WHAT IS THE PROBLEM?

The Preamble of the 1951 Refugee Convention refers to the ‘problem of refugees’, and expresses the wish that states ‘will do everything within their power to prevent this problem from becoming a cause of tension between States’. UNHCR’s Statute also identifies one of its functions as ‘seeking permanent solutions for the problem of refugees’ (UNHCR Statute Chapter 1.1). In a 2019 document on guidance for partner organisations, UNHCR describes this function as seeking ‘permanent solutions to the problems of refugees’, which changes its meaning in significant ways (UNHCR 2019a: 8; my emphasis). However, the phrase ‘the refugee problem’ runs deep throughout media, political and academic discourse on displacement. Kelly Staples refers to this as ‘the construction of … people as a problem in need of solution’ (Staples 2019: 161). She points out, drawing on the work of Peter Lawler, that ‘problems are not fixed, but rather “named and framed in the process of responding to them”, which implies “a constitutive relationship between problems and solutions”’ (Staples 2019: 159; Lawler 2008: 386).

This opens up the possibility that what counts as a problem depends on what solution you want. In other words, while we may normally understand the problem as coming first and the solution second, the real relationship in some cases may be that the solution comes first, and the problem is then defined by that solution. For example, if your preferred solution is the maintenance of the status quo when it comes to the international order of nation states, then certain groups of people become constituted as problems that must be solved in ways that maintain that order. While we may have thought that the purpose of the international refugee regime is to protect refugees, what the discourse of the ‘refugee problem’ suggests is that its purpose is predominantly to preserve and protect the nation-state system, and even then to protect the interests of a powerful group of states within that system. To put the point in what might seem a provocative way, the international protection system’s primary purpose is to protect the global order of things, not to protect the displaced.