Since the end of the Cold War, and particularly after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001 in the United States, refugee movements have increasingly been portrayed by state policy makers, the media, and even the UN High Commis- sioner for Refugees as a threat to security. This development is intrinsically linked to the widening of the concept of security in the post-Cold War period beyond the traditional Realist notion of national security as the military protec- tion of state sovereignty and territorial integrity. This trend can be seen in the academic literature as well as in the discourses of states, regional organizations, and the UN. It is a phenomenon that can be observed in the industrialized North as well as in the developing South, albeit in different manifestations.

The securitization of forced migrants, whether they be mass infl uxes of refugees in the global South or asylum seekers in the North, has had a signifi cant impact not only on how we talk about displacement, but also on what solutions we deem appropriate for dealing with their situation. Using the securitization approach of the Copenhagen School, this chapter will trace the process of securitization of forced migration over the past two decades. It will then discuss the consequences of this securitization for the treatment of asylum seekers in the North and mass refugee fl ows in the South. The links between, on the one hand, Northern atti- tudes and actions to deter and return asylum seekers, and on the other hand, an increased unwillingness to receive refugees in the South will also be explored.

INTRODUCTION

We must attempt to reduce complex political questions in the minds of nations into simple moral and humanitarian components for the heart to answer. (Sadruddin Aga Khan, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, November 1974)

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Population displacement, whether internal or international has gone beyond the humanitarian domain to become a major political, security and socio-economic issue, affecting regional and global stability, as the crises in former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda have clearly shown. (Sadako Ogata, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, October 1994)

These quotations are by the two longest-serving UN High Commissioners for Refugees: Sadruddin Aga Khan, who dominated UNHCR throughout the 1970s, and Sadako Ogata, in charge of the refugee agency for almost the entire decade of the 1990s. The quotations provide an apt snapshot of how percep- tions of the refugee problem have changed over the decades. When even UNHCR, which oversees the international refugee regime and is tasked with protecting the rights of refugees, takes on a discourse of security, we can be fairly confi dent that the refugee problem has gone through a process of secu- ritization. This process—how it started, how it has unfolded, and what are its consequences—is the concern of this chapter.

There is by now what seems to be a broad consensus among scholars that, since the end of the Cold War, and particularly after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001 (9/11) in the United States, refugee movements have increasingly been portrayed as a threat to security by state policy makers, the media, and even UNHCR. In the IR literature, scholars began studying refu- gees through the analytical prisms provided by Security Studies in the early 1990s (pioneers including Weiner (1993) and Loescher (1992) ). This happened at the same time as the so-called ‘widening debate’ took off within the academic fi eld of Security Studies at the end of the Cold War (see, e.g., Mathews 1989; Buzan 1991; Deudney 1990; Booth 1991; Baldwin 1997; Krause and Williams 1997; Paris 2001). The securitization of refugee movements is intrinsically linked to the widening of the concept of security in Security Studies, beyond the traditional Realist notion of national security as the protection of state sovereignty and territorial integrity against military threats and beyond the narrow defi nition of Security Studies as ‘the study of the threat, use, and control of military force’ (Walt 1991: 212). Refugees were as such not the only newcomers on academic and state security agendas in the early 1990s; they were in the erstwhile company of other perceived emerging global threats such as migration (in general) (Wæver et al. 1993) and the environment (Homer-Dixon 1991, 1994; Myers 1993).

The aim of this chapter is to track the securitization of refugee movements, not in academic literature, but in the discourse of political elites who are more directly responsible for maintaining the international refugee regime. Securitization denotes the process wherein ‘an issue is presented as an exis- tential threat, requiring emergency measures and justifying actions outside the normal bounds of political procedure’ (Buzan et al. 1998: 23–4).

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The securitization of displacement is a phenomenon that can be observed in the industrialized North as well as in the developing South, albeit in different manifestations. I will aim to document this process by focusing on the evolu- tion of UNHCR’s offi cial discourse.

The chapter is structured as follows: I begin by sketching UNHCR’s tradi- tional discourse, dominated by descriptions of the refugee problem as non- political and humanitarian and the refugee agency’s own role as purely legal and neutral. I then trace the evolution of this discourse over the decades, with particular emphasis on the adoption of a fully fl edged security discourse in the 1990s. After mapping these dramatic discursive changes, I discuss the reasons why this shift took place.

The fi nal section looks at the impact and implications of this securitization process on the functioning of the international refugee regime, and provides evidence suggesting that viewing forced migration through a security prism has encouraged an atmosphere where the hosting of refugees is understood by states as a zero-sum game rather than a question of solidarity (with each other and with refugees). This takes us to the question of desecuritization: ‘the shifting of issues out of emergency mode and into the normal bargaining processes of the political sphere’ (Buzan et al. 1998: 4). I discuss the desira- bility of desecuritizing forced migration, and view this against the many reasons given for securitizing the issue in the fi rst place. I agree with Wæver’s view (1995) that, in general, desecuritization is desirable. More specifi cally, I argue that the reasons for securitizing the refugee problem have been outweighed by the problems caused by viewing forced migrants through a security prism. I also discuss some trends that seem to suggest that such a desecuritization, or at least partial desecuritization, of forced migration is indeed currently taking place within UNHCR’s discourse.

W H Y U N HCR?

Before turning to the main analysis, it would be prudent to say some words about its relevance. Some may question the choice of UNHCR as the main subject of study. Why not instead investigate the discourse of more powerful actors such as the United States; of major refugee-hosting states in the South such as Thailand and Tanzania; or of major asylum destinations in the North such as Sweden and the United Kingdom? The fi rst reason is methodological: Although it has grown to become one of the UN’s largest agencies, UNHCR has a relatively narrow mandate and a unique structure where the person of the High Commissioner enjoys an unrivalled position as the voice of refugees

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on the international arena. This means that UNHCR is an unusually contained and unitary actor that lends itself well to discourse analysis.

