Refugees in International Relations

This volume, as they explain, emerged from the editors’ frustration with the relative marginalisation of the issue of refugees from the dominant scholarship within the discipline of International Relations (IR) (p 4). It is an outcome of a lecture series held at the University of Oxford between October 2008 and March 2009 where the invited academics, drawn from a range of theoretical perspectives within IR, were asked to contribute to and comment on the relevance of their scholarships to forced migration. This book builds on an earlier project, an OUP volume entitled Refugees and International Relations, edited by Gil Loescher and Laila Monahan (1989), bringing together authors within the discipline of refugee studies; it is also intended to complement the textbook by Alexander Betts, Forced Migration and Global Politics (2009). This volume, therefore, seeks to bridge the divide between IR and forced migration studies. It is much needed as writers in the field of forced migration studies have not paid enough attention to the ‘top-down’ level of analysis provided and championed by IR Studies, as the editors rightly note. However, both sides are to be blamed for the current state of the debate, and the lack of a genuine cross-disciplinary approach: IR for ‘surprisingly little work on refugees’, and forced migration studies for disregarding macro-level structures in understanding states’ and other international actors’ responses to forced migration (p 3). Betts and Loescher have recognised where the problem lies, and justify the need for this book and the preceding lecture series in order to, in their own words, ‘mainstream refugees in IR’ (p 4).