Abstract:
The international refugee regime is establishing the grounds for a transition toward a paradigm of non-encampment, shifting from a largely humanitarian discourse to a more development-oriented understanding of refugee situations. This has been signalled by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ recent policies on urban refugees and alternatives to camps which advocate strongly for improving refugees’ access to livelihoods and self-reliance through integration with host development schemes. It is believed that, in doing so, the inadequate protection and poor material conditions many refugees face in host countries can be overcome as refugees become able to provide for their own protection. This thesis sees these developments differently. It views them through an understanding of the international refugee regime as a space in which global politics and power structures operate to contain refugee populations in the South. This view helps to explain how the recent EU-Turkey Agreement – which establishes the means to return all asylum seekers arriving in the European Union (EU) from Turkey – can legitimise its containment of refugees in Turkey partially through a discourse of development and selfreliance. Within this understanding of the regime, development through self-reliance operates discursively and politically to perpetuate the global containment of refugees, albeit now in a discourse which deemphasises the centrality of encampment. The policies mentioned above – as well as a global policy proposal from Amnesty International which seeks to overcome this global containment – are analysed through a governmentality-informed framework to understand the implications of promoting refugee self-reliance in a paradigm of non-encampment, in terms of both the material and the political consequences. The findings of this analysis suggest self-reliance operates biopolitically to perpetuate global containment and, consequently, inadequate protection space. Both a repoliticising of refugee situations and a rethinking of development approaches to these situations – and development through self-reliance more generally – are needed to overcome this; Amnesty’s proposal helps address some of this, and a politics of distribution is also explored as an alternative model of development which might signal new rationalities and spaces of political mobilisation.