Chapter 6 - Refugees

Summary

Chapter 6 covers some new challenges associated with massive refugee populations. How can we help refugees in ways that are effective for all key stakeholders? Key stakeholders here include refugees, internally displaced populations who have not yet crossed a border, those left behind in states of origin, and those states that bear the burden of hosting large refugee populations. The chapter explores options that offer good solutions for host and home countries, for the roughly 10 percent of refugees who typically make it to high-income countries and the 90 percent who do not. Given the scale of refugee problems, we must supplement the three traditional approaches to addressing the plight of refugees (voluntary repatriation, local settlement, and resettlement), with new development-oriented and empowerment approaches. I discuss reforms that would better safeguard the human rights of displaced people or those vulnerable to displacement. In the absence of good faith and credible efforts at making such changes, our current arrangements for assisting refugees cannot be regarded as adequate. A state system that offered these up as the ways for dealing with refugees cannot be legitimate.