A SMALL ISLAND

In the Introduction I said I would not offer a definition of the refugee in this book. Having said that, I do need to discuss definitions of the concept of refugeehood, for two reasons. The first is that I have argued that the vast majority of people forcibly displaced from their homes are left outside of international protection, because they do not fall within the category of ‘refugee’ in international law, and so I need to map out its boundaries to demonstrate the narrowness of its limits. I have argued that we need to stop talking about protection gaps, as this gives the impression of an expansive system of refugee protection with some gaps in it through which some displaced people fall. Rather, I suggested we conceive of a small island of refugee protection within an ocean of forced displacement. In Chapter 2 we saw the struggles people face to reach that island and the efforts global North states make to repel them, with refugees caught up in violent and sometimes fatal practices of exclusion as much as any other migrants. In this chapter I aim to explore the island of protection more closely. What we will find is that it is guarded not only by physical walls, fences and guns but also by laws and policies which aim to restrict access.

The second reason is that the vast majority of normative political theorists who discuss forced displacement would agree with this point, and offer more expansive definitions of ‘refugeehood’. But I have argued that the whole process of trying to arrive at a definition of the refugee which is more inclusive is a mistake, and pushes the argument in a conservative direction because of a narrow conception of what international protection should look like. While surrogate membership of a sanctuary state is an important form of protection for refugees, it cannot be applied in other cases of forced displacement, which subsequently get categorised as not political, when in reality they look profoundly political. Also, because of the boundary problem, many of these attempts to redefine refugeehood are undermined by issues of arbitrariness and incoherence; they still seem to leave people outside of international protection for no good moral reason.