Hannah Baumeister’s review examines the national politics of international institutions concerned with refugees and asks why host states with similar refugee norms respond differently to cross-border displacement.
It reports Alexander Betts’s argument that elite interests, shaped by national and international incentives, influence whether protection is extended to people fleeing serious human-rights deprivation outside the dominant legal definition of a refugee. The concept of “survival migration” offers a human-rights-based framework for assessing whether such people are entitled not to be returned under refugee law or human-rights law.
Failed governance and the crisis of displacement in the context of survival migration
Its concrete contribution is to present protection against return as potentially grounded not only in refugee law but also in human-rights law, while linking differing state responses to political incentives.
International Journal of Refugee Law · 2015
DOI 10.1093/ijrl/eev054