Second, UNHCR’s offi cial discourse is worth analysing because it is linked to, and refl ects, a broader securitization trend. The refugee agency would not have developed and refi ned a discourse of security if this did not refl ect changes in the perceptions and interests of key states. UNHCR relies on states for funding,1 and for access to refugee populations, and therefore feels keenly the need to remain relevant and responsive to their fears and needs. In the words of High Commissioner Thorvald Stoltenberg:

If UNHCR is static and unresponsive to the political realities surrounding us, we become meaningless both to the refugees and to the internal [sic] community which have [sic] established us. If on the other hand, we are dynamic in analysing, under- standing and responding to the very same political realities, we would be in a posi- tion not only to serve those who need us directly, but we will also be occupying an important and meaningful place on the world stage (. . .) (Stoltenberg, 17 January 1990a) 2

It is unlikely that UNHCR would have taken on a security discourse without the belief that this resonated with the perceptions of core donor (in partic- ular) and refugee host states. Having said that, it is also unlikely that the refugee agency would have adopted a security discourse unless it thought it could harness this discourse to further the cause of protecting refugees and fi nding solutions to their plight. This means that UNHCR’s security discourse varies in its emphases and its conceptualizations of security from the discourses of states.

W H Y DISCOU R SE A NA LYSIS ?

But is securitization really that interesting? Is it not merely a matter of rhet- oric? The study of refugees and security indicates that discourse does matter. How we perceive and understand an issue affects how we act on it. Changing perceptions of forced migrants, whether mass infl uxes of refugees in the global South or asylum seekers arriving individually in the North, have had a signifi cant impact not only on how we talk about refugees but also on what actions we deem appropriate and acceptable for dealing with their situation. According to UNHCR, part of whose mandate it is to monitor states’ adher- ence to the international refugee regime, the protection climate for refugees has deteriorated markedly in recent years (e.g. Feller 2008). In this chapter I argue that, due to security language’s ‘specifi c capacity for fabricating and

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sustaining antagonistic relations between groups of people’ (Huysmans 2006: xii), the deterioration in the protection climate is linked to the securitization of the refugee problem.

However, I would exaggerate the importance of discourse if I were to imply that there is some direct and one-way causal link between the securitization of refugee movements (the cause) and a deterioration in the international protection climate (the effect). Instead, taking as a starting point the securi- tization approach of the Copenhagen School, this chapter attempts to analyse the process of securitization of forced migration as a form of hermeneutical spiral between discourse and practice. The way we talk about a phenomenon helps shape how we react to it. But our actions—and their consequences—in turn help shape how we discuss the phenomenon.3 Thus, for the analysis to be complete, in addition to studying the securitization of how we talk about forced migration, the chapter will also discuss how changing realities on the ground have facilitated such a securitization process.

U N HCR’S SECU R ITIZ ATION OF FORCED MIGR ATION :

A N I N TELLECT UA L HISTORY

An analysis of UNHCR’s offi cial discourse from its inception in 1951 until today reveals startling changes in the refugee agency’s understanding and presentation of the refugee problem through the decades.4 From a timidly legalistic and non-political discourse studiously avoiding controversy in the 1950s, UNHCR had by the mid-1990s abandoned caution for a high-profi le interventionist outlook, ready to deal with the root causes of displacement, even when that meant being actively involved in humanitarian action in the midst of war. Instead of its traditional emphasis on its uniqueness as the world’s only refugee protection agency, UNHCR began to routinely describe itself as a central cog in the UN’s international security mechanism. In its own words, UNHCR’s discourse shifted from a ‘reactive, exile-oriented and refugee-specifi c’ paradigm to a ‘proactive, homeland-oriented and holistic’ one (UNHCR 1995: 43).

UNHCR’s discursive evolution was a gradual one. In its fi rst decade, the 1950s, the agency stuck to a strictly legal self-defi nition, focusing (in dry tones and general terms) on monitoring state signatories’ implementation of the 1951 Refugee Convention. In the 1970s, the agency’s language became more humanitarian in its outlook, and more fl amboyant in style. In this period, material assistance to refugees took an increasingly central place in the agen- cy’s discourse. The 1980s saw the advent of a human rights agenda and a more

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political approach to the refugee problem. In this period UNHCR would admonish states to deal with the ‘root causes’ of fl ight, not just leave the refugee agency to alleviate the symptoms of the underlying political ills causing displacement. Finally, a security discourse emerged in the early 1990s.

While there has been a gradual evolution of key concepts and ideas in UNHCR’s discourse throughout its existence, the securitization of the refugee problem happened surprisingly swiftly. For instance, a statistical analysis of the frequency of the use of the term ‘security’ in UNHCR’s annual Reports to the General Assembly shows a clear trend. From 1970 to 1986 you hardly see the term (average 3.5 times per report). From 1986 to 1987 the mention of ‘security’ more than trebles, and the average frequency for one Report in the period between 1987 and 1999 is 17.5. The trend continued upwards in the early 2000s, with a peak in 2001 of thirty-eight mentions of security in its different permutations. The average frequency in the years 2000 to 2006 is 21.7, but there is a clear downward trend from 2002 onwards, down to only ten mentions of security in the 2006 report. The word frequency count thus shows a sharp growth in the use of the term ‘security’ from the late 1980s onwards, with a gentler but clear decline in the new millennium. A similar trend can be found when counting the term ‘security’ in UNHCR’s annual Notes on International Protection over the same period.5

Not only was the term security employed more frequently since the early 1990s but it evolved into an overarching framework within which UNHCR embedded its other core concepts and which provided a new reason for the refugee agency’s very existence. This can be seen when broadening the discourse analysis beyond word frequencies to an analysis of the High Commissioners’ speeches, the occasional publication The State of the World’s Refugees (fi ve issues over a fi fteen-year period), editorial themes of Refugees Magazine, various funding appeals, and a range of other central UNHCR policy documents. My discourse analysis of these texts attempts to determine the core concepts of UNHCR’s discourse; how these core concepts relate to each other; how their meaning is adjusted and changed over time (for instance, how the meaning of being ‘non-political’ changes dramatically over the years); and how new concepts emerge (especially security), while other recede in their signifi cance and centrality.

