8 - Elusive Refuge

Summary

In Chapter 8, I reflect on the patterns in the ways decision-makers approach protection from refuge claims. Across the globe, decision-makers have transitioned from sophisticated to impoverished understandings of refuge, from approaches that disrupt containment mechanisms to those that cement them and from decisions that facilitate to ones that impede refugee journeys. I consider the implications this has for refugee law, and the international protection regime more broadly. I discuss how my analysis of judicial approaches that give a rich meaning to the concept of refuge responds to scholars’ identifications of current dilemmas in refugee law. I also consider how the judicial dilution of the concept of refuge poses risks to the future directions of refugee law. In particular, I suggest that decision-makers’ dilution of the notion of refuge risks refugee law developing in an asymmetrical fashion: widening the categories of people entitled to international protection, but diminishing the protection to which they are entitled. Last, I highlight how the analysis in this book adds new dimensions to scholarly assessments of decision-makers’ understandings of gender and intersectionality. Overall, I argue that the trajectory of decision-makers’ approaches to protection from refuge claims has rendered refuge elusive.