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The construction of the “refugee” is a relatively recent phenomena as modern warfare in the twentieth century displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Between the first and second world wars, the League of Nations created the office of High Commissioner for Refugees to address the issue of displaced populations from the Russian Revolution, Armenian genocide, and other European conflicts. After World War II, the newly created United Nations sought to develop a definition for the “refugee.” Thus, the 1951 Convention defined refugee as the following:
“a person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who . . . is unable or . . . unwilling to return to it.”
The problem with constructing refugees legally through modern definitions such as the 1951 Convention (and later, the 1967 and 1969 Conventions) is that modern conceptions of “refugee” reflect a modern construction of the international state relations, under which there is “a state for everyone and everyone in a state.”[1] This state-centered approach is exclusive of the very group it seeks to define because refugees are stateless. Such an approach is problematic because it causes states to negatively view mobile persons as having no geopolitical value. For example, many states view refugees as “destabilizing” because of economic tensions between local populations and refugees who are willing to receive less pay for labor. Additionally, many states fear the political mobilization of refugees. Thus, states construct the refugee as a “problem” that needs to be “solved.”
A second way in which refugees are constructed is through the bureaucracy of aid regimes. Relief organizations have made the refugee an “object of intervention.” Discursively, humanitarian organizations construct refugees as victims not only in determining who receives assistance, but also in compelling people to donate to relief efforts. The depiction of refugees as victims is a double-edged sword because it limits a refugee’s ability to act within the world, yet it gives them access to crucial assistance and acknowledgement from the global community. Furthermore, the aid that is provided is “simultaneously constraining and productive.”[2] It is constraining in that it creates tension not only between aid-workers distributing aid to refugees, but also as refugees compete with each other for aid. However, aid is productive because it provides refugees with a life-line that they otherwise would not have.
The refugee experience is not one-dimensional as refugees are constructed as legal categories by the state system, and as they are constructed as objects of intervention by aid regimes. Therefore one must understand both of these facets before one may understand the construction of the “refugee.”
[1] T. Alexander Alienikoff "State-Centered Refugee
Law: From Resettlement to Containment" in Daniel, E.V. and J. Knudsen (Mis)Trusting
Refugees Berkeley: UC Press: 257.
[2] Peteet, Julie Landscape of Hope and Despair. Palestinian Refugee Camps. University of
Pennsylvania Press, 2005: 49.
Mary Rose Kennedy is a senior McConnell Scholar from Owenton, KY. Kennedy is studying political science, history, and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.
Mary Rose Kennedy is a senior McConnell Scholar from Owenton, KY. Kennedy is studying political science, history, and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies.