Anne Hammerstad - The Rise and Decline of A Global Security Actor - UNHCR, Refugee Protection and Security-Oxford University Press (2014)

T h e r i se a n d d e c l i n e o f a g l o ba l
se c u r i t y ac t o r
The Rise and
Decline of a Global
Security Actor
UNHCR, Refugee Protection, and Security
A n n e Ha m m e r s ta d
1
1
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To Adam
Acknowledgments
This book is the fruition of a research interest in UNHCR and the politics of
displacement that has spanned more than a decade. There are many, both indi-
viduals and institutions, I would like to thank for their help, support, advice
and critical comments.
While UNHCR has had no formal input into the contents of this book,
many of its staff members, from junior field staff to senior management, have
been generous with their time, experiences and insights during two rounds of
interviews at the agency’s Geneva headquarters. The first round took place in
the winter of 2000–01, just as Sadako Ogata was making her farewells as High
Commissioner and UNHCR was entering a period of downsizing and uncer-
tainty. The second round was in the spring of 2008, when High Commissioner
Antonio Guterres had contributed to a new sense of purpose and identity to
the agency’s handling of the fraught and violent fall-out from US-led inva-
sions in Afghanistan and Iraq. Jeff Crisp, long-standing head of UNHCR’s
Evaluation and Policy Analysis Unit before his move in 2013 to become Senior
Director at Refugees International, needs particular mention for sharing from
his well of experience and for his critical, but always friendly and constructive
exchange of ideas. I also would like to mention the generous help from former
Assistant High Commissioner Søren Jessen-Petersen, who opened doors and
made available information for the research of this book. Among the former
and current UNHCR staff members who helped, Mark Cutts, Filippo Grandi,
Andrew Harper, Nicholas Morris, Jean-François Durieux, Arafat Jamal,
Stephane Jaquemet, Irene Khan, Janet Lim, Radhouane Nouicer, Jose Riera,
Nicky Tennant, Volker Turk and Neill Wright should have special mention.
Some interviewees preferred to be anonymous, but I would nevertheless like
to express my gratitude to them for the interviews and exchanges of opinion
they contributed.
I have received invaluable financial and institutional help for the writing of
this book. Interviews and research at UNHCR’s Geneva headquarters in the
winter of 1999–2000 were made possible by a bursary from Europaeum, while
a grant from the British Academy enabled me to conduct a second round of
interviews in Geneva in the spring of 2008. A Global Uncertainties Fellowship
from the ESRC, from 2009 to 2012, awarded ample resources, as well as the
time to think and write, which were necessary to complete the book. Kristian
Berg Harpviken and Halvard Buhaug at the Peace Research Institute in Oslo
generously offered the use of PRIO’s offices and resources, accompanied by
viii Acknowledgments
stimulating discussions with PRIO colleagues, in the summer of 2012. Elizabeth

Sidiropoulos and the South African Institute of International Affairs have pro-
vided opportunities, facilities and resources in the inspiring atmosphere at Jan
Smuts House in Johannesburg on many occasions. Oxford University Press
and editor Dominic Byatt have been patient and supportive throughout the
research and writing of this book.
I would particularly like to extend my warmest thanks to colleagues who
commented on the manuscript at its various stages of completion. In partic-
ular: Ruth Blakeley, Dominic Byatt, Andy Hurrell, Gil Loescher and Adam
Roberts for responding to and advising on versions of outlines and chapters
at various stages of the project, and Matthew Gibney for doing the same in
addition to being a pillar of support and an academic mentor and role model.
Alex Betts, Nick Bisley, Mark Beeson and Gil Loescher provided opportuni-
ties for me to develop analytical themes in seminar series and edited books.
Mats Berdal and Steven Haines could always be counted on for advice, recom-
mendations, encouragement and support. Thank you to Hugh Miall, Richard
Sakwa and Richard Whitman in the School of Politics and IR at the University
of Kent for the same, and to my other Kent colleagues for providing a dynamic
and collegial research environment.
Finally, my thanks and love go to my husband, ‘the other’ Adam Roberts, for
being my strongest supporter and best critic. Needless to say, despite all this
help and support, I take full responsibility for the final product.
Contents
1. Introduction: The Rise and Decline of a Global Security Actor 1
Part One: Displacement and security 17

