The concept of refugee is at once a legal, political, cultural and sociological category. As a consequence, the attribution or label refugee carries with it not only common-sense cultural connotations and legal specificity, but also a great deal of analytical baggage (Marx 1990; Zetter 1988; 1991). Refugees are also heterogenous populations found across the world which have been singled out from ordinary migrants as a potential subject for study for all disciplines.
Legal and political dimensions
Although the phenomenon of refugees is not novel to the twentieth century (Marris 1985), the technical meaning, as it developed after the First World War, was mainly concerned with distinguishing those groups who had lost the protection of their own state (refugees) from ordinary migrants (immigrants). During this period, refugees were not simply defined as people seeking safety, but those who were forced to cross international boundaries under particular conditions of political duress (Skran 1989). The ascription refugee (as defined in the 1933 Refugee Convention) allocates this status according to specific nationalities, for example Russians, Armenians, Assyrians and Turks (Skran 1989:21). This international convention also entailed an obligation of receiving states to provide assistance and protection. A separate category of people in need of international protection was identified by the 1938 Refugee Convention which concerns the status of denationalized Germans, mainly Jews (Goodwin-Gill 1990; Skran 1989). It is important to note that the pre-Second World War definitions identified refugees in terms of membership of particular national groups and the particular political situation which led to their flight.
The main international legal instrument—the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees—emerged as a result of the European experience of the Second World War. The drafters of the convention—thirty-five primarily western-block countries (Weis 1994)—defined refugees as individuals, rather than groups, who had a ‘well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’. It was limited to people fleeing events occurring in Europe before 1 January 1951. Although governments were supposed to apply this definition to all asylum seekers in a neutral manner, and the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was to be of an entirely non-political character, in fact this was not the case. Because of the politics of the Cold War, people fleeing communist countries were generally granted asylum and their acceptance was used for ideological purposes (Loescher 1993:59; Loescher and Scanlan 1986).
In the aftermath of decolonization, refugees became a global problem and the 1967 Protocol extended the definition of a refugee beyond European boundaries. Both the Organization of African Unity’s Convention and the Cartagena Declaration expanded the definition of a refugee to include those who fled their countries ‘owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order’. An important feature of all these international conventions is that they contain a negative stricture (the condition of non-refoulement) for the signatory states without, however, obliging them to grant asylum to a refugee. In contrast, asylum under Islamic law entails the duty of the state to grant asylum (Elmadmad 1993).
Although the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees was being prepared at the time of the 1948 expulsions of the Palestinians, the international community recognized the difficulty of incorporating them under the authority of the High Commissioner for Refugees, whose office was to be non-political, and the Arab states also resisted such an inclusion of Palestinians because they held the United Nations directly responsible for the creation of the refugee crisis and felt that the international community should bear the cost rather than placing it on them, the countries of refuge. As a consequence, an independent legal and assistance regime, the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East, was created under the UN General Assembly Resolution 194(III) of 1948 to accommodate their case.
In its working definition, Palestinians were registered as refugees by UNRWA if they had lost both home and livelihood and had taken refuge in one of the countries or areas where this organization was providing relief. Furthermore, the status of a Palestinian refugee is transmitted to descendants through the male line. It is evident that both the determination of refugee status and the assistance and protection to which they are entitled are influenced by the prevailing geopolitical agenda.
The sociological dimension: the evolution of solutions to the refugee problem
The evolution of the term refugee as it has developed in the context of international humanitarian policy after the First World War falls into five main phases. In each one of these phases is found both a particular conceptualization of the refugee as a national and an international problem and the corresponding policy solution used to address it (Goodwin-Gill 1990).
Phase I
The interwar period was dominated by the spirit of the times which was nationalism, understood as one nation for each state and only one state for every nation, as Manzini put it. In this sense, refugees were defined in terms of their membership of a nation without a state, or without the protection of their state, and thus in need of international protection, for example, passports (travel documents for Russian refugees) (Skran 1992), and livelihood support (jobs for Armenian refugees). In some cases, settlement sponsorship schemes were supported for nation-states trying to absorb those refugees who had an ethnic claim (e.g. Greece and Greek refugees from Turkey) (Skran 1992:28–30). Furthermore, since the protection and assistance was mainly provided by the receiving state, the dominant solution was primarily through the labour market.
Phase II
In the period following the Second World War, solutions were guided by the Cold War ideology and the west’s preoccupation with the elimination of the enemy: fascism, whether right or left (Harrell-Bond 1985). Resettlement as a response to the vast refugee numbers was to be a permanent solution, involving the assimilation of the newcomers into the host society (Hathaway 1992; Kay and Miles 1988).