If one were to pinpoint a ‘watershed’, a moment when security terminology seized centre stage in UNHCR’s discourse, it would probably be High Commissioner Stoltenberg’s speech in October 1990, where he describes UNHCR as a global security organization. The speech outlines three ambi- tions for UNHCR and relates all three to the goal of furthering global secu- rity. The fi rst ambition, to promote voluntary repatriation, is justifi ed as ‘a

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concrete contribution to peace and security’. The second, safeguarding asylum, which must be done through containing economic migration through the alleviation of poverty, is a task that is both ‘a moral issue and (. . .) a problem of our collective security’. The third ambition, ‘to have the interna- tional community recognize the importance of the issues of refugees and migration and to place them fi rmly on the international political agenda’, is necessary in order to overcome the narrowly defi ned, and now obsolete, secu- rity thinking of the Cold War period. Instead we must recognize ‘the interde- pendence of states and the need to confront together the common problems and challenges to our global security’ (Stoltenberg 1990b).

Stoltenberg’s tenure was short. However, his successor Sadako Ogata inten- sifi ed the process he started. With a background as a Japanese diplomat and a former professor of International Relations, she redefi ned UNHCR’s purpose from the narrower goal of protecting the rights of refugees to the broader purpose of furthering international peace and security. She aimed to place UNHCR at the centre of the attempt in the early 1990s to create a post-Cold War ‘new world order’ of peace and stability. She argued that in order ‘to reach a new order, the problem of displacement must be addressed effectively and humanely’ (Ogata 1992a). Peace and security became, throughout the 1990s, a routine topic of Ogata’s speeches.

The Nature of UNHCR’s Discourse in the 1990s

The Ogata decade saw the consolidation and expansion of UNHCR’s security discourse throughout the agency’s various publications and offi cial utter- ances. But how did UNHCR understand and employ the concept of security in the 1990s? A brief look at the publications The State of the World’s Refugees gives a clear idea of both how central the concept of security was to UNHCR’s discourse and how this concept developed over time. The 1997 edition gave the concept of security an exceptionally prominent role: The fi rst chapter set out UNHCR’s understanding of ‘security’ and the term was subsequently employed as a guiding concept throughout the survey. At the same time the 1997 edition exemplifi ed how the refugee agency attempted to redefi ne secu- rity into a more refugee-friendly concept. This was also a theme of Ogata’s speeches: in 1995 she declared that a ‘major test for the coming decades (. . .) will be to develop a humanitarian perspective of security’ (Ogata 1995).

This more humanitarian perspective took the form, in UNHCR’s discourse, as the adoption of the concept of human security towards the end of the 1990s. UNHCR’s advocacy of holistic approaches to the refugee problem led the agency also to advocate a holistic notion of security: a concept of

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human security that aimed to incorporate all aspects of security from the individuals to states and the international community. UNHCR, in common with many other advocates of human security, did not go into detail about how this could be achieved. The message was simply that by focusing on human rights and dignity, ‘food security’, and other aspects of bettering the life of individuals, the security of states and the international community will—eventually—follow. Human security was endorsed as a new humani- tarian and superior notion of security, which had the potential of replacing narrow, short-sighted, and egotistical national security concerns with a broader and longer-term perspective of collective security.

The introduction of the concept of human security into UNHCR’s offi cial vocabulary made away with any dualism between the security of states and regions and that of individuals. Instead, the security of individuals and that of states and the international community became inextricably—and harmo- niously—linked. Matching UNHCR’s post-Cold War mantra of comprehen- sive and holistic approaches to solving the refugee problem, then, was the refugee agency’s new comprehensive and holistic concept of security. The agency had travelled a long way from when UNHCR’s discourse was framed around the concepts of being non-operational and non-political. In the 1970s, High Commissioner Aga Khan had understood his role to be to keep refugee issues out of the sphere of international politics and security. Ogata stressed the opposite: Population movements could no longer ‘be dealt with through charity’, she said: there ‘must now be a clear realization that movements of people are likely to become both a major political and security issue in the near future’ (Ogata 1992b).

W H Y DID U N HCR SECU R ITIZE THE R EFUGEE PROBLEM ?

Since 2001, there has again been a considerable shift in UNHCR’s discourse, this time away from the use of security language, at least to some extent. Before I turn to a more detailed analysis of how and why this partial desecu- ritization has occurred, this section will look at some of the political, opera- tional, and bureaucratic reasons why UNHCR adopted a security discourse in the fi rst place. I do this by placing UNHCR’s discursive evolution in the context of

1. the agency’s operations on the ground; 2. the discourse and actions of core donor and refugee host states; 3. the emergence of more people-friendly conceptualizations of security; and 4. some bureaucratic shifts within the refugee agency itself.