2. From Explaining to Constructing Security: A conceptual
analysis 19
3. Victims or Threats? Placing Displacement on Three Security
Agendas 40
Part Two: An intellectual history of UNHCR 65

4. Institutional and International Developments 69
5. The 1950s to 1970s: Timidity and Restraint in UNHCR’s
Discourse 93
6. The 1980s: A Political Turn 112
7. The 1990s: Adopting and Adapting a Security Discourse 129
8. The 2000s and Beyond: Return of a Protection Discourse 151
Part Three: An actor or re-actor in international

refugee politics? 175
9. UNHCR’s Rise as a Global Security Actor: Northern
Iraq, 1991 179
10. A Humanitarian Star: Lead Agency in Bosnia, 1991–95 192
11. Protection Disaster in Eastern Zaire, 1994–96 213
12. How Success Became Failure: The Kosovo Crisis, 1998–99 229
13. Challenges of Protection After 9/11 250
14. Repatriating Afghan Refugees 271
x Contents
15. Conclusion: The Ongoing Quest for Power, Independence

and Relevance 290
Bibliography 305
Index 337
1
Introduction
The Rise and Decline of a Global Security Actor
For the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the past two
decades have been a period of uncertainties and dilemmas, but also one of opera-
tional expansion, institutional change and conceptual innovation. After decades
of leading a relatively anonymous existence, the refugee agency gained interna-
tional prominence in the early 1990s then gradually returned to a more modest
role in the 2000s. This book explores the rise and decline of UNHCR as a global
security actor. It follows the agency through some of the major conflict-induced
humanitarian emergencies of the post-Cold War period: in northern Iraq (1991),
Bosnia (1991–95), eastern Zaire (1994–96), Kosovo (1998–99), Afghanistan
(2001–), and Iraq (2003–). It analyses UNHCR’s momentous transformation from
a small and timid legal protection agency to one of the world’s largest humanitar-
ian relief organizations playing a central role in the international response to the
many wars of the tumultuous last decade of the twentieth century. Then, as the
twenty-first century set in, the agency’s prominence waned and it returned to a
more modest and anonymous role reminiscent in some ways of the one it used to
play (sometimes quite successfully) in the Cold War period.
The rise and decline of UNHCR as a global security actor must be under-
stood within the context of the dramatic shifts in perceptions of national and
international security that have taken place after the end of the Cold War.
The Cold War superpower struggle encouraged a narrow strategic-military
understanding of security. In the more fluid and unpredictable post-Cold War
environment, a whole range of new issues were introduced to states’ security
agendas. By the early 1990s, it had become commonplace to include refugees
and asylum seekers, along with migrants in general, among these new security
issues. UNHCR’s response to this new fluid international environment is the
topic of this book. The rise and decline of UNHCR as a global security actor
in the post-Cold War era cannot be understood without investigating how
2 The Rise and Decline of a Global Security Actor
perceptions of refugees changed in the same period. The book will therefore
follow two parallel and interactive processes in international politics: First, the
arrival of refugee movements on the international security agenda with the
end of the Cold War; and, second, UNHCR’s reaction to this new development
by trying to shape the evolving process of labelling refugees as security issues
to its own advantage and to that of refugees.
Change and innovation after the end of