Phase III
By the 1970s, most of the situations giving rise to mass exodus were taking place in Asia and Africa. Refugees became identified as a Third World problem to be resolved in these regions (Zolberg et al. 1989). Asylum was perceived as temporary, as was (and still remains) the solution devised to address it: the refugee camp (Harrell-Bond 1986; Malkki 1989; 1990; Stein 1986; Voutira and Harrell-Bond 1994). Given that the weakest states had become the hosts of the vast majority of refugees, the refugee camp was perceived by the rich donor countries as a strategy of political containment, as an efficient mechanism for the delivery of humanitarian relief leading to economic self-sufficiency (Daley 1991; Harrell-Bond 1986; 1993). Neither of these objectives were, in fact, achieved. With respect to the political considerations, refugee camps became the seedbed for political foment (Malkki 1989; 1990). As far as economic self-sufficiency was concerned, for the most part, people living in refugee camps have been systematically impoverished (Clark and Stein 1985; Harrell-Bond 1986; Waldron 1987). Refugees became permanent cases for international welfare (Harrell-Bond and Voutira 1992; Harrell-Bond et al. 1992).
Phase IV
From the early 1980s, the recognition of the failures of temporary solutions led to series of attempts simply to eliminate the problem. These included efforts to undermine the legitimacy of the whole notion of refugee status by promoting the idea that refugees were not victims of circumstances but, in fact, individuals who had been attracted by the aid offered as a result of this status (Ruiz 1987). Such ideas have led to the very common popular misconception that all refugees are now job seekers rather than asylum seekers. With the increasing poverty and instability in the south, such beliefs are further reinforced by the general unwillingness to recognize the degree to which human rights issues underlie the diverse economic, environmental and civil unrest which cause refugee movements (Hathaway 1991).
The promotion of voluntary repatriation is the major solution marking Phase IV (Coles 1985; Harrell-Bond 1989), with many observers criticizing the coercion under which these programmes are implemented (Crisp 1984; Cuny and Stein 1990). Even repatriation back into conflict situations may be seen as legitimate (Cuny et al. 1992), and refoulement is legitimized by the concept of safe countries (Amnesty International 1992; EXCOM 1991).
Under the policies of perestroika, the waiving of restrictions on immigration and the international policy of rapprochement between east and west, the concept of voluntary repatriation was introduced to account for the large numbers of immigrants from the east. These included ethnic Germans, Armenians, Greeks, and Jews from the then Soviet Union, Hungarians from Romania, Germans from Poland, to mention only a few, who were defined as repatriating to their respective homelands (Bade 1993; Korcelli 1992; Voutira 1991).
Phase V
The 1990s marked the beginning of a new phase. On the one hand, UNHCR proclaimed it as the decade of repatriation. On the other, as a result of the war in the former Yugoslavia, refugees are once again a European problem demanding a common response. Methods were introduced to actively prevent threatened people from acquiring access to the territory of states bound to grant asylum by governments, united by their restrictionist policies (e.g. fortress Europe), and reinterpreted as protection of the right not to be uprooted. The international community now promotes the notion of preventive protection through safe havens (Jaeger 1993).
Sociocultural constructions of the refugee
Media images of refugees, often reinforced by charity fund-raising, characteristically focus on depictions of misery, destitution, helplessness and dependency (Benthall 1993). These familiar encodings of the global culture are far removed from anthropological analyses of the refugee experience in different cultural contexts. Accordingly, we need to identify the degrees to which the formal and technical meanings of the legal terms discussed vary with respect to different ideologies and local practices concerning strangers, foreigners and guests.
A number of cases point to the range of such cultural variations. In southern African societies, norms of hospitality to the stranger allowed western survivors of shipwrecks to be welcomed into local communities even as chiefs and benefactors of these regions. In South-east Asia, foreigners were regularly integrated into local communities through rituals of eating together, helping and entertaining neighbours according to Buddhist tradition. For the Sherpas in Nepal, the people are the hosts and the gods are their guests: making others comfortable pleases the gods, who, in turn, are expected to protect the hosts from demons. Among Afghan refugees, codes of honour ensured temporary shelter among kin, when they first arrived in Pakistan. On the ideological level, Koranic tradition includes the general obligation to grant asylum to the refugee (mohajer), guaranteeing the maintenance of this protection. Furthermore, because the refugee in this context is associated with Muhammad’s flight from Mecca to Medina in AD 622, a refugee is not a term of shame but a term of honour. In each of these cases, the theme of exchange of social obligation and reciprocity supports the manifestation of ‘this-worldly’ or secular benevolent behaviour, which is legitimized by the belief in ‘other-worldly’ restitution or retribution to balance out the particular act.
In conclusion, refugees are people who have undergone a violent rite of separation and unless or until they are incorporated as members into their host state (or returned to their state of origin) find themselves in a perpetual state of liminality or between and betwixt (Malkki 1990). Their incorporation is an interactive process involving the adaptation of both refugees and their hosts.
Coming to terms with the different dimensions of human suffering that are encapsulated in the refugee experience has functioned as a corrective device for theory. The study of such disenfranchised and dispossessed populations has also provided an impetus for establishing social science more firmly within public affairs.
E.Voutira
B.E.Harrell-Bond
University of Oxford
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