Refugee Return without Refoulement: A Typology of State Strategies to Evade Asylum Norms

E40-496, in-person limited to the MIT Community

SSP Wednesday Seminar with speaker Stephanie Schwartz, Assistant Professor in the Department of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. The talk will be broadcast live on the MIT Security Studies Program Youtube channel.Summary/abstract: How do states avoid hosting refugees? This article presents a novel typology of state strategies to avoid providing asylum, demonstrating that just as rich democracies can feign compliance with the letter of international law without upholding the spirit, states in the Global South can design liberal asylum policies to achieve illiberal ends – but they must use the governance of refugee return to do so. Using multiple forms of description, the article conceptualizes a common yet overlooked strategy which I call ‘return-without-refoulement’ in which states effectively turn already-recognized refugees on their territory into asylum-seekers. This enables states to engage in tactics to incentivize refugees’ to return ‘voluntarily’ or to legally deport now former-refugees. The article then outlines the implications of identifying and conceptualizing the return-without-refoulement strategy in advancing debates on human rights compliance.