the Cold War
From the perspective of global politics, the post-Cold War era has been a
period of uncertainty, turbulence and innovation. As first the Berlin Wall, and
soon after the Soviet Union, crumbled, many of the assertions and assump-
tions of the Cold War era came into question. This was not least the case in the
field of international security, where the rigid structure of superpower rivalry
under the conditions of nuclear stalemate had suited the Neorealist security
perspective so well. With the demise of one of the superpowers, a host of
ideas emerged about what international security would look like in the future,
from the dream of a new world order under the benign tutelage of the United
States,1 to visions of a new world disorder of state breakup, overpopulation,
disease and increasing anarchy, between and within states (Kaplan, 1994).
In this climate, there is little surprise that the very concept of security came
under question. The Realist definition of security as concerning the threat and
use of force between states (Walt, 1991) received an onslaught of criticism.
This critique took many different forms, but most versions advocated a wider,
more inclusive concept of security. There were two directions in which this
widening took place: the first aimed to broaden the referent object of secu-
rity beyond sovereign states to include the people living within them; while
the second urged a broadening of our understanding of potential threats to
include other spheres than military relations. Various United Nations bodies
introduced new definitions of security, such as comprehensive security; our
common security; and, the most influential of them all— human security. At
the same time it became commonplace to describe issues such as environmen-
tal degradation, resource scarcity and mass population movements as secu-
rity threats, with the implication that these issues should be tackled with the
1
In a 1990 address to a joint session of Congress, president George Bush Senior famously set
out his hopes that ‘a new world order—can emerge: a new era—freer from the threat of terror,
stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace’ (Bush, 1990).
Introduction 3
utmost urgency. Part One of this book will take a closer look at the security
debate and its impact on our perception of displacement.
Reflecting a fast-changing political environment, UNHCR has also gone
through a period of political uncertainty, institutional restructuring and con-
ceptual innovation over the past two decades. Despite, or as this book will
argue, because of the challenges posed by the turbulent environment in which
it operates, the refugee agency has, in this period, expanded dramatically: in
terms of budgets, staff levels and operational presence on the ground; and,
more importantly, in terms of the tasks and responsibilities it considers itself
mandated and fit to perform. This book follows UNHCR’s reinvention as a
global security actor. It tells the story of how one international actor dealt with,
and took advantage of, the rapid changes that were taking place in ideas and
beliefs about security from the early 1990s onwards, to strengthen its position
in the politics of humanitarian action. It shows how the refugee agency, by
transforming the way in which it perceived and presented the refugee problem,
became a central actor in the international community’s efforts to deal with
most of the major conflict-induced humanitarian emergencies of the 1990s
and 2000s. In the spirit of the widening of the concept of security, UNHCR
began to describe the refugee problem as an inherently political and security
problem, and its own role as that of contributing to international peace and
security.
UNHCR’s rise as a global security actor was swift and dramatic, and the agency
today is difficult to recognize from the one that existed in the late 1980s. However,
the refugee agency’s high profile when it led the responses to the humanitarian
disasters following the wars of ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia and
genocide in Rwanda, has not been replicated in recent years—even though the
agency also led the humanitarian response to Iraqi mass displacement after the
US-led invasion, and is currently in charge of the UN’s efforts on behalf of Syrian
refugees. There has been a marked decline in UNHCR’s profile and self-image
as a global security actor, a decline that started in 2001. This book discusses the
problems encountered by UNHCR when entering the world of security politics.
By following the refugee agency’s rise and decline as a global security actor, it
attempts to understand not only the opportunities of power and influence that
open up when placing the refugee problem on the international security agenda,
but also the pitfalls and dangers created by redefining displacement as a secu-
rity issue. The book has two overall aims: first, to increase our understanding
of the processes through which international organizations such as UNHCR
respond and adapt to new pressures and changing circumstances, and how the
ideational level of perceptions, beliefs and discourse is crucial to understanding
such processes. Second, to explore the trajectory and consequences of treating
displacement and forced migration as a security issue. Why has the problem of
refugees, asylum seekers and other forced migrants increasingly come to be seen
as a security problem, rather than an issue of humanitarian concern and human
rights? What are the consequences of this transformation—for the policies of
states; for the forced migrants themselves; and for UNHCR, the organization
mandated to protect and assist refugees?
Remaining relevant: UNHCR and the

politics of displacement
UNHCR was founded by the UN General Assembly in 1950,2 with statutory

