The ‘Refugee World’: A Twentieth-Century Retrospective

Abstract In 1973 Sadruddin Aga Khan, the high commissioner of UNHCR, the UN refugee agency headquartered in Geneva, declared that refugees belonged to a ‘fourth world’. This article examines the implication of this term by tracing the ways in which UNHCR engaged with refugees and what refugees made of UNHCR in the quarter century following its inception in 1951. External observers of the ‘refugee world’, including British journalist Robert Kee, criticised UNHCR’s tendency to defend its institutional interests and to make a priori assumptions about refugees. Drawing on its confidential individual case files, this article discloses the voices and perspectives of refugees who wrote to the organisation: those who came within UNHCR’s mandate and those who hoped to access its assistance and protection but were excluded. Attention is then paid to those who sought refuge in communist states and to refugees in the third world who escaped colonial repression or became freedom fighters. The article concludes by demonstrating that some refugees challenged UNHCR to envisage an alternative refugee world or a world without refugees. This underlines the point that the world of refugees never constituted a single realm of persecution.