I start with reference to refugee journeys and how they are rarely linear but are instead ‘fragmented’ because of poor conditions in many places of ostensible refuge and states’ containment mechanisms. I highlight that there has been little consideration of the role litigation plays in refugee journeys. This is despite refugees increasingly turning to courts to seek protection, not from persecution in their home country, but from a place of ‘refuge’. While there are myriad studies of how courts interpret refugee definitions, in this first global and comparative study of protection from refuge jurisprudence, I examine how judges approach the remedy: refuge. Using feminist approaches to international law,I also consider whether these judicial approaches assist or hinder refugees’ (or particular refugees’) journeys towards a safe haven with a particular focus on gender but also intersectional factors such as youth, disability, sexuality and parenthood. I argue that when protection from refuge claims first come before decision-making bodies, judges adopt rich and robust ideas of refuge. However, most of these victories have been ephemeral. Decision-makers reverse or dilute initial successes and adopt rudimentary understandings of refuge. This trajectory transforms these judgments from refugee protection to migration management decisions.

In Chapter 8, I reflect on the patterns in the ways decision-makers approach protection from refuge claims. Across the globe, decision-makers have transitioned from sophisticated to impoverished understandings of refuge, from approaches that disrupt containment mechanisms to those that cement them and from decisions that facilitate to ones that impede refugee journeys. I consider the implications this has for refugee law, and the international protection regime more broadly. I discuss how my analysis of judicial approaches that give a rich meaning to the concept of refuge responds to scholars’ identifications of current dilemmas in refugee law. I also consider how the judicial dilution of the concept of refuge poses risks to the future directions of refugee law. In particular, I suggest that decision-makers’ dilution of the notion of refuge risks refugee law developing in an asymmetrical fashion: widening the categories of people entitled to international protection, but diminishing the protection to which they are entitled. Last, I highlight how the analysis in this book adds new dimensions to scholarly assessments of decision-makers’ understandings of gender and intersectionality. Overall, I argue that the trajectory of decision-makers’ approaches to protection from refuge claims has rendered refuge elusive.