responsibility for providing international protection for refugees and seeking
permanent solutions to their plight. During the Cold War the main activity of
the agency in the developed world was to ensure that states hosting refugees
from communist countries adhered to their international legal obligations
according to the UN Refugee Convention.3 In the developing world, the agen-
cy’s main activity was the running of refugee camps across the border from
states submerged in protracted anti-colonial and post-independence wars,
often fuelled by the superpowers, such as those in Afghanistan and Angola
(Loescher, 1993). Although UNHCR gradually widened its range of activities
during the 1970s and 1980s, the refugee agency nevertheless grew concerned
when the Cold War came to an end that it would not ‘remain relevant’ in the
post-Cold War period.
In retrospect, the many refugee crises and the substantial expansion of
UNHCR’s operational scope and budget in the 1990s, make this concern seem
misplaced. By 1999, UNHCR had become a humanitarian leader, one of the
world’s largest humanitarian relief agencies, doubling its staff in less than a
decade to over 5,000 by the turn of the millennium. This growth has contin-
ued—albeit with some fluctuations. The tally in mid-2013 was around 7,700
local and international staff working in more than 125 countries.
This is indeed a stark contrast to the agency’s humble beginnings in 1951 as
a self-confessed ‘non-operational’ agency. Its focus has shifted from primar-
ily providing international protection for refugees, particularly in the form
of promoting asylum, towards large-scale humanitarian operations, in the
midst of conflict, for war-affected populations, internally displaced persons
(IDPs) and refugees alike. The agency has also expanded into relief for victims
2
General Assembly Resolution 428 (V) (New York, 12 December 1950).
3
United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (Geneva, 28 July 1951).
Introduction 5
of natural disasters, including the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and the 2005
Pakistan earthquake. UNHCR itself described this policy transformation, tak-
ing off in the early 1990s, as a movement from a ‘reactive, exile-oriented and
refugee-specific’ paradigm to a ‘proactive, homeland-oriented and holistic’
one (UNHCR, 1995: 43).
UNHCR’s policy transformation has been accompanied by a process of sig-
nificant conceptual change within the agency’s official discourse and a substan-
tial re-evaluation of its understanding of the nature of refugee emergencies and
its own role in dealing with them. The early 1990s saw a particularly profound
transformation, described in this study as the evolution of a security discourse
within UNHCR. Earlier the agency was careful to describe both the nature of
refugee problems and its own efforts in dealing with them as matters of purely
humanitarian, ethical and legal significance for the international community.
Beginning in the 1990s, however, UNHCR began systematically to describe
refugee movements as security problems of the utmost political significance for
the international community and to emphasize its own role in aiding refugees
as fraught with political and security dilemmas. In the first four decades of
UNHCR’s existence, the agency’s main model for how the international com-
munity should deal with refugee problems was that of the Good Samaritan.
In the 1990s, UNHCR placed less emphasis on the moral necessity that the
international community help refugees and more on the compelling political
and security reasons for it to do so.
Part Two of this book conducts an intellectual history of UNHCR from its
inception in 1951 to 2013. Despite asserting through the decades that it merely
pursues the tenets of its mandate and Statute, an analysis of UNHCR’s official
discourse shows that such assertions hide how much the agency’s interpreta-
tion of this mandate and Statute has changed, in order to adapt to, but also
influence, changes in the political environment in which it operates. Part Two
shows how UNHCR embraced and adapted the language of security in the
1990s, but then rejected and withdrew a security-driven understanding of the
refugee problem in the 2000s. Part Three then investigates some of the main
humanitarian emergencies in which UNHCR was a leading humanitarian
actor in order to understand the agency’s rise as a global security actor in the
early 1990s, followed by a return to a more quiet and cautious approach in the
2000s accompanied by a decline in its influence and visibility.
The Non-Political Myth
In the 1990s, as UNHCR became a prominent humanitarian actor and lead

