, everything, including protection, is negotiable, and that includes refugees” (Goodwin-Gill, 1999: 240, cited in Gammeltoft-Hansen, 2014: 574). Today, Goodwin-Gill’s insights are more relevant than ever; while international law and principles still exist, states circumvent their legal obligations to grant related protection by using administrative policies and law to secure their borders, precluding asylum seekers. Australia has excised its borders for the purposes of making a refugee claim, literally cutting off its shores for the purpose of seeking asylum, preferring to process asylum seekers far from its own territory, in Papua New Guinea or on Nauru, and to settle them in Cambodia if their claims are successful. Since 2012, Canada has made it extremely difficult to arrive on its territory from a refugee-producing country by introducing the new Protecting Canada’s Immigration System Act and adding the requirement of a biometrically endowed visa⁵ secured prior to flight. Preclusion prevails.

Every dimension of security, including refugee protection, has been and continues to be negotiated. The post-World War II 1951 Convention and its 1967 Protocol remain the pillars of international refugee law, but in a post-Cold War landscape, almost everything about protecting those who have fled across a border has changed. Protection has been respatialized and consolidated in refugees’ “regions of origin.” According to John Urry (2014), “offshoring” characterizes the contemporary global political and economic order, including security measures and surveillance that manage migration far from the borders of the world’s wealthiest countries: in this context Ulrich Beck asks, “How can the ‘outsourced’ citizen of the world be included in decisions which affect their survival?” (Beck, cited in Urry, 2014: n.p.). From the period of the Cold War, fought among and between states, to the current globalized “war on terror” against radical Islamist extremists, refugees have shifted from being treated as the flotsam and jetsam of superpower conflicts to becoming “illegal migrants” and potential terrorist suspects, a theme we take up in the next chapter.

With global North states preferring to assist refugees in their “regions of origin,” it is no surprise that 86% of refugees live in the global South (including the Middle East), up from 70% just ten years ago (UNHCR, 2012a, 2014a).⁶ Governments in the global South that host refugees largely resist integrating them permanently into their own societies where resources, jobs and social security are often too meager to meet the needs of existing citizens (UNHCR, 2012a). Furthermore, encampment of the displaced creates international legibility and bargaining power for host states when they negotiate compensation for their hospitality with UNHCR and its donor states.

Analyzing the situation of refugees who have seen no marked change in their legal status or livelihoods in two or three decades is a sobering deed. A lack of status “prevents access to local labour markets, prevents the displaced from setting up businesses or accessing education or health services” (Long, 2011: 22; Giles, 2010). As space for seeking asylum has shrunk in the global North, “temporary” forms of accommodation in the global South expand. In the liminal spaces of transit countries, forms of detention and deterrence proliferate while readmission agreements and safe third-country policies ensure that uninvited migrants, including asylum seekers, are returned to where they came from (Mountz, 2011a).

While the critical, conventional and everyday geopolitics of displacement are central to our analysis (Pain & Smith, 2008; Dittmer & Gray, 2010), we also seek to render legible the more quotidian struggles and livelihoods of people who are defined as refugees by states, scholars and UN agencies, despite their best efforts. Following Long (2011: 3), “protracted displacement cannot be understood—much less resolved—without first comprehending the interests and hopes that the displaced themselves invest in the idea of ‘solutions’.” Brun and Fábos (2015) echo this sentiment through their analysis of “home” among refugees in long-term exile, critiquing the state-centrism of “protracted refugee situations” and illustrating how the place of “home” is remade in various contexts of exile (see also Brun, 2015; Dona, 2015). Our book explores opinions held, decisions made, and meanings ascribed to long-term displacement by people living in extended exile (see also Grayson-Courtemanche, 2015). While demonstrating volition and agency is vital, understanding the ways in which displaced persons are represented by others as victims unable to help themselves and in need of international intervention is key to redirecting current conversations about “protracted refugee situations” (Seshadri, 2008; Turner 2010: 2). While the term “refugee” is employed throughout this book in order to be understood, we also avoid and critique its use. Such terminology strips exiles of their identities as people who work, raise families, go to school, and live in communities of their own making.⁷

