Towards the globalisation of refugee flows: a refugee cycle

The majority of literature on refugee movements has focused upon individual examples, and has often been in the form of case studies or designed to address particular policy issues. There have been only a few attempts to place individual cases within a broader

context. This observation is not to discredit some of the excellent case studies which have been undertaken, two of the best being on refugees in Sudan (Rogge, 1985a; Harrell-Bond, 1986). However, unless refugee movements are placed within a broader context, such that attention is focused upon general processes of causation and consequence, it is difficult to compare one refugee flow with another, or refugee flows with other migration flows. Without a framework for analysis, case-studies are difficult to compare. One of the premises of this chapter is that the contextualisation of refugee flows is a valuable tool for placing individual case studies within a broader context, and that this globalisation of discrete refugee flows can be important.

However, placing refugee flows within a broader context has proved an elusive goal. In a recent edited collection of refugee literature (Black and Robinson, 1993), for example, the link between the various chapters seems somewhat tenuous, and some people may consider the volume essentially a collection of case studies. Exactly why it has proved difficult to contextualise refugee flows is difficult to know. Salt (1986) suggested that migration specialists from whatever discipline have tended to steer clear of refugee movements as they seem unpredictable and are generally triggered by political events. Desbarats (1992, p.280) asserted that: ’Refugee movements generally result from the political structure of the international system rather than from its economic structure, so that their analysis requires different frameworks from those found useful in accounting for international labour movements’. The idea that political structures can be credited as the most important causative element of refugee flows is one which is questioned in the following discussion.

Perhaps the most significant attempt to place refugee flows within a broader context has been that of Zolberg e t a l (1986, 1989). Their thesis linked refugee flows with political instability. They argued that although the events that trigger refugee flows are unpredictable, they do not occur randomly but are manifestations of processes which are themselves related to structural features of contemporary world politics. Therefore, the determinants of refugee flows are amenable to theoretical analysis. As one of the first attempts to access an analysis of refugee flows via a theoretical framework, the work is very important.

The thesis of Zolberg et.al. suggested that an analysis of the determinants of refugee movement should be cast in a trans-national framework (Salt, 1986). This is patently sensible. Refugee status, from the 1951 Convention definition through the range of regional adaptations, hinges upon the asylum-seeker being outside the country of origin. As Shacknove (1985) observes, this principle is necessary in order to respect the sovereign rights of a government in its own country. What this does mean is that many jpeople, simply by virtue of not crossing an international border, are not considered refugees. It is estimated that there are probably more internally displaced people in the world than externally displaced (Bascom, 1993). Sometimes, as is often the case in Mozambique for example, these people simply hve too far from an international border to reach it. In other cases, such as Cambodia between 1975 and 1978 (Desbarats, 1992), bureaucratic barriers have been placed in the paths of prospective refugees. The point is, however, that refugee status depends equally upon the receiving country allowing entry. Perhaps the most notorious recent example of refusal of the right of entry is associated with the electrified border fence erected by the South African Government to deter Mozambican refugees. Cases of third countries of resettlement demonstrate the necessity of including a third actor in a trans-national framework of refugee movement. More countries can be brought into the framework when consideration is given to the phenomenon of ’refugees in orbit’ which results when the responsibility for examining asylum claims is shifted from country to country (Melander, 1986), or by the inclusion of the host of donor countries which support refugees via the UNHCR.

Salt (1986) and later Desbarats (1992) sought to place refugee movements within a broader context by adopting such a trans-national framework. In doing so both authors adopted a systems approach from the corpus of migration theory (Mabogunje, 1970), which approach seeks to articulate the hnkages between a number of elements which constitute the system, and between the system as a whole and factors external to it. The three elements in Salt’s refugee system (derived from Zolberg, 1985) were Third World countries; reception countries and the super and major regional powers. Third World countries were seen as the major sources of refugee flows, where political, economic and social weakness and endemic poverty and inequality can often be exacerbated by the actions of major regional and superpowers. The recognition of people as refugees depends upon the attitudes of the potential receiving countries, and so they were the third

element. The three elements in Desbarat’s system were source countries; first-asylum countries and resettlement countries. Apart from articulating the multiplex relationships between these three sorts of countries as well as similarly placed countries, her system hardly improves upon that of Salt as a framework for understanding the causes or consequences of refugee flows.

The systems of Salt then Desbarats made the very valuable point that refugee movements are inextricably linked with the characteristics and policies of source, first asylum and other countries. They also provided a framework for comparing different refugee flows. However, a number of case studies, perhaps best exemplified by a wealth of local studies in Mozambique (e.g. Geffray and Pederson, 1988; Roesch, 1991; Wilson, 1991; Wilson and Shumba, 1991) have demonstrated the inadequacy of such macro-level approaches in explaining the actual processes of flight and the individual experiences of the people involved. What such local case studies point to is the need to separate analytically the underlying causes of refugee flight, which may usually be political, from their immediate précipitants which are often not. In any case it is obvious that refugees flee a range of factors, often inextricably linked, of which political insecurity may be only one. An emphasis upon the macro-level also ignores the tenacity of refugees in overcoming or defying institutional procedures. Thus, for example, many refugees negotiate unofficial entry into asylum countries, and settle outside the official framework (Chambers, 1980a).

Furthermore, neither system included all of the stages of the refugee experience, from displacement through exile to a stage of completion. Salt’s refugee system was concerned only with displacement, and although Desbarat’s system extended the analysis to third country resettlement, this has been numerically the least important of the three so-called durable solutions for refugees (Stein, 1986), which also include local integration and repatriation. However, a number of case studies have shown that the stages in the ’cycle’ of refugee movement are not discrete, and that to study them as such fails to reveal important processes (e.g. Bulcha, 1989; Makanya, 1991). The research presented later in this thesis, for example, shows the importance during both flight and return of family networks, whereby only a few members of a family moved in order to establish a means of economic livelihood before the remainder joined them. From the point of view of

policy-makers I also consider it important to stress the notion of a refugee cycle (Black, 1993a; Koser, 1993a), thereby emphasising that refugees should not be conceived as a permanent burden, but rather as a temporary phenomenon for whom there is a solution.

In contrast, this thesis adopts a different approach for contextualising refugee flows. The theoretical framework is a refugee cycle and is thus still founded in the systems approach. However, the emphasis is upon placing refugees themselves back into the system, and thus shifts from the macro-analytical level of the national and trans-national to the micro-analytical level of the individual, household and community, and the interaction between these three levels. Refugee movement through the cycle is explained in terms of the decision-making processes of refugees, tied up as they are with individual values, perceptions and preferences. Of course decision-making occurs within the context of environmental factors which include policies of the countries of origin and asylum. Such a focus is overtly geographical, as it draws upon the traditional geographical interest in people-environment relationships, and seeks to understand the diversity of individual and group experiences in different places (Black, 1991).

By focusing upon the decision-making of individuals as opposed to institutional policies, the approach in this thesis also enables a critical comparison between refugees and other sorts of migrants, and parallels to be drawn between the decisions of the two whether to move. This comparison is a further tool used to place refugee movements into a broader context. However, in the context of a blurred distinction between refugees and other sorts of migrants; the refugee cycle becomes an elusive concept, in terms of who enters it, when and why, but also when and how it ends.