humanitarian agency in northern Iraq, the former Yugoslavia, the Great Lakes
of Africa and elsewhere, it also received a great deal of academic attention,

much of it critical (Barutciski, 1996; Chimni, 1998a, 1998b; Goodwin-Gill,
1999; Mooney, 1999). A common, albeit not universal, feature of this academic
criticism was an emphasis on human rights principles and refugee law. A main
concern was that UNHCR let itself, and the ideals and principles it was created
to uphold, be tainted by the base world of state and international politics. The
question put by this literature was usually ‘why does UNHCR not abide by its
legal and moral principles, as set out in its Statute?’ A vocal camp of refugee
advocates saw the refugee agency’s plunge into global security politics as serv-
ing two dubious aims: the bureaucratic ambitions of UNHCR’s leadership to
augment the organization’s finance and staffing levels and second (an argu-
ment based on the unspoken assumption of a zero-sum relationship between
the interests of states and the rights of refugees), to legitimize states’ attempts
to disguise their narrow self-interests to keep refugees out behind a veil of
ill-defined ‘security’ concerns (Chimni, 1998b: 286). Thus, UNHCR’s aban-
donment of a neutral, non-political stance has constituted an unprecedented
sell-out of its principles and statutory duties (Barutciski, 1996: 57).
This study rejects the premises of such criticisms. The work of UNHCR,
like that of every international organization, is inherently political. This book
analyses how UNHCR partakes in the international politics surrounding the
refugee problem, alongside states, non-state actors (such as rebel movements),
non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international organizations, and,
often, the refugee groups themselves. It does not attempt to refute or revile the
‘politicization’ of refugee problems. Instead it takes the unavoidably political
nature of UNHCR’s work for granted. Any definition of ‘political acts’ would
include the aim of influencing or forcing the actions of others in a direction
beneficial to one’s own aims. UNHCR is—uncontroversially—a deeply politi-
cal agency since the principal part of its mandate is to try to influence states
and the general public to adopt certain ideas and values embedded in refugee
and human rights law (as interpreted by UNHCR) (Forsythe, 2001:1).
This book, then, is not another critique of UNHCR for abandoning its
principles. It asks instead what are the political factors in UNHCR’s external
environment that impede the agency from achieving its goals; what strategies
does UNHCR employ to attempt to overcome these impediments; and how
well have these strategies worked? The argument underlying this study is that
UNHCR’s leverage vis-à-vis more (materially) powerful actors in the arena of
international refugee politics (especially UNHCR’s donor states) can mainly
be found on the ideational and discursive level.
Some critics (e.g. Chimni, 1998a: 351–54) maintain that UNHCR managed,
at least to a larger extent, to remain non-political during the Cold War, and that
this provided the agency with a moral and legal strength and independence it
Introduction 7
has now lost. It is a myth, however, that UNHCR’s work was less political dur-
ing the Cold War. Certainly, UNHCR proclaimed it was non-political more
often in the first four decades of its existence than it did in the 1990s. But its
policies have always been limited by the structure of the international envi-
ronment and the actions and interests of the state and non-state actors who
provide the agency with funding and with access to refugee populations. The
starting point for this study is High Commissioner Sadako Ogata’s strong con-
cern in the first few years of the post-Cold War period that UNHCR was about
to become irrelevant in the eyes of such powerful actors. This fate could only
be avoided, she believed, if UNHCR changed in step with the profound and
rapid changes taking place in the international environment.
To ‘remain relevant’ is a continuous concern for most intergovernmental
organizations. International norms, even when part of a legal regime, are not
set in stone. They are continuously promoted, reinterpreted and reasserted in
the international political arena, in competition with other norms and ideas.
The provisions of refugee law, like most other international law, are too broad
and weak to allow only one interpretation, thus UNHCR must—and does—
take part in the continuous political debate on how refugees should be treated
and how the refugee problem should be solved. The imperative of remaining
relevant warrants that UNHCR maintains its role as a central contributor to
this debate. To succeed in this, UNHCR must command the attention and
trust of other actors, particularly the agency’s donors and refugee host states.
Thus, UNHCR’s success in achieving its goals of refugee protection and assis-
tance depends ‘not on steering clear of politics but on deliberately engaging
political actors to shape their perception of interest so that it allows more space
for principled humanitarian action’ (MacFarlane, 2000: xiii).
Ideas and power in the study of

international organizations
Ever since its inception as a separate field of academic study, International

