Security implications of protracted refugee situations

Abstract

Protracted refugee populations not only constitute over 70% of the world's refugees but are also a principal source of many of the irregular movements of people around the world today. The long-term presence of refugee populations in much of the developing world has come to be seen by many host states in these regions as a source of insecurity.

In response, host governments have enacted policies of containing refugees in isolated and insecure camps, have prevented the arrival of additional refugees and, in extreme cases, have engaged in forcible repatriation.

Not surprisingly, these refugee populations are also increasingly perceived as possible sources of insecurity for Western states. Refugee camps are sometimes breeding grounds for international terrorism and rebel movements. These groups often exploit the presence of refugees to engage in activities that destabilise not only host states but also entire regions.

Acknowledgements

Gil Loescher would like to thank the US Institute for Peace and the Ford Foundation for their support. James Milner would like to thank the Trudeau Foundation for their support. We are also grateful to members of the postgraduate class ‘Forced Migration and International Relations’ at Oxford for their contributions to our undertanding of protracted refugee situations in Africa and Asia. Some material from this Adelphi Paper appeared in an article, ‘The Long Road Home: Protracted Refugee Situations in Africa’, published by the authors in Survival, Summer 2005, vol. 47, no. 2.

Notes

¹Claudena Skran, Refugees in Inter-war Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995).

²Gil Loescher, The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).

³Gil Loescher and John Scanlan, Calculated Kindness: Refugees and America's Half Open Door: 1945 to Present (New York: The Free Press, 1986).

⁴UN Doc. A/41/324, 13 May 1986. See also Luke Lee, ‘Toward a World Without Refugees: The United Nations Group of Government Experts on International Cooperation to Avert New Flows of Refugees’, British Yearbook of International Law, vol. 57 (London: H. Frowde, 1986), pp. 317–336.

⁵United Nations, A more secure world: Our shared responsibility, Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (New York: United Nations, 2004); and International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, The Responsibility to Protect (Ottawa: International Development Research Centre, 2001). For background, see: Christopher Greenwood, ‘Is there a right of humanitarian intervention?’ The World Today, vol. 49, no. 2, February 1993, pp. 34–40; Nigel Rodley (ed.), To Loose the Band of Wickedness: International Intervention in the Defense of Human Rights (London: Brasseys, 1992); and Lori Fisler Damrosch (ed.), Enforcing Restraint: Collective Intervention in Internal Conflicts (New York: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1992).

⁶This argument is more fully developed in Alan Dowty and Gil Loescher, ‘Refugee Flows as Grounds for International Action’, International Security, vol. 21, no. 1, summer 1996, pp. 43–71.

⁷Lori Fisler Damrosch, ‘Changing Conceptions of Intervention in International Law’, in Laura W. Reed and Carl Kaysen (eds), Emerging Norms of Justified Intervention (Cambridge, MA: American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1993), 100ff.

⁸UN Security Council, UN Security Council Summit Declaration (New York: United Nations, 1992).

⁹Matthew J. Gibney, The Ethics and Politics of Asylum: Liberal Democracy and the Responses to Refugees (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

¹⁰Sadako Ogata, The Turbulent Decade: Confronting the refugee crisis of the 1990s (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005).

¹¹For an account of this period see Sadako Ogata, A Turbulent Decade.

¹²Richard Ullman, ‘Redefining Security’, International Security, Vol. 8, no. 1, summer 1983; Caroline Thomas, In Search of Security: The Third World in International Relations (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1987); Jessica Matthews, ‘Redefining Security’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 68, no. 2, 1989; Thomas Homer-Dixon, ‘On the Threshold: Environmental Changes as Causes of Acute Conflict’, International Security, vol. 16, no. 2, fall, 1991.

¹³Gil Loescher, Refugee Movements and International Security, Adelphi Paper 268 (London: Brasseys for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1992); Myron Weiner (ed.), International Migration and Security (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993).

¹⁴For a critique of this view, see: B. S. Chimni, ‘The Global Refugee Problem in the 21st Century and the Emerging Security Paradigm: A Disturbing Trend’, in A. Anghie and G. Sturgess (eds), Legal Visions of the 21st Century: Essays in Honour of Judge Christopher Weermantry (the Hague: Kluwer Law International, 1998).

