Arat-Koç, ‘Refugee Governance: Power Relations and the Making of Refugees’, 2026

Arat-Koç, S. (2026). Refugee Governance: Power Relations and the Making of Refugees. In: Fukuda-Parr, S., Jacobs, S. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook on Decolonizing International Affairs. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham.

Abstract

This chapter aims to demonstrate the historical and ongoing coloniality of refugee governance and to discuss some of the ways it may be decolonized. From its initial legal and institutional foundations in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the Refugee Convention in the early 1950s, refugee contexts and experiences from the Global South were systematically excluded from what was supposed to be a universal system of refugee protection. “Tolerated” or used as pawns during the Cold War, Southern refugees were perceived as “no longer possess(ing) political or ideological value” after the end of the Cold War. This meant that, from early 1990s on, they have faced increasingly hostile policies and discourses and an expanding non-entrée regime across the Global North. Epistemologically, the non-entrée system has been justified by two main premises, the “myth of difference”, and internalist explanations regarding the root causes of refugee movements. These premises help provide legitimacy for rejection of Third World refugees; and to absolve Western responsibility for the making and protection of refugees. The final section of the chapter cautions that coloniality may be relevant even in contexts where refugees are seen to receive a positive welcome. Literature on Vietnamese refugees, and gender and sexuality-related refugee claims based in Critical Refugee Studies demonstrate that rather than refugee protection, the priority in these discourses is about asserting Western superiority and celebrating empire.