This chapter critically examines the distinctive institutional and normative regime created by the UN for the Palestinian refugees in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba in the form of the United Nations Conciliation Commission for Palestine and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. It juxtaposes that regime against the international institutional and normative regime applicable to all other refugees in the world, as administered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. The special regime for Palestinian refugees is widely regarded as reflective of the UN’s unique responsibility for their plight. Yet, a critical examination of the UN record on the early history, mandate, and regulatory framework underpinning this regime reveals that it was never intended to give effect to Palestinian refugee rights as established under prevailing international law, including as affirmed by the UN itself. The resulting ‘protection gap’ that has consequently emerged for Palestinian refugees, marked by uneven and confused state practice concerning their plight as well as ongoing gender discrimination against them by the UN, is demonstrative of the Organization’s role in the maintenance of Palestinian legal subalternity on the international plane.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

The author discusses the responsibility of International Organizations under international law. With the help of two case studies (the proposed relocation of a refugee camp involving the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and a water project involving, amongst others, the World Bank), the chapter discusses three central elements of international responsibility: obligation, attribution and causation. It concludes that, often enough, allegations concerning the responsibility of international organizations owe much to opportunism. Since the current legal regime is not very helpful, responsibility claims flow like water: they flow wherever they can, relatively independent from obligation, attribution and causation.

In a sort of conceptual history in action, this chapter looks at the labels attached to the settlers-turned-migrants that were hotly contested. The most prominent among them, retornados (returnees) and refugiados (refugees), inferred conflicting views about the nature of their mobility and belonging and thus evoked divergent emotional and political responses. By disentangling how domestic, foreign, and international actors, notably the UNHCR, fought over these labels, the chapter demonstrates how the mechanisms of the international postwar refugee regime were compatible with and helped reinforce an ethnic reordering of citizenship and the postcolonial nation in Portugal. Conceptually, the chapter argues that historicizing these battles over how to name, interpret, and handle those who were leaving the colonies can provide fresh vistas for the broader scholarly discussion about coerced migration.

This chapter draws an outline how scholars from myriad disciplines (including law, anthropology, political science, history, geography, international relations, philosophy, psychology and economics), UN institutions and refugees approach and understand the notion of refuge. I also highlight the discrepancies between these ideas and the reality. I ask the gender question by exploring what women are seeking when they search for refuge as well as the nature of refuge sought by children and refugees with disabilities. I show that the concept of refuge is a robust one. There are different approaches to theorising refuge, but there is a shared understanding that it has restorative, regenerative and palliative functions that address refugees’ past, present and future. Refuge operates as a response to the particular dilemmas of those in need of protection and is variously expressed as a remedy, right, duty, process and status. It has a broad and flexible scope that responds to the specific needs of women, children and refugees with disabilities. The threshold for adequate refuge is a high one, encompassing much more than mere survival. However, many people who seek protection find themselves in places where the conditions may be comparable to or worse than the places they fled.

Once a person falls within the international legal definition of a refugee, he or she is entitled to make a claim for asylum. The prohibition in international law of refoulement prevents a refugee from being sent back, whether directly or through a third country, to the State from which he or she escaped if he or she will suffer persecution upon or after return. Additional protection for asylum seekers and refugees caught up in a situation of armed conflict is contained in international humanitarian law.

One problem complicating the task of humanitarian protection is the quality of data on the populations most affected. If protection agencies cannot identify those who need help, then their ambitions are unlikely to be realized. This is especially relevant when considering “invisible,” hard-to-reach, or historically marginalized groups such as stateless people for whom we have little baseline data. Undercounting is often a political matter. Who is counted also tells us about governmental and institutional priorities and exposes biases about what counts, and the ways in which resources should be allocated. This chapter presents a critical review of how statelessness has been underestimated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its partners. It argues that the process of undercounting is indicative of a revisionist turn in humanitarian management characterized by a fixation with numbers and “results.” The ways in which the UNHCR data are presented reflects an increasingly top-down logic that ignores the lived experience of stateless people and does little to advance the cause of humanitarian protection.

Chapter 5 shows that aid facilitates the creation of a political architecture of control that pushes refugee people into self-disciplining behaviours, in the hope to be seen by aid agencies as conforming to a certain style of refugeehood. Specifically, I look at projects favouring migrant labour integration to show that migrant people can be attracted to or can decide to distance themselves from aid-funded projects for reasons that have nothing to do with the stated purpose of the initiative (in this case, favouring migrants’ integration into the labour market). Rather, the structural constraints characterising the life of migrant people in Morocco (lack of legal mobility avenues, lack of access to public services, lack of access to decent work) pushes project beneficiaries to read aid-funded projects as disciplinary tools through which aid agencies can observe their behaviours.