Drawing on analyses at multiple scales and across several sites—from refugee camps and cities of asylum to ports of entry and cities in the global North—we highlight the power relations related to asylum that traverse international borders and serve to contain displaced people in “regions of origin.” A policy-oriented humanitarian approach to fixing protracted exile has been the norm in both policy circles and published scholarship. One such solution was announced in 2014 with little fanfare: the “UNHCR Policy on Alternatives to Camps” (UNHCR, 2014d). This policy is directed mainly at UNHCR staff who plan, design and deliver humanitarian activities in the field and those who develop tools and training that support such activities. “From the perspective of refugees, alternatives to camps means being able to exercise rights and freedoms, make meaningful choices regarding their lives and have the possibility to live with greater dignity, independence and normality as members of communities” (UNHCR, 2014d: 3). These goals are laudable, but UNHCR must persuade host governments, not just its own staff, to assist refugees outside camps. The agency bluntly adds that “UNHCR’s experience has been that camps can have significant negative impacts over the longer term for all concerned” (UNHCR, 2014d: 4).

Lucy Hovil (2014) explains that refugee camps are an expression of the salient narrative that refugees are outsiders, foreigners or security threats that merit close scrutiny until they can return home. Camps have provided a visible tool for raising funds and managing humanitarian demands for UNHCR. Citing research showing that refugees who have left the camp context and live in more urban areas feel more secure and have engaged in the local economy, Hovil (2014) illustrates that far from being passive victims, they have taken control of their lives, often without any external assistance (see also Landau & Duponchel, 2011). Accordingly, we endorse Oliver Bakewell’s (2008) call for more policy-irrelevant research in studies of forced migration. Policy approaches aim to apply “best practices,” but can also foreclose on analysis beyond the terms of reference and creative ways forward.

In a concerted effort to redirect the salient discourse of the refugee regime and challenge existing scholarship about those facing conditions of long-term exile, we avoid the language of “solutions” that have simply not worked. With close to three-quarters of all refugees under the auspices of UNHCR displaced for more than five years, the international refugee regime has not been able to protect most refugees with these “solutions”:

The very fact of protracted displacement is evidence that existing approaches to “solving” displacement have failed. Voluntary return, local integration and resettlement—the traditional “durable solutions”—are not accessible for those trapped in protracted displacement… One question which must be asked, however, is whether the very language of “solutions” is in fact creating—rather than confronting—the apparent impasse in protracted displacement crisis.

(Long, 2011: 8)

This insightful provocation by Long is important: are existing frames of inquiry and scholarship perpetrating the problem of extended exile? We suspect so, and critically engage these framings in relation to theory and our fieldwork. The failure of current approaches to protect refugees and provide “durable solutions” is difficult to dispute, but more problematic is that failure implies a fix, a way to avert it. How can we get beyond such thinking? Have states lost political interest in processing the protections afforded by international refugee law, with its focus on Convention refugees? Have states’ security concerns compromised or supplanted their commitments to refugee protection?

Long also identifies an urgent need to secure adequate protection during displacement: “improving the quality of asylum and ensuring access to formal mechanisms of protection would have a far greater and more immediate impact on the lives of the displaced,” especially for those who cannot return in the short term (Long, 2011: 9). Providing survival rations and protection from refoulement to refugees in a camp for a matter of months is humanitarian aid. Providing such rations and protection in the same milieu for two decades is questionable as humanitarianism of any kind; it does not ensure the most basic protection afforded by human rights—political, economic or otherwise—and instead suspends political life (Durieux & McAdam, 2004). Eyal Weizman (2012) questions the acceptability of pursuing humanitarian assistance as an exceptional course of action in order to prevent a greater human tragedy, ostensibly death. Assisting any human being facing death is arguably a universal value ensconced in humanitarian principles and international humanitarian law, the “right to life,” but parking refugee “undesirables” in isolated places for years after they have been rescued from a fatal fate is much less defensible (Agier, 2011b).

Humanitarian assistance to refugees often remains vital to people’s survival, during and even immediately after an emergency is over. The provision of medicine, shelter, water and food assistance, as well as protection from refoulement, remains essential. More funds and programming can help to ameliorate poor conditions and gaps in scarce services based in the camps and settlements where people facing long-term exile l...