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Changes in the Agency’s Operations on the Ground

Changes in UNHCR’s operational environment have had a signifi cant impact on the agency’s security language. UNHCR began as a non-operational agency, which then gradually became more involved in the fi eld, fi rst indi- rectly through ‘implementing partners’, and then increasingly through the fi eld presence of its own staff. It is now one of the largest humanitarian relief agencies in the world, with most of its staff located in remote fi eld offi ces rather than at the Geneva headquarters. But not only has UNHCR become increasingly operational but the nature of its operations has also changed. Traditionally UNHCR used to sit on the other side of the border waiting for refugees to fl ow out. This sat well with its discourse of being a non-political and humanitarian agency. In UNHCR’s 1970s discourse, security is never mentioned without pairing it with politics, and both concepts are considered as negative, alien elements in the refugee discourse, as in this example:

If a [formal refugee status determination] procedure does not exist, there is no guar- antee that a bona fi de asylum seeker will be treated according to accepted humani- tarian standards, and that extraneous considerations, such as those of a political, economic or security nature, will not infl uence the case. (UNHCR 1971, para. 12, emphasis added)

Since UNHCR was so remote from the confl icts and crises that created refu- gees, it was relatively easy for it to take a stance wherein the agency would never comment on why refugees in its care had fl ed their own country:

Since UNHCR is strictly a humanitarian and non-political organization, it is not for us to comment on the cause [of refugee fl ight]—which is debated in many other forums of this Organization [the UN]—but only to fi nd rapid and durable solutions to the effect. (Sadruddin Aga Khan, UN High Commissioner for Refugees, November 1970)

While the emphasis on operational presence happened gradually over the decades, a qualitative shift took place after the end of the Cold War regarding the nature of the operational environment in which the agency deployed its fi eld teams. In the early 1990s, beginning with the assistance of Iraqi Kurdish internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the so-called safe haven of Northern Iraq in 1991, the agency became increasingly involved in providing assistance and protection (to the degree protection was possible) in the midst of confl ict. No longer does the agency sit on the other side of the border awaiting the arrival of refugees. It acts proactively in any situations where displacement is a threat or a reality, regardless of whether this displacement takes place across borders or not. As a result, there are for instance today more IDPs than refu- gees among the ‘population of concern’ to UNHCR.6

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This in-confl ict nature of operations has put UNHCR staff in harms way at unprecedented levels. It has also put the refugee agency in relations of close cooperation with traditional security actors, such as the Security Council, NATO, and UN peace keeping forces. Adding these operational experiences in war zones together with these new institutional relationships with political and military actors resulted in an operational environment in which the language of security came more naturally to the agency’s staff and leadership. Experiencing confl icts fi rst-hand allowed UNHCR to see the security impli- cations of forced migration on the ground. Thus, in the 1990s, UNHCR began to paint a franker, often quite pessimistic, picture of the refugee problem, such as in this 1997 Note on International Protection:

Militarized populations in exile, particularly on a large scale, can carry domestic confl icts across borders, sustaining and exacerbating those confl icts, as well as igniting fresh violence in other States. Such fl ashpoints can rapidly become unman- ageable if the international community remains passive even when the ground rules of asylum are ignored. (UNHCR 1997)

This frankness stands in stark contrast to the agency’s discursive history: throughout most of its existence UNHCR did its utmost to refute all claims, when made by states, that refugees constituted security threats. In contrast, the Notes from the latter half of the 1990s routinely warned about ‘the impor- tance for refugees and asylum seekers to conform to the laws and regulations of the host country and refrain from actions that would undermine local security’ (UNHCR 1999: para. 10). This message came most starkly across in High Commissioner Ogata’s speeches:

Refugee problems invariably affect key state interests. They are related to matters of national, regional and even international peace and security. Humanitarian crises in our times increasingly are strategic crises, although they are infrequently dealt with as such. (Ogata 1997: 4, emphasis in the original)

This less benign view of refugee populations stemmed in particular from UNHCR’s experiences in the Great Lakes region of Africa, where civilians and armed perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide were mixed together in refugee camps and UNHCR had no means with which to separate militants from refugees. Part of the rationale behind UNHCR adopting such security language was to spur decisive international political and military action to demilitarize the camps by appealing to the security interests of states. However, UNHCR also highlighted the security costs of coping with mass infl uxes in general. The High Commissioner often argued that refugees, apart from being victims of insecurity, had ‘also become a major source of insta- bility and confl ict’ (Ogata 1999).7 As seen above, even the protection and rights-oriented Notes warned of refugees as potential security burdens.8

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Changes in the Discourse and Action of Core Donor and Refugee Host States

With the end of the Cold War superpower rivalries, the early post-Cold War era became a period of searching for new threats and enemies, both in the academic security studies literature and among policy makers. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, one immediate fear was that of fl oods of migrants from former Soviet satellites into Western Europe. This never really material- ized, but the wars in the former Yugoslavia created a major refugee crisis on Western Europe’s doorstep and the rise in asylum seekers in the early 1990s was comet-like. Asylum soon became securitized as a problem of societal or identity security, and all sorts of measures were put in place to deter, stem, and return the fl ow of asylum seekers from Europe’s shores.

UNHCR cannot afford not to remain relevant to states—and especially to its main donor states. As refugees and asylum seekers were increasingly described in security terms by policy makers, the media, and academic experts alike, UNHCR had to relate to these asylum fears and the language of security enveloping them. It did so in two ways: First, by attempting to ensure that refugees never reach the shores of Europe at all, through getting involved in ‘in-country protection’ and preventive activities, often in the midst of confl ict; to strengthen the capacity of refugee-hosting states in the South to cope with large refugee populations; and by advocating that the international community deal with the ‘root causes’ of fl ight (i.e. resolve confl icts) in order to prepare the ground for repatriation of refugees. For instance, in Ruud Lubbers’ fi rst speech as High Commissioner (2001), a major theme was how European states and UNHCR together could ‘explore the possibilities of meaningful preventive action in countries of origin and for a serious commit- ment to building the capacity of refugee hosting countries’.

Second, UNHCR responded to the fears and concerns of refugee and asylum hosting states by taking on the language of security itself—for instance, as shown above, by pointing to the security implications of forced migration to refugee host and sending states alike. But to understand the particular characteristics of UNHCR’s security discourse, it is necessary to turn to the opening up of the security debate in the post-Cold War period.

