Print Pub ication Date: Jun 2014 Subject: Po itica Science, Internationa Re ations, Comparative Po itics
On ine Pub ication Date: Aug 2014
DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199652433.013.0004
International Relations and Forced Migration
(p. 61) Yet despite the political and international nature of forced migration, there has traditionally been relatively little work within international relations (IR) on refugees. IR has expanded its empirical focus beyond analysing war and peace and international security to address a range of areas such as the global economy, environment, human rights, and international trade. However, it has paid comparatively little attention to the international politics of forced migration.
The work that has attempted to ‘bridge the divide’ between IR and forced migration suggests that studying forced migration has enormous relevance for IR, touching upon issues relating to international cooperation, globalization, human rights, international organizations, regime complexity, the role of non-state actors, regionalism, North–South relations, transnationalism, the national politics of international institutions, and security. Therefore, making the study of forced migration part of mainstream IR has a potentially wide-ranging theoretical contribution to make to the discipline (Betts and Loescher 2010).
Furthermore, forced migration studies has rarely drawn upon the tools offered by IR to inform its analysis. Rather, social scientific research on refugees and forced migration has predominantly drawn upon disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and geography to analyse the causes and consequences of human displacement. It has generally offered a
‘bottom-up’ perspective, placing the experiences of displaced people at the centre of its analysis. There is also a need for a complementary ‘top-down’ level of analysis to understand the macro-level structures that influence states’ and other international actors’ responses to forced migration. This is crucial because it is often the choices made by states and other political actors that determine outcomes for the displaced.
Gradually, a growing body of scholarship has begun to consider how patterns of forced migration relate to world politics.
This chapter offers an intellectual history of the relationship between IR and forced migration, arguing that ‘international relations and forced migration’ can be divided into three broad waves of scholarship. First, it suggests that much of the early IR work on forced migration beginning during the Cold War was mainly empirical and can be thought of as international history. Second, it argues that since the late 1990s there has been a gradual move towards theorizing the international politics of forced migration but with a primary focus on theorizing refugees and international relations.
Third, it argues that a new wave is gradually beginning to emerge which represents a transnational turn, with the greatest potential to contribute not only to understanding the politics of forced displacement but also to export ideas back to political science and international relations.
International Political History
At virtually every juncture in the evolution and development of the international system, the refugee has been a central figure. In Arendt’s terms, refugees have been a ‘vanguard of history’, not only witnessing, but also being an integral aspect of, the changing (p. 62) architecture of world politics (Owens 2010). From the creation of the state system at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, to the consolidation of the European state through the revolutions and state unifications of the nineteenth century, to the changing balance of power between the late nineteenth century and the two world wars, to decolonization and the creation of the post-Second World War international society, to the bipolarity of the Cold War, to the post-Cold War era, to globalization, 9/11, and the emergence of new transnational threats linked to terrorism and the environment, refugees have been a central feature of world politics. Not only have refugees been an unintended consequence of developments in the international system but they have also often had an important independent causal influence on the trajectory of world politics.
The most prominent body of academic work on the international politics of forced migration is within the area of international political history. This research lays the empirical groundwork for work on IR and refugees. It offers insights into the emergence and development of the international refugee regime and interaction with the changing international political context. Most of this work has been archival and strongly empirical, and so has not generally applied the conceptual and theoretical developments of IR.
Two pioneering and related volumes emerged in quick succession in the late 1980s, which established the link between IR and refugees. Gordenker’s (1987) Refugees in International Politics was the first to outline the international institutional framework underpinning international cooperation on refugee protection, explaining the emergence of the refugee regime in the twentieth century, the challenges emerging to the scope of that regime at the end of the Cold War, and making a range of policy recommendations. Loescher and Monahan’s (1989) edited volume Refugees and International Relations offered an interdisciplinary approach to the international politics of the refugee regime, drawing on history, sociology, and political science. The chapters collectively highlight, in the words of one contributor, that ‘the
refugee problem is essentially political’ rather than humanitarian (Coles 1989: 394).
