Marta Castro

International Politics of Migration

Book review
Survival Migration: Failed Governance and the Crisis of Displacement. By Alexander Betts.
Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2013. XVIII, 234

Betts starts his book by criticising the limitations of the international refugee system created
in the aftermaths of the World War II and the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees.
To identify those people who fall outside the refugee definition agreed on the 1951
convention, he develops the concept of survival migration: “persons who are outside their
country of origin because of an existential threat for which they have no access to a
domestic remedy or resolution” (p.23). However, his main argument is the inconsistency by
state’s responses to survival migrants and how the state’s response depends on the
interests of elites. He goes further by identifying a set of national and international incentives
that can shape the elite interests.

In the first chapter of his book, Betts claims that the concept of survival migration should be
focused not on the particular causes of displacement, which creates an analytical trap of
privileging some causes than others, but rather on a threshold of rights deprivations. For
him, we have to go beyond the assumption that refugees are those fleeing state persecution.
Protection should rather be granted on the basis of deprivation of human rights rather than
violations, omissions rather than acts of states and socioeconomic rather than civil and
political reasons, including a more humanitarian perspective.

The second chapter emphasizes on the variation of states’ responses and the process of
regime adaptation. He incorporates the concept of ​regime stretching, that describes the way
in which a regime may adapt its domestic policies even in the absence of international legal
norms. Institutions adapt at three levels: international bargaining, which changes norms
through treaty and mandate negotiations; institutionalization, which shapes norms according
to how they are disseminated internationally; and implementation, which refers to the ability
or inability of the state to implement international norms. It is the conditions under which
implementation takes places what matters to Betts. Even though two states have similar
levels of international bargaining and institutionalization, the variation in responses can be
explained at the level of implementation. And that level of implementation is shaped by elite
interests and politics, rather than by human rights and international law: “the contrasting and
changing approaches to implementing the refugee regime..they have been driven by
national politics, which shapes what international law means at the national level” (p. 161).
Betts goes further by emphasizing the role of domestic and international incentives in
shaping the states’ response to survival migrants. This is worth highlighting since it will shed
light on how international practices link and interact to domestic politics.

Betts makes use of six cases of displacement to examine the patterns and causes of
displacement, the government responses and the role of the international community:
Zimbabweans in South Africa and Botswana, Congolese in Angola and Tanzania, and
Somalis in Kenya and Yemen​. ​He then seeks to describe the particular responses with
reference to interests and incentives. Kenya and Tanzania represent cases of stretching
 Marta Castro

regimes; Botswana and Angola of nonstretching; and Yemen and South Africa of
intermediate response. The type of domestic incentives Betts identifies are presidential and
local elections, public opinion, the role of diasporas and civil society and business interests.
The international incentives that shaped national politics were generally the seek for
international recognition and legitimacy, the costs of hosting and financial assistance, and
the diplomatic relations with the government one consider as fragile state. For instance, the
strong diplomatic relations of Yemen with the government of Ethiopia, especially in trade and
regional security matters, have prevented it to recognise Ethiopia as a fragile state and
therefore have prevented many Ethiopians to even require asylum protection.

Betts uses the last two chapters of the book to identify potential solutions. Interstate
agreements at the global level may do very little in practice. What matters is to reform at the
levels of institutionalization and implementation, first trying to consider what can be improved
at lower levels of governance. At the level of implementation, what matters is the state
capacity, the national legal system and the cultural context. Betts enhances international
organizations to engage in more direct way with domestic politics, by either supporting more
civil society groups or transnational advocacy groups and to share the international burden
to support the cost of hosting refugees. He also proposes to rely more on national
representatives and develop more informal or formal partnerships within and beyond the UN
system, to work on particular refugee situations.

At the level of institutionalization, one of the main problems has been the inability of states to
fully incorporate within their national polities the international refugee law and human rights
law standards to which they are signatories, opening up a space for domestic interpretation
of international laws. Therefore, his first solution is the use of “soft law” or the development
of a set of guiding principles and non-binding framework on the refugee system, that offers
an agreed- on interpretation of existing principles and standards without the need to develop
new interstate treaties. This could also include the UNHCR taking a more active role to offer
guidance on the application of the 1951 convention. Second, since a huge majority of
migrants arriving to host countries fall outside the conventional definition of refugee, there is
also a lack of institutional response at the international level, most institutions as UNHCR
claiming that the responsibility to protect those not defined as refugees is not part of their
mandate as it happened in Angola. Betts states that there is a need for greater division of
responsibility for migrant protection across agencies or what he calls the “cluster approach”.
Greater clarity and guidance at the international level will prevent national politics to fill the
gap and define outcomes based on their own interpretation. Third, international
organizations should carry out better political analysis and mobilization to align the
incentives faced by government elites.

Overall, ​Survival migration is a well- argued and coherent book and easy to read. However,
the arguments are mostly based on ethical notions and human rights ground. Also, it does
not define who are those elite interests. By providing domestic and international incentives,
the international community must also deal with national sovereignty issues and the issue of
neutrality. One could also criticise the trade- off between quantity and quality of asylum. This
is illustrated by the case of Tanzania, that granted asylum to almost all Congolese but kept
the majority of them in closed camps in remote areas, with very limited rights and services.
 Marta Castro

How can host countries, by adopting the definition of survival migration, grant protection to a
higher number of refugees while maintaining the quality of the protection and the provision of
all the rights to which they would be entitled as refugees?