¹⁵Aristide R. Zolberg, Astri Suhrke and Sergio Aguayo, Escape from Violence: Conflict and the Refugee Crisis in the Developing World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

¹⁶Jef Huysmans, ‘Migrants as a security problem: dangers of “securitizing” societal issues’, in Robert Miles and Dietrich Thränhardt (eds), Migration and European Integration: The Dynamics of Inclusion and Exclusion (London: Pinter Publishers, 1995); Ole Waever, Barry Buzan, Morten Kelstrup and Pierre Lemaitre, Identity, Migration and the New Security Agenda in Europe (London: Pinter Publishers, 1993); Ole Waever ‘Securitization and Desecuritization’, in Ronnie D. Lipshutz, On Security (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995); Didier Bigo, ‘Securité et immigration’, Cultures et conflits, 27, 1998; and Dider Bigo, ‘Sécurité, immigration et controle social’, Le Monde diplomatique, October 1996.

¹⁷Joanne van Selm, ‘Refugee Protection in Europe and the U.S. after 9/11’, in Niklaus Steiner, Mark Gibney and Gil Loescher (eds), Problems of Protection: The UNHCR, Refugees, and Human Rights (London: Routledge, 2003); Matthew J. Gibney, ‘Security and the ethics of asylum after 11 September’, Forced Migration Review, 13, 2002; and Aristide Zolberg, ‘Guarding the Gates in a World on the Move, http://www.ssrc.org/sept11/essays/zolberg.htm

¹⁸Alice Hills, Border Security in the Balkans: Europe's Gatekeepers, Adelphi Paper 371 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2004).

¹⁹For a critique of proposal to establish regional processing centres, see Gil Loescher and James Milner, ‘The missing link: the need for comprehensive engagement in regions of refugee origin’, International Affairs, vol. 79, no. 3, May 2003, pp. 595–617.

²⁰Mohammed Ayoob, ‘A Subaltern Realist Perspective’, in Keith Krause and Michael C. Williams (eds), Critical Security Studies (Minneapolis, MN, University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 130.

²¹Fionna Terry, Condemned to Repeat? The Paradox of Humanitarian Action (Ithica, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Stephen Stedman and Fred Tanner, Refugee Manipulation: War, Politics and the Abuse of Human Suffering (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2002).

²²Karen Jacobsen, ‘A Framework for Exploring the Political and Security Context of Refugee Populated Areas’, Refugee Survey Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 1, 2000.

²³UNHCR, ‘Economic and Social Impact of Massive Refugee Populations on Host Developing Countries, as well as Other Countries’.

²⁴Gil Loescher, Refugee Movements and International Security.

²⁵Myron Weiner, International Migration and Security, p. 16.

²⁶Macedonian Deputy Foreign Minister, speaking at the Emergency Meeting on the Kosovo Refugee Crisis, Geneva, 6 April 1999.

²⁷Finn Stepputat, Refugees, Security and Development. Current Experience and Strategies of Protection and Assistance in ‘the Region of Origin’, Copenhagen: Danish Institute for International Studies, Working Paper No 2004/11, 2004, p. 4.

²⁸Gil Loescher, Refugee Movements, p. 42.

²⁹ Ibid.

³⁰Tiyanjana Maluwa, ‘The Refugee Problem and the Quest for Peace and Security in Southern Africa’, International Journal of Refugee Law, vol. 7, no. 4, 1995, p. 657.

³¹ Ibid.

³² Ibid.

³³Bonaventure Rutinwa, ‘The end of asylum? The changing nature of refugee policies in Africa’, New Issues in Refugee Research, Working Paper No. 5, Geneva: UNHCR, May 1999, p. 2.

³⁴Matthew J. Gibney, ‘Security and the ethics of asylum after 11 September’.

³⁵Bonaventure Rutinwa, ‘The Tanzanian Government's Response to the Rwandan Emergency’, Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 9, no. 3, 1996, pp. 291–302.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gil Loescher

Gil Loescher is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for International Studies, University of Oxford and was formerly Senior Fellow for Migration and Forced Displacement at the IISS. He is the author of The UNHCR and World Politics: A Perilous Path (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) and Refugee Movements and International Security, Adelphi Paper 268 (London: Brassey's for the IISS, 1992.) as well as over a dozen authored and edited books.

James Milner

James Milner is a doctoral student at St Antony's College, Oxford and is a specialist on refugee policy, Africa and development. Loescher and Milner have co-authored recent articles in International Affairs and Conflict, Development and Security.