Historical Foundations and Limitations of International Refugee Law

This article situates the foundational legal definition of the refugee articulated in the 1951 Geneva Convention on Refugees and its subsequent 1967 Protocol in historical processes of empire, decolonization, war, and humanitarian mobilization. It critiques international refugee law from the inside out, that is, by taking as axiomatic its European normative origins while simultaneously recognizing the global and polycentric dimensions of the refugee crisis by the early twentieth century. In particular, it draws upon the work of an emerging scholarship on refugee history that reveals the frequently ad hoc, improvisational nature of international refugee law in its formative development, which has made for persistent limitations. Key limitations include the privileging of political, rather than environmental or economic, motivations for migration.