The RefMig project aimed to bring new legal and empirical insights into the institutionalisation of the refugee/migrant binary. The project entailed three intertwined strands of work, (1) Recognising Refugees, a global empirical examination of the institutional practices that seek to distinguish refugees from migrants; (2) Organisations of Protection on the role of international organisations, with a particular focus on the International Organisation for Migration (IOM); and (3) New Legal Perspectives on the Global Refugee Regime, encompassing the overarching focus on accountability and a revisitation of core legal principles that cut across the refugee/migrant binary, namely non-refoulement, non-penalisation and non-discrimination; and assessments of access to and the content of international protection.
The Recognising Refugees strand developed a broad conception of the refugee recognition regime (RRR), encompassing not only individual refugee status determination (RSD) but also the institutional processes that determine access to RSD, as well as prima facie and group determination. As well as the key concept development, we also published two thematic multi-disciplinary literature reviews. RefMig engaged a number of external experts to provide country profiles (of Brazil, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon, Malaysia, Niger, South Africa, and Uganda), and the first study of group recognition across Africa. The strand also included several important journal articles on how refugees navigate processes and how UNHCR and state interact in handovers of authority. Midway in the project, we expanded our methods to include large-n quantitative study. Mitali Agrawal conducted the first quantitative assessment comparing UNHCR and national recognition rates globally. The strand will culminate in the publication of a collective monograph entitled Recognising Refugees, under contract to appear with Cambridge University Press in the prestigious Cambridge Asylum and Migration Studies series. As part of this strand, Dr Natalie Welfens also explored empirical and ethical issues surrounding refugee resettlement, including the use of ‘vulnerability’ criteria and assessments in this context.
The Organisations of Protection strand, led by Dr Angela Sherwood, included a ‘spotlight on IOM’. This strand’s key achievement was the open access edited collection, Megan Bradley, Cathryn Costello and Angela Sherwood (eds), IOM Unbound: Obligations and Accountability of the International Organization for Migration in an Era of Expansion (Cambridge University Press 2023). This edited collection brings together contributions from legal scholars and political scientists to clarify and assess the obligations (political and legal) of an understudied international organisation, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), now self-styled as ‘the UN Migration agency’, in fact a UN-related entity. The volume makes significant contributions to the study of IO accountability generally, and to scholarship on the global governance of migration.
The third strand, Legal Perspectives on the Global Refugee Regime encompassed the overarching focus on accountability in the global refugee regime, and a revisitation of its core legal principles, non-refoulement, non-penalisation and non-discrimination. The first RefMig workshop led to a special issue of the German Law Journal Border Justice: Migration and Accountability for Human Rights Violations (Cathryn Costello & Itamar Mann, editors). Containing 13 articles, the special issue explored various aspects of border violence, assessing possible legal regimes of accountability, examining EU law, transnational tort law and international criminal law. The other key works on the legal principles that underpin the global refugee regime include on non-refoulement, where the PI co-authored the first comprehensive study of the norm’s interpretation across the main global human rights treaties. On non-penalisation, she co-authored an important contribution ‘Non-penalization and Non-Criminalization’ in The Oxford Handbook of International Refugee Law. On non-discrimination, RefMig collaborated on a Symposium of the American Journal of International Law Unbound, and co-authored two articles. This strand also includes the final project output, a Critical Introduction to International Refugee Law (Bristol University Press 2024), bringing together key insights from the project to provide a new introduction to the field.