The Emergence of More People-friendly Conceptualizations of Security

UNHCR’s mandate is to protect and assist vulnerable refugees, and to fi nd humane and durable solutions to their plight. It would be a deeply unfair exaggeration to argue that UNHCR is so beholden to donor agendas as to

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unquestioningly mimic a xenophobia-tainted, knee-jerk reaction of panic and fear against asylum seekers just to please European states. A more convincing analysis is based on the power inherent in the concept of security. High Commissioner Ogata (and Stoltenberg before her) thought she could harness the power of security to increase refugee protection and to use the urgency of security language to garner a level of resources and attention to address the refugee problem that had never before been seen.

UNHCR thus latched onto the rise in the post-Cold War era of hopes that security could be turned into a more collaborative and people-friendly concept, away from national security and towards ‘our common security’ or later, human security. Indirectly and in the longer term, UNHCR suggested, by protecting, assisting, and fi nding humane and durable solutions for IDPs and refugees, we improve global security. And by improving global security we contribute to improving the national security of donor states themselves.

Bureaucratic Changes within UNHCR

Last, but possibly not least, some bureaucratic shifts within UNHCR itself, as well as within the UN as a whole, contributed to making the adoption of the language of security more likely. Turning to internal developments fi rst, there was in the 1990s a clear decline in the importance of the international lawyers within the refugee agency. As UNHCR became increasingly operational and increasingly involved in confl ict zones, many more staff were employed in fi eld offi ces than in Geneva headquarters. As the agency expanded massively, more of the numerous new recruits came from a social science, and even International Relations, background, and fewer from a legal one. The once mighty International Protection division became less prominent in the organizational hierarchy. This bureaucratic shift helps explain the discursive shift taking place away from the emphasis on legal protection, and towards the political, social, and security implications of forced migration.

Occurring parallel with these internal changes is the humanitarian reform process within the UN family as a whole—an ongoing (possibly infi nite) process aimed at strengthening communication and coordination and clari- fying the division of labour and responsibilities between the UN’s many specialized agencies and the head offi ce in New York. In the 1990s, UN humanitarian reform tended to strengthen UNHCR’s security discourse in that it was regularly called upon by the Secretary-General to become lead agency in some of the largest humanitarian operations of the decade, including the war in the former Yugoslavia. UNHCR cherished this new-found centrality in humanitarian politics: it relabelled itself as a humanitarian organization

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rather than a refugee agency, and defi ned its work according to the contribu- tions it made as part of the UN family in promoting international peace and security.

CONSEQU ENCES OF SECU R ITIZ ATION —A ND

THE PATH TO DE SECU R ITIZ ATION

UNHCR’s discursive journey had taken the agency from fi rst adopting the language of security in the early 1990s to endorsing ‘human security’ as a new, humanitarian, and superior notion of security at the end of the decade. However, soon after the turn of the century, a return of to a more cautious discourse can be discerned. Increasingly UNHCR seemed to doubt the usefulness and propriety of enmeshing problems of displacement in a secu- rity language. The use of the term security decreased in the annual Reports to the General Assembly and Notes on International Protection. Ditching almost completely the concept of human security, the refugee agency instead adopted the UN buzzword responsibility to protect as its new rallying cry. At the same time, the old distaste for security language displayed by Sadruddin Aga Khan, re-emerged in statements such as in this speech by Antonio Guterres, who took over as High Commissioner in 2005:

And as we look for new ways to deliver protection it has become harder to get public opinion to recognize the need for it. Unfortunately, public opinion in many societies is increasingly led by fear and suspicion. (Guterres 2005)

Although there has been a process of desecuritization in UNHCR’s discourse, and although there are similarities between the discourse we see emerging from UNHCR today and that of three decades ago, we cannot say that UNHCR has come full circle back to its 1970s non-political, non-operational self. In the 1970s, the term security was hardly uttered, and if mentioned was pronounced as if it gave a bad taste in the mouth. In the late 2000s, UNHCR still uses the term security, but in more discrete ways, in particular to describe the operational challenges it faces in the fi eld.

Having set out in the section above the many reasons why UNHCR adopted a security discourse in the 1990s and adapted it to its own mandate, why then did the use of the concept of security wane again in the 2000s? The desecuri- tization trend certainly had something to do with Ogata leaving offi ce—she was (and still is) a particular champion of the agency’s security discourse, and especially the concept of human security. However, the retreat was gradual. Ruud Lubbers, the new High Commissioner in 2001, although

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adopting a lower profi le than Ogata, did not abandon her security language. In addition, the desecuritization trend has also been observed among other actors, most notably by Huysmans and Buonfi no (2008) in UK parliamentary debates. Thus, although individual High Commissioners certainly wield a lot of power within UNHCR, it would be too simplistic to pin the fl owing and ebbing of a security discourse onto personality alone.

Instead we must seek an answer by studying the consequences of securitization—some of which became particularly visible after the terror attacks on the United States in 2001. The marked deterioration in the inter- national protection climate taking place in the months and years after 9/11 spurred a renewed scepticism within UNHCR of what the concept of security could achieve for the work of the agency in particular and for the future of refugee protection in general. A cottage industry of academic literature on the security dimensions of refugee movements (see, e.g., Loescher 1992; Weiner 1993; Dowty and Loescher 1996; Posen 1996; Poku and Graham 1998; Suhrke 1999; Newland et al. 2002; Terry 2002; Guild 2003; Lischer 2005; Martin 2005; Guild and Van Selm 2005; Loescher and Milner 2005; Muggah 2006; Huysmans 2006); the routine invocation by states of security as a reason to curb asylum and immigration; the constant lumping of asylum seekers and illegal immigrants together in states’ terminology; the conundrum of so-called ‘mixed fl ows’; the linking of terrorism and asylum in the North, and of confl ict and refugees in the South: all these factors meant it was time for UNHCR to seek out a more positive image of refugees, or at least a less scary and off-putting one. This section looks at two of the factors that led to this new discursive shift within UNHCR: First, the impact of the war on terror and, second, the fraught burden-sharing relationship between refugee hosting states in the South and donor and asylum states of the North. In the analysis I suggest that both these aspects of the deterioration of the refugee protection climate have clear links to the securitization process of forced migration that started in the 1990s.