Relations theorizing has been fuelled by the question ‘do ideas matter?’ Starting
with E. H. Carr’s division of the field into ‘Realists’ and ‘Idealists’ (Carr, 1995
[1939]), this question has gone through several permutations. Sixty years after
Carr, Keohane (1989) described the debate as one between ‘rationalists’ and
‘reflectivists’, filling the ranks of the former with Realists, neoliberal institu-
tionalists and game theorists, while packing into the latter a disparate group
consisting of macro-sociologists concerned with social and cultural forces,
post-modernists, Critical Theorists, Constructivists and, I would argue, the
English School. As reflectivists, they have in common the belief that the social
world, as opposed to the natural one, is intersubjectively constituted. The struc-
tures and ‘laws’ of international society are normative, not material, and exist
only as far as, and as long as, they are injected with meaning by their users.
‘Reflectivism’ as a category was problematic, since it included at one end
poststructuralists who refute the existence of a reality outside language and,
at the other, scholars of the English School who study ‘international institu-
tions’—institutionalized patterns of behaviour—that restrain or enable states’
actions (Bull, 1977), such as ‘national self-determination’, ‘balance of power’
and, more pertinent to this study, the institution of asylum. Since Keohane’s
categorization attempt, both Constructivism and the English School have
moved firmly into the mainstream of IR. In the twenty-first century, to assert
that ideas do matter no longer relegates the claimant to IR’s lunatic fringes.
Neither are the main non-positivist approaches any longer in need of group
labels such as ‘reflectivism’. They stand on their own feet.
The approach of this study can best be described as ‘cautious constructiv-
ism’ of the English School kind. The aim is to show that the study of ideas and
discourse is of crucial importance if one is to understand the reasons for and
the direction of UNHCR’s transformation. However, ideas and discourse must
be studied alongside, not instead of, the study of material interests and power
relations. Before ending with a brief outline of the structure of the book, the
remainder of this introduction chapter will discuss the relevance of discourse
in the study of UNHCR’s rise and decline as a global security actor.
Why Discourse?
A core subject matter of this study is the evolution of UNHCR’s official dis-
course over six decades from the agency’s inception in 1951, with particular
emphasis on the emergence, evolution and decline of a security discourse after
the end of the Cold War. But why this focus on discourse? Does the changing
rhetoric of an international organization really matter? This question has two
implications: First, it implies that international organizations do not matter,
that their actions are the reflection of the interests of major states in the inter-
national system—in the case of UNHCR, particularly its main donors in North
America, Europe and Japan. Second, it suggests that the way in which an inter-
national organization presents the problems it is mandated to address—in this
case refugees and displacement—is mostly a rhetorical veneer, with little abil-
ity to affect the interests and actions of the actors that really count, i.e. states.
Both these claims are refuted in this book. First, international organiza-
tions do matter. They help states co-operate, and to co-operate in a particular
Introduction 9
manner, in particular fields of international relations sometimes described as

