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Refugee Repatriation and the Problem of Consent

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2016

Mollie Gerver
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Abstract

Over the past decade, millions of refugees have fled their countries of origin and asked for asylum abroad. Some of these refugees do not receive asylum, but are not deported. Instead they are detained, or denied basic rights of residency, some forced into enclosed camps. Hoping to escape such conditions, they wish to return to unsafe countries, and ask for help from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In such cases, should NGOs and the UN assist refugees to return? Drawing on original data gathered in South Sudan, and existing data from around the world, I argue that they should assist with return if certain conditions are met. First, the UN and NGOs must try to put an end to coercive conditions before helping with return. Secondly, helping with return must not encourage the government to expand the use of coercive policies to encourage more to return. Finally, NGOs and the UN must ensure that refugees are fully informed of the risks of returning. Organizations must either conduct research in countries of origin or lobby the government to allow refugees to visit their countries of origin before making a final decision.

Type
Articles
Information
British Journal of Political Science , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , October 2018 , pp. 855 - 875
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2016 

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Footnotes

*

London School of Economics (email: m.gerver@lse.ac.uk). The author is grateful to the participants of the LSE Doctoral Workshop, the Horn of Africa Seminar Series (Oxford) and the Oxford Central Africa Forum (Oxford) for discussion. Many thanks also to Chandran Kukathas and Eiko Thielemann for their comments on earlier versions of this article, and especially to Kai Spiekermann for his encouragement and constructive feedback throughout the research process. Thanks, also, to the subjects who took part in the research, and to Dobuol Chuol Nyaang, Sharon Livne, Michael Man Goldman and Rami Gudovitch for assistance during fieldwork. Finally, the author is grateful to Hugh Ward and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful and detailed critiques and suggestions. The data found in this article are based on interviews conducted by the author with refugees and internally displaced persons. Due to security risks, transcripts from the interviews have not been made public and all names have been changed.

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