THE WA R ON TER ROR A N D THE DETER IOR ATI NG

PROTECTION CLIM ATE

Some of the hopes for what a more comprehensive and people-friendly concept of security might achieve waned after 9/11. States resorted to a more traditional realist conception of national security, not least displaying a renewed concern with old-fashioned border security. This type of security thinking is diffi cult to adapt to a more refugee-friendly conception of security:

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it was about keeping people out, not letting them in. British Home Secretary David Blunkett displayed the new fears of asylum seekers as terrorists in November 2001:

This is our home—it is our country. We have a right to say that if people seek to abuse rights of asylum to be able to hide in this country and organise terrorist acts, we must take steps to deal with them. (quoted in Huysmans and Buonfi no 2008: 773)

Guild (2003) argues that the link between terrorism, foreignness, and asylum was made from the outset after 9/11 by the US administration. The same was the case for many other western governments. The UN Security Council set the tone with its Resolution 1373 (28 September 2001), which mentions twice the possibility of terrorists abusing the asylum system (despite none of the 9/11 terrorists being asylum seekers or refugees). The resolution further stipulates that states should not harbour individuals who ‘fi nance, plan, support or commit terrorist acts’, but does not defi ne the term terrorism or set out safeguards regarding individual rights, due process, and fair trial (Blake 2003). Zard (2002: 32) suggests that Resolution 1373 ‘generated a wave of new and restrictive laws and regulations [to curb asylum] at a national level’. Blake (2003: 445–7) argues that the use of the UN Refugee Conven- tion’s exclusion clauses and defi nitions of ‘political crime’ has in the climate after 9/11 been left more to executive discretion and less to judicial scrutiny. All in all, in the post-9/11 period, national security thinking seemed to be getting the upper hand on the legal obligations set out in the international protection regime.

It should be remembered, however, that terrorism is only one way in which forced migration has been securitized in the North. Recent literature on the topic tends to overlook the fact that the securitization drive started in the early 1990s, when it took the form of claims of societal or identity insecurity (Wæver et al. 1993). This securitization of refugees and asylum seekers took more the form of a ‘politics of unease’ than a ‘politics of exception’, except perhaps in the fi rst few frantic months of legislation after 9/11.9 It was these more amorphous and ill-defi ned fears and unease over immigration and asylum that UNHCR had tried to counter with its human and comprehensive security discourse in the 1990s.

But when such societal insecurity fears became compounded by perceived threats of international terrorists arriving through asylum channels, it became increasingly diffi cult for UNHCR to hold on to a belief that its own security discourse could modify states’ perceptions of their own security interests. Far from it, by employing the language of security itself, there was a risk that UNHCR was helping to legitimize states’ use of security reasoning to limit the rights of refugees and asylum seekers to seek and receive protection

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outside their country of origin. This realization can be seen in the fi rst state- ment made by UNHCR in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. High Commis- sioner Lubbers warned that ‘[a]s emotions run high and while Americans and the rest of the world grieve following last Tuesday’s terrorist attacks, we should refrain from pointing fi ngers and inciting hatred against innocent groups such as refugees’ (UNHCR 2001a). This was followed up a few days later by the Director for Protection, Erika Feller (now Assistant High Commis- sioner for Protection). She placed states’ post-9/11 security-based efforts to restrict asylum within a broader context of the increasing criminalization of asylum seekers and refugees, and called for resolute leadership ‘to de-drama- tise and de-politicise the essentially humanitarian challenge of protecting refugees and to promote better understanding of refugees and their right to seek asylum’ (UNHCR 2001b).

North–South Burden-sharing

Another aspect of the international refugee regime that has deteriorated (although it never worked smoothly) is the institution of burden-sharing. According to UNHCR’s ExCom, burden-sharing is intrinsic to the proper functioning of the refugee regime, because:

(. . .) respect by States for their protection responsibilities towards refugees is strength- ened by international solidarity involving all members of the international community and (. . .) the refugee protection regime is enhanced through committed international cooperation in a spirit of solidarity and responsibility and burden sharing among all States (UNHCR 2004a).

While in theory burden-sharing is about solidarity and cooperation, in prac- tice it has mostly boiled down to fi nancial contributions from rich countries in the North to help host states and humanitarian organizations cope with refugee situations in poorer regions of the South (e.g. almost all of UNHCR’s billion-dollar budget is provided by ten donors in the North). However, in the opinion of refugee host states, burden-sharing goes beyond the question of who pays. In addition to economic, political, and even in some cases military support, it should include sharing the burden of actually hosting refugees, through asylum and resettlement channels. Efforts by Northern States, particularly the European Union, to contain refugee fl ows within their region of origin and to negotiate agreements to return asylum seekers to ‘safe’ fi rst- countries of asylum, have raised shackles in refugee host countries coping with the vast majority of the world’s refugee population. Despite the rhetoric in European capitals, only 14 per cent of the global refugee population makes

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it out of their own region (UNHCR 2008: 27). Disagreements between the North and South became particularly visible during Ruud Lubbers’ tenure (2001–5), when his Convention Plus initiative was viewed with suspicion by refugee-hosting states, who interpreted it as UNHCR taking on an EU agenda for burden shifting of refugees away from European soil.10

