The History of Refugee Protection: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges

Forced migration has always existed and yet societies and policy makers are regularly surprised by the arrival of refugees. Similarly, refugee studies is caught between the assertion that displacement and refugee protection are a constant phenomenon of our history and the presentness of its current policy relevance. Neither being wrong, both viewpoints run the risk of arguing a-historically, ignoring either precedents or transformations. The multi-disciplinary field of refugee studies lacks a reflection on conceptual, theoretical and methodological challenges of its historical perspective. Until recently, it faced a historiographical lacuna with few historians researching forced migration systematically and, in turn, little historical research being adopted in refugee studies (Marfleet 2007). This is not to say that refugee studies was unconscious of the past. Important studies by non-historians, influential in the field of refugee studies, detailed the development of institutions (Skran 1995; Betts et al. 2011; Betts and Loescher 2014; Goodwin-Gill 2014) and analysed case studies about the historical response to refugee protection needs (Zolberg et al. 1986; Gibney 2004; Price 2009; Chatty 2013). These have been central to our understanding of refugees and refugee protection. However, the narratives can be at times anecdotal, selective or lack a broader historical contextualization beyond the issue of refugees. As the study of the past is to challenge perceptions of the refugee present, interpreting the past from the present can run the risk of arguing in circles. This dilemma cannot be fully resolved but can be counteracted by historiographical theory and methodology.