Both volumes are predominantly empirical and policy oriented rather than theoretical. Yet, what is striking is how few of the core international policy debates they address evolved in the subsequent decades. They discuss the challenge for the international refugee regime to adapt to people fleeing socio-economic rights and basic rights deprivations, referred to as ‘extra-convention refugees’ or ‘de facto refugees’ (Gordenker 1987), the need to cooperate to find durable solutions to long-standing refugee crises (Cuny and Stein 1989), the need to promote refugee self-reliance beyond encampment (Cuenod 1989), and the challenges posed by so-called irregular migration (Gallagher 1989).
Loescher’s work as an international historian has established him as the leading authority on IR and forced migration. In Calculated Kindness, Loescher and Scanlan (1987) examine the history of US refugee policy during the Cold War, showing how foreign policy considerations consistently defined the US response to refugees fleeing from East to West.
In Beyond Charity, Loescher (1996) considers the global challenges faced by the international refugee regime in the post-Cold War era, situating (p. 63) them within a broader historical context. He shows that refugees are an inherently political issue and must be addressed in a comprehensive way that not only ensures asylum but also engages with the underlying root causes of displacement. In UNHCR and World Politics, he (2001) provides an in-depth institutional history of the main Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees showing how the organization has had to walk a ‘perilous path’ in its relationship with states, needing to uphold humanitarian principles while working in a context defined by power and interests.
This approach has been complemented by work from the so-called English School of International Relations, traditionally the most historically and empirically focused approach to exploring the evolution of international society. Hedley Bull (2010), the founder of the English School, even wrote a posthumously published paper looking at the challenges of refugee protection within international society. Most notably, Haddad’s (2008) The Refugee in International Society, examines the longue durée of the mutually constitutive relationship between the figure of the refugee and modern state system. She argues that, first, refugees can be understood to be an inevitable consequence of the state system, resulting from the breakdown of the assumed state-citizen-territory nexus implied by the Westphalian system and, secondly, that refugees reinforce the nation-state system by upholding a clear distinction between citizens and non-citizens.
Although refuge and sanctuary have been provided by city states and religious groups throughout history, the basis of the refugee regime emerged alongside the creation and consolidation of the modern state system. For Haddad (2008), the origins of the modern refugee regime can be found within the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, with the flight of the Huguenots in the seventeenth century after their expulsion by Louis XIV representing Europe’s first refugee crisis.
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, refugee creation and protection was an integral part of the state-building process within Europe, with émigrés fleeing revolutions in France between 1789 and 1815, and elsewhere in Europe such as in Italy and Poland in 1848. Refugees were also an integral part of the changing balance of power in the context of the formation, consolidation, and expansion of the modern state system in the early part of the twentieth century. As the First World War accelerated the dismantling of multi-ethnic empires such as the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Prussian empires, large numbers of people were excluded from citizenship in the new national states, making displacement to the subsequent nation-building process. Recognition of this longer historical durée of the refugee in world politics, within the English School tradition of International Relations, has thereby contributed to showing how the figure of the refugee only makes sense when considered as closely related to the evolution of the state system (Skran 1995; Haddad 2008; Hurrell 2010).
(p. 64) Theorizing Refugees and International Relations
While this work has largely been empirical and historical in nature theoretically informed scholarship has more recently emerged, attempting to ask explanatory questions about the contemporary challenges of refugees and forced displacement. Such attempts have most notably been developed in Betts’s (2009a) textbook Forced Migration and Global Politics and the related Betts and Loescher (2010) volume Refugees in International Relations, which have examined what IR theory can offer empirical questions within refugee and forced migration studies and vice versa.
The concepts that have emerged from IR have great relevance for understanding the relationship between forced migration and world politics. The area has immense relevance for a whole range of debates in IR, not least because of the way in which forced migration conceptually sits between debates on security, international political economy, and human rights. Within work on IR and Forced Migration, the two main strands of work have focused on analysis of the
International Relations and Forced Migration
causes and consequences, which engage mainly with IR literature in international security, and work on responses to displacement, which draw mainly on IR literature on international cooperation.