It seems appropriate to analyse the deterioration of the institution of burden-sharing in light of the securitization of forced migration. As discussed in the introduction to this chapter, the mindset of national security ‘favours zero-sum thinking’, which frames a problem ‘into a highly competitive game in which a state can only gain benefi ts at the cost of other states’ (Huysmans 2006: 23). It also tends to frame problems in black and white: other actors are either friends or enemies; they are either ‘with us or against us’. This makes the task of cooperating and identifying common ground and mutual interests more diffi cult (Deudney 1990). Burden-sharing thus becomes harder when the problem is phrased in the zero-sum survivalist language of security. From the perspective of the South, which hosts the large majority of the world’s refugees, why, if a few asylum seekers are portrayed as security threats to the North, should not the mass infl uxes of refugees in the South be an even worse security threat? Rather than creating a common incentive to deal with the ‘root causes of fl ight’ and fi nd durable solutions to refugee situations, the security framing of the debate has contributed to a race to the bottom. Condi- tions of refuge have deteriorated not only in the North but also in the South, where the ‘warehousing’ in insecure camps with little chance of solutions has become a common reality for an increasing number of refugees. In 2004, around two-thirds of the world’s refugee population was in ‘protracted refugee situations’ with no solution in sight (Loescher, Betts, and Milner 2008: 60).

UNHCR’s recent response to the lack of good-will and solidarity in the burden-sharing institution is very different to its attempt at humanizing security in the 1990s. Instead of trying to reinterpret security, the refugee agency has in recent years mostly rejected the appropriateness of security language to describe the refugee problem, and has returned to a discourse focused around protection. This discursive change was accompanied by insti- tutional changes, especially the creation of an Assistant High Commissioner for Protection. In the proposal to the UN General Assembly to create this position, UNHCR performed a discourse analysis of its own, arguing that the confl ation of terrorists, criminals, and refugees/asylum seekers has led to a lack of political will among states in the North as well as the South to fulfi l their protection obligations:

The fulfi lment of these protection responsibilities has become an ever more diffi cult task in light of signifi cant changes in the environment in which the organization operates.

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Disillusionment on the part of many governments, and at the highest levels, with the capacity of States to manage their asylum responsibilities has resulted in curtailment of protection opportunities and in asylum being offered on ever more unfavourable terms. Illegal migration, growth in people smuggling syndicates, and the post-Sep- tember 11 fallout have compounded the problems by confusing refugees and asylum- seekers, in the public mind and the policies of some States, with abusers of the system, criminals and terrorists. All this is coupled with a strong sense on the part of major host States that there is no good system of burden-sharing in place and that they are too often left with a disproportionate share of responsibilities which, in light of the protracted nature of many situations, they are less and less inclined to meet. (UNHCR 2004b: para. 5)

BACK TO THE FU TU R E : DE SECU R ITIZ ATION

AS U N HCR’S R A ISON D’ÊTR E ?

Why desecuritize refugee movements? At a general level, because human movement is natural. The movement of people has helped shape the trajec- tory of history for as long as human communities have existed. It is a catalyst for change, sometimes in the form of upheavals but other times in the form of improvement, enriching people’s economic, social, and cultural lives. If population movements—whether forced or voluntary—is inevitable, it seems counterproductive to securitize it, since, as Jef Huysmans (2006: xii) succinctly puts it, security knowledge has ‘a specifi c capacity for fabricating and sustaining antagonistic relations between groups of people’.

On the other hand, there are situations where particular refugee move- ments, or particular groups or individuals within them, do warrant a secu- rity label, as for instance did the militarized refugee camps on Rwanda’s borders in 1994–6. It is also true, as High Commissioners Stoltenberg and Ogata were aware, that politicizing and securitizing the refugee problem ensures more sustained and urgent efforts to deal with it. This leads us to the question: is it possible to sustain a limited security discourse that reaps the benefi ts from the propensity the language of security has for keeping refugee issues at the forefront of policy makers’ minds while avoiding this language’s pernicious effects? Is it possible to strike the right balance between security and protection?

Looking back at UNHCR’s discursive trajectory, it seems that the agency’s security discourse, although it had some spectacular successes in soliciting funding and support for particular operations in the 1990s, never found that balance. This became particularly obvious in the aftermath of 9/11. As a result there is already a discernible trend towards desecuritization. And this

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desecuritization is not only taking place in the language of UNHCR. Huys- mans and Buonfi no (2008) argue that the peak of securitization of forced migration took place in the United Kingdom in the fi rst couple of years after 9/11. In the case of UNHCR, the desecuritization trend began at the same time, but did not become pronounced until the arrival of the new High Commissioner, Antonio Guterres, in 2005.

In the period since then, UNHCR’s preoccupations with security have been limited in scope to an operational issue. A major theme has been the ‘shrinking of humanitarian space’, where warring factions prey on the civilian population and view humanitarian staff as parties to the confl ict and thus as legitimate targets rather than neutral actors. UNHCR is continually conducting an internal and external debate on how to counteract this problem. The refugee agency’s response seems to be, on the one hand, a deep preoccupation with the personal security of staff and refugees in confl ict areas, while on the other, interpreting its own role as that of depoliticizing and desecuritizing displacement through the performance of its non-polit- ical and humanitarian mandate. For instance, The State of the World’s Refu- gees 2006 argues that ‘( . . . ) the security concerns of states as well as refugees are best met by ensuring that the multilateral and humanitarian character of refugee protection is maintained’. It promotes ‘preventive and “soft” meas- ures integrated into refugee protection and assistance’ in order to ‘defuse many of the security threats faced by refugees and their hosts alike’(UNHCR 2006: 63 and 64).

