Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

This is a timely and courageous book. The core argument is that the global refugee system is failing because it focuses on humanitarianism rather than on development. Until and unless we ‘move beyond the humanitarian silo ... to prioritize jobs, education, and economic empowerment for refugees’ (p 168) – and do so in a manner that works ‘within the constraints of the contemporary world’ (p 234) – our commitment to refugee protection will remain more rhetorical than real. The critique is hard-hitting. The shift during the 1980s to refugee encampment as the default response to the arrival of refugees is argued to have served the interests of States of the global South who sought ‘a means to place refugees “out of sight and out of mind” while abdicating financial responsibility to the international community’ (p 41). But it was abetted by a ‘global humanitarian industry intent on distributing food, tents, and blankets’ (p 52), by donor States ‘because camps contain a population that might otherwise be a source of instability and move onwards in search of a better life’ (p 139), and, in particular, by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which had ‘found itself without purpose and without money at the end of the Cold War’ (p 52) and viewed camps as a means to ‘bankroll the organization’ (p 139). Chancellor Merkel’s open-door policy was well intentioned, but ‘the uncomfortable reality is that the German government has systematically denuded a poor country Syria of the capacity it will need in order to rebuild’ (p 200). Refugee advocacy is said to be ‘dominated by a dogmatic insistence that reciting international law is the most effective way to influence state behaviour’ (p 209), with lawyers unduly fixated on the promotion of ‘layers of reinterpretation of the language of a convention created for a bygone era’ (p 35). Nor do refugees themselves escape criticism, it being suggested that most of the Syrian refugees who came to Europe had made ‘an economic decision to migrate, not reacting to the force majeure of violence. The small minority of Syrians, around one in twenty, who moved to Europe had chosen to become migrants’ (p 199).