How do aid agencies deliver protection and assistance in Uganda’s Kyaka II, and specifically seek to prevent and overcome gender-based violence? In what ways do they affect the women and men living there? Focusing on these questions, the chapter explores the overall camp structures and scope of aid via the humanitarian apparatus, power practices, and decision-making—as well as their effects on the refugees living in Kyaka II. Divided into four parts, the first addresses developments and aid in the camp alongside hierarchies, and argues that refugees are made ‘protection objects.’ The second part centers on projects tackling gender-based violence, and their links with global refugee policies. It reveals how preventive and protective projects against gender-based violence as well as those to support empowerment essentially draw on ‘vulnerability’ categorizations, which portray women primarily as ‘vulnerable protection objects.’ The third part addresses correlations between aid, the camp architecture, and the prevalence of gender-based violence, revealing the three issues of aid workers at times perpetrating violence, the structural effects of aid, and the risks resulting from the camp landscape. Before concluding, the fourth part considers whether the broad critique of aid provision and of the camp is reasonable in light of the challenges that aid agencies themselves face.

Intergovernmental organizations like the UNHCR and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have become key actors and facilitators between European states and countries of origin or transit, but it is unclear to what extent these organizations are able to influence the domestic policies of host countries. Chapter 7 finds that in Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey there are certain limitations that intergovernmental organizations face in attempting to carry out their agendas or advocate for alternative policies, but there are also areas in which intergovernmental organizations have been successful in either influencing domestic policy or having a host government adopt a certain agenda. While the financial incentives that intergovernmental organizations can offer host states sometimes allows for greater influence, other factors are also critical, including: (1) whether the issue of migration or refugees has gained domestic political salience leading to further red-lines; (2) the pre-existing relationships that intergovernmental or international organizations have in the host state; (3) the security concerns around migration or refugees.

In this chapter the framework developed in Chapter 3 is applied to the UNHCR practice of administering refugee camps. I discuss how the UNHCR thus exercises power over individuals, both directly through its personel and through its so-called implementing partners. The sources of the UNHCR’s human rights obligations are also identified. Thereafter, I turn to assessing the applicable accountability mechanisms: the UNHCR Inspector General’s Office, the UN Office of Internal Oversight Services, and domestic courts. Neither of these mechanisms provide sufficient accountability.

This chapter reviews our basic claim: refugee-led organisations exist, and they deserve recognition for the important roles they play. We draw out comparative analysis of RCOs based on nationality and leadership and the political economy in which they partake, and discuss practical and theoretical implications. Many RCOs offer social protection to refugees and fill gaps left by national or international providers in areas as diverse as education, vocational training, psychosocial support, health, microfinance, sport, youth engagement and legal representation. They vary in scale, focus and capacity, demonstrating the many ways in which refugees mobilise to support vulnerable members of the community. They are providing protection and assistance – the very services normally associated exclusively with international aid agencies and NGOs. For many refugees, especially those in cities, such sources of community support are perceived as more relevant to their lives than those provided by large-scale aid organisations. Yet refugee-led organisations rarely receive recognition or funding from the international humanitarian system. A deeper understanding of how they have and can contribute to refugee aid and development can act as a crucial next step to begin restructuring the architecture of assistance.

Our main theoretical contribution is the concept of the ‘global governed’, which we discuss as an umbrella concept for existing literatures on post-development, post-humanitarianism and post-protection. We also contribute ‘post-protection’, an analytical lens for critically engaging with the risks of protection as a form of top-down governance, and a means to recognise alternative forms of refugee-led social protection. This chapter presents these concepts and applies them to examine refugee-led social protection in East Africa. The ‘global governed’ enables us to ontologically focus on the collective action of refugees themselves, and the ways in which they mobilise to provide social protection. ‘Post-protection’ offers a heuristic framework through which to critically examine the interaction between top-down international institutions and bottom-up refugee community organisations (RCOs). Our main empirical question is: what explains variation in the scale and scope of refugee-led social protection? We seek to critically re-examine the provider-beneficiary relationship that characterises a range of policy fields, grounding our concepts in literatures that are fundamentally about the role of power in global governance. Our theoretical contributions critique the ‘global’ while rendering visible the ‘local’, highlighting hidden power relations and unquestioned institutional assumptions, while reasserting the subjectivity and agency of the marginalised.

This chapter introduces the key ideas and questions that inform this work, as well as the overall structure of the subsequent chapters. Across the low- and middle-income countries that host 85 per cent of the world’s refugees, protection and assistance is provided to refugees by United Nations organisations in collaboration with a network of NGO ‘implementing partners’. The dominant humanitarian model is usually premised upon a provider-beneficiary relationship: international organisations are the protectors and refugees are the protected. In parallel to this model, however, is a largely neglected story: refugees themselves frequently mobilise to create community-based organisations or informal networks as alternative providers of social protection. They mobilise bottom-up to provide sources of assistance to other refugees in areas as diverse as education, health, livelihoods, finance and housing. Despite their importance to refugees, however, for a number of reasons introduced in this chapter, refugee-led organisations (sometimes referred to as refugee community organisations, or RCOs) generally receive little international recognition or support.