The International Refugee Regime: Stretched to the Limit?

Abstract

International institutions traditionally have had difficulty addressing refugee problems, particularly during times of great disorder and structural change within world politics -- for example, during the First World War when multinational states and empires disintegrated and after the Second World War when the global structure shifted from a multipolar to a bipolar system. Over 70 years ago, the world community established an international refugee regime(1) to regularize the status and control of stateless people in Europe. Since then, international laws specifying refugees as a unique category of human rights victims to whom special protection and benefits should be accorded have been signed and ratified by over a hundred states and enforced for several decades. Like international institutions, however, states also have been traditionally ambivalent about international cooperation over refugee issues. On the one hand, states have a fundamental, self-serving interest in quickly resolving refugee crises: Refugee movements create domestic instability, generate inter-state tension and threaten international security.(2) Thus, states created the international refugee regime prompted not by purely altruistic motives, but by a desire to promote regional and international stability and to support functions which serve the interests of governments -- namely, burden sharing and coordinating policies regarding the treatment of refugees. On the other hand, state independence is also an issue: States often are unwilling to yield authority to international refugee agencies and institutions and consequently, impose considerable financial and political limitations on their activities. For example, the first intergovernmental activities on behalf of refugees during the interwar period (1921-1943) were limited to specific groups of European refugees. The series of international organizations created to deal with these situations possessed limited mandates of short duration. Although governments met in the early cold war period (1949-1951) to create the contemporary international refugee regime(3) and formulate rules and decision making procedures, they sought to limit once again the regime's responsibilities in the context of the emerging global refugee problem. The great powers were unwilling to commit themselves to indefinite financial costs and large resettlement programs. Nonetheless, despite state reservations, significant intergovernmental collaboration on the refugee issue did in fact occur, and the responsibilities accorded to the international refugee regime steadily expanded, with assistance and protection granted to a progressively larger number of refugees. In the post-Cold War era, however, the number of displaced people in situations of internal conflict, state disintegration and environmental degradation is growing rapidly. The refugee regime -- ill-equipped to address the causes of a crisis, the numbers caught up in it or its consequences -- is once more in danger of being overwhelmed. Having presented an overview, this article examines the dynamics of regime change through the five periods during which the international refugee regime confronted significant challenges to its authority and adapted to those specific needs: the interwar period; the immediate post-Second World War era; the period of expansion into the Third World during the late 1950s through most of the 1970s; the decade of the 1980s, when the regime faced long-standing refugee problems resulting from superpower involvement in regional conflicts; and finally, the post-Cold War era, during which internal displacements and repatriations in situations of civil conflict assume primary importance for international organizations and governments. Next, this article analyzes the characteristics of many of today's displacements, the challenges they pose to the international refugee regime and the kinds of policy responses required -- not only to alleviate human suffering, but also to contribute to greater stability and security in the future. …