international regimes. They do so by overseeing, promoting and, in some cases,
enforcing the rules and norms of the regime; by facilitating and regularizing
meetings between the actors in the regime; and by strengthening the regime
through operational practice and through advocacy. Over time, regimes, and
the intergovernmental organizations overseeing them, become more than
the sum of the state parts that created them. UNHCR, for instance, is the key
institutional actor in the international refugee regime. It plays the dual role of
being the champion and guardian of refugee rights vis-à-vis states; and being
the vehicle for interstate co-operation and burden-sharing, the forum where
states develop and confirm norms and guidelines for how they deal with the
global refugee problem.
Second, and discernible from the argument above, the reason why inter-
national organizations matter must first and foremost be found at the
ideational level. As Bull (1977) set out, the inter-state system is a society
of norms and institutions that shape state behaviour. The nature of the
society of states, and the rules and norms guiding it, are not material facts,
but historical creations. If Bull had written the Anarchical Society today, he
would have agreed with the Constructivist tenet (but disagreed with the
jargon) that international society is intersubjectively constituted: created,
maintained and gradually changed by the actors within it. Even highly
‘Realist’ concepts such as international anarchy (Wendt, 1999); the national
interest (Weldes, 1999); and security (Buzan et al., 1998), are socially and
historically constructed concepts. They are infused with particular mean-
ings before they are put to use in directing state actions. And these mean-
ings are neither given nor static. Thus, there is nothing inevitable about the
fact that states have created a regime for co-operation on refugee issues,
or that this regime is founded on the refugee’s right to seek asylum and to
not be sent back to danger (the principle of non-refoulement). However,
neither is the creation of this regime arbitrary, since the norms of the inter-
national refugee regime have evolved gradually, and are linked to histori-
cal experiences, especially during the first half of the twentieth century
(Skran, 1995), as well as to broader ideational trends, such as the arrival
and strengthening of norms regarding human rights and state responsi-
bilities towards individuals. It is important to look closer at the relation-
ship between ideas and interests in international politics. This will set
the stage for the discussion in Part One of this book of the constructed
nature of the concept of security; the inclusion of refugees and other forced
migrants, especially asylum seekers, in this construction from the early
1990s onwards; and the implications of this inclusion for perceptions of
the refugee problem.
Interests, Ideas or Both?
Students of international relations cannot ignore ideational factors in their

attempts to understand why actors on the international arena choose certain
policy options over others. To argue that it is the national interest that shapes
states’ action begs the question of what the national interest actually is. Even
Morgenthau (1993: 6 and 11), who famously set out ‘interest defined as power’
as the rationale driving states’ foreign policy, went on to argue that ‘the kind of
interest determining political action in a particular period of history depends
upon the political and cultural context within which foreign policy is formu-
lated’. The definition of the national interest is a political process characterized
by actors struggling and arguing over which beliefs, ideas and norms should be
included in this concept (see e.g. Weldes, 1999). But ideas and beliefs also mat-
ter at the more specific policy level: once the national interest has been defined,
the decisions on what particular policies to put in place in order to pursue this
interest are based on beliefs, especially beliefs of causality. For instance, while
some argue that military humanitarian intervention is seldom a useful way
of promoting human rights and democracy,4 others promote humanitarian
intervention as a necessary tool with which to uphold globally acknowledged
human rights and humanitarian legal principles. Thus, even if interests are the
driving force behind action, ideas govern the direction in which those inter-
ests will take the actor. Described in Max Weber’s famous analogy:
Not ideas, but material and ideal interests, directly govern men’s conduct. Yet very
frequently the ‘world images’ that have been created by ‘ideas’ have, like switch-
men, determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic
of interests (Weber, 1948: 280).
Ideas, then, do not determine behaviour, but frame actions and guide the
actor by providing him with a structure of possibilities and values. Since deci-
sions are always made under conditions of uncertainty, ideas will always play
a significant part in the decision-making process.
Second, an approach that takes interests as given ignores how interests are
formed and how they may change over time. It does not take into account his-
torical processes and the human capacity for learning. New ideas may lead to a
significant change in the constitution of interests, especially when existing sets
of ideas become discredited by events (this happened to the ideas of eugenics
after the Holocaust) or when ‘a new idea is simply so compelling that it cap-
tures the attention of a wide array of actors’ (Goldstein and Keohane, 1993: 16).
4
John Stuart Mill was one of the first to make this argument, although the term ‘humanitarian
intervention’ is a more recent invention (Mill, 1974).
Introduction 11
Individuals and groups embark on conceptual innovation in an attempt to