These last two quotes are illustrative of how UNHCR’s discourse has trans- formed itself (again). Security language has not disappeared—after all a whole chapter of The State of the World’s Refugees 2006 is dedicated to secu- rity. UNHCR remains painfully aware that states harbour an array of security concerns over refugees, and that ‘the challenge of integrating the differing security interests and strategies of the various parts of the international refugee regime has grown more complex’ (UNHCR 2006: 64).

It is clear from these quotes that UNHCR takes a constructivist view on state security concerns: threats can be defused and refugee movements dese- curitized by responding to them in a particular manner. Desecuritization can be achieved through, using the terminology of the Copenhagen School, speech-acts of affi rming the neutral, non-political, and humanitarian nature of asylum and refugee protection, committing to the international refugee regime, and giving UNHCR the necessary support to provide international, multilateral, and non-political refugee protection. Thus, in one deft move, UNHCR has both described a solution to states’ security concerns (desecuri- tization through multilateralism) and asserted its own indispensable role in achieving this solution (as the multilateral agent responsible for refugees).

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The (diffi cult) task ahead for UNHCR is to convince states of this particular interpretation of the security challenges posed by displacement. In the words of the Assistant High Commissioner for Protection:

UNHCR’s ability to extend protection is challenged in many regions by the absence of political will to support it and the disinclination to recognise that asylum is a non- political and humanitarian act. Asylum is viewed through the security prism in many parts of the world. (Feller 2008)

While in the 1990s, UNHCR was one of the key securitizing actors in the discourse on displacement, the agency has now become a voice of desecuriti- zation. This move is also a step back to a previous era of UNHCR’s history, during the reign of Sadruddin Aga Khan. In the 1974 speech quoted in the introduction to this talk, he admitted that refugee fl ows could lead to ‘the most strenuous tensions’ (he was loath to use the term security), but the aim was to overcome these tensions by attempting ‘( . . . ) to reduce complex polit- ical questions in the minds of nations into simple moral and humanitarian components for the heart to answer’. The jargon and terminology is very different in 1974 from 2006, but the argument is the same: UNHCR’s neutral, non-political, and humanitarian mandate to protect and assist refugees is there in order to desecuritize refugee issues. UNHCR’s mandate thus helps increase the security of states as well as that of refugees and the humanitarian staff aiding them.

This was arguably the aim of states from the outset when they decided to create the two corner stones of the international refugee regime, the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, and UNHCR. By taking forced migration out of the political and the controversial, leaving it in the hands of a non-political multi- lateral institution, reduces the risk of tensions between states. UNHCR had archived this part of its history in the 1990s and the fi rst half of the 2000s, but it is now brushing the dust off the insights of its founders as the effects of securitizing population movement on community relations and human rights standards have become increasingly clear—and as Huysmans argues, increasingly pernicious.

NOTE S

1. Only around 3 per cent of UNHCR’s billion-dollar annual expenditure is allo- cated automatically from the UN’s central budget. The remaining 97 per cent must be raised annually from donors. Ten Western donors, headed by the US (30 per cent), account for almost 80 per cent of UNHCR’s budget (Loescher et al. 2008: 91–3).

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2. Remaining relevant or useful to states has been a core theme of all High Commis- sioners, but particular of Stoltenberg and his successor Sadako Ogata.

3. Loosely, and simplistically, based on Gadamer (2004), who asserted that our consciousness is ‘historically effected’ and that learning takes place in a herme- neutic circle between the text we try to interpret and the existing prejudices (or pre-judgements) and experiences found in our own horizon. Thus our under- standing of the world is coloured by the historical, social, and cultural practices in which we are embedded.

4. This analysis is based on the reading of a broad range of UNHCR offi cial docu- ments, speeches, and publications, only some of which is directly quoted or referenced in this chapter.

5. All the Reports of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Notes on International Protection, 1970–2006, can be found on UNHCR’s research tool, Ref World, available through its web site www.unhcr.org, with the exception of the Reports from 1995, 1996, and 1999. These three have been counted in the old-fashioned way. The Reports and Notes constitute suitable material for a quan- titative study, since they are produced every year to the same audience and in similar format and style.

6. In 2007, out of a total population of concern of 31.7 million people, 11.4 were refugees, while 13.7 million were IDPs. The rest were asylum seekers, returnees, stateless persons, and ‘others of concern’ (UNHCR 2008: 7).

7. Statements like this, as well as UNHCR’s involvement in the Rwandan refugee crisis, show that the refugee agency by the mid-1990s no longer followed the UN Refugee Convention in using the term ‘refugee’ solely to describe civilian, non- militarized persons. UNHCR advocated the demilitarization of refugee camps, but neither its discourse nor actions in the 1990s signalled that militarized exile populations such as the Rwandan Hutus were considered to be outside the agen- cy’s competence.

8. See the 1998 Note for another example (UNHCR 1998: para. 17). 9. Huysmans and Buonfi no (2008: 781) show how migration and asylum ques-

tions in Parliamentary debates are framed within a ‘general context of societal insecurities’.

10. For an account of the fate of Convention Plus, see Loescher, Betts, and Milner (2008: 62–6).

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AQ6

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OUP UNCORRECTED PROOF – FIRST PROOF, 06/08/2010, SPi

Author Queries

[AQ1]: Please confi rm if the insertion of page range in ‘Booth 1991’ is correct.

[AQ2]: Please provide page range for ‘Dowty and Loescher 1996’ and ‘Ogata 1997’ if appropriate.

[AQ3]: Please provide complete details for ‘Khan 1970, 1974’, ‘Walt 1991’, and ‘Lubbers 2000’ if appropriate.

[AQ4]: Please confi rm if the insertion of page range is correct in ‘Mathews 1989’.

[AQ5]: Please provide publisher name for ‘Ogata 1999 if appropriate’. [AQ6]: Please update ‘UNHCR 2001a’.

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