solve problems or resolve contradictions they meet in practice or theory (Farr,
1989: 38). Goldstein and Keohane (1993: 17) suggest that ideas can become
particularly important in times of radical political events such as war and
depression. Such ‘exogenous shocks that undermine the existing order’ may
lead to radical shifts in the political agenda, since people become more open
to new ideas and beliefs in times of turbulence and uncertainty. The end of the
Cold War was one such period of uncertainty and flux, and the late 1980s and
the early 1990s were characterized by a plethora of new (or reformulated) ideas,
vying for a place on the world’s post-Cold War political agenda. UNHCR, itself
emerging from an institutional and financial crisis in the late 1980s, was caught
up in this atmosphere of uncertainty and innovation. Its discourse changed
dramatically in the period between 1987 and 1992, incorporating, and adapt-
ing to its own purposes, some of the new ideas of the time. The terror attacks
of 11 September 2001 provided another shock to the international system, with
far-ranging consequences for the international refugee regime, thus contribut-
ing to another period of UNHCR discursive uncertainty and re-interpretations.
The central role of ideas, beliefs and perceptions as ‘switchmen’ that guide
interests and actions onto certain tracks, opens up a potential independent
power base for international organizations such as UNHCR. Like most other
international organizations, UNHCR does not have a material power base. Its
financial clout is wholly dependent on the goodwill of donor states, and there is
no enforcement power attached to its formal role as supervisor of international
refugee law. The level of power and independence it enjoys derives from its
ability to influence the perceptions and beliefs of the other actors in the inter-
national refugee regime. The refugee agency has, at least potentially, an influ-
ential voice in maintaining and shaping the meanings infused in this regime,
performing a role both as a ‘refugee expert’ and as a moral and legal guardian
of human and refugee rights, in the debate on how refugee problems should
be addressed and solved. It is through persuasion that it can create an interna-
tional environment more conducive to its goals. In the words of Wheeler, what
is important ‘is to distinguish between power that is based on relations of domi-
nation and force, and power that is legitimate because it is predicated on shared
norms’ (Wheeler, 2000: 2, emphasis in the original). It is in this light that this
book’s emphasis on the ideas and discourse of UNHCR must be understood.
Discursive Power and Independence
This is thus a study of the role ‘discursive power’ may play in enabling UNHCR
to pursue such policies as the agency itself believes are in the best interest of
refugees and displaced persons. Did UNHCR’s choice of language, the way in
which it opted into, then out of, the security discourse on displacement, weaken
or strengthen the agency’s independence vis-à-vis other actors in international
refugee politics? Did the agency’s security discourse in the 1990s demonstrate
the weakness of the agency (the way that it was beholden to state agendas); its
adaptability (its effectiveness in navigating competing interests to service the
goals of assisting and protecting refugees); or even its power (its ability to shape
the way in which state actors perceive the refugee problem through shaping
the refugee discourse)? Why did it abandon this discourse again in the 2000s?
Independence is defined in this study to mean the ability for UNHCR to act
in a way the refugee agency itself believes is in the best interest of refugees. Of
course, no actor—on the macro level of international politics or the micro level
of social groups—is completely independent. Apart from material restraints,
the structures of norms, language and beliefs in which we are immersed guide
our behaviour. Thus, UNHCR is not immune from the influence of the ideas
advocated by donor states, refugee host states, NGO representatives, academ-
ics and other actors with a stake in refugee politics. Neither are these actors
immune from the influence of UNHCR’s language and arguments. We are all
participants in a social world, and derive and build our ideas, decisions and
arguments on our experiences in this world.
However, there is a limit to how far UNHCR can be influenced and still
retain a degree of independence from the sources of this influence. This limit is
provided by the refugee agency’s primary function of providing protection for
refugees and solutions to their plight. This statutory duty provides the founda-
tion for all UNHCR’s policy choices. The agency’s understanding of how this
task can best be performed has changed over time, but the Statute sets limits
for how far UNHCR’s ideas and actions can change before the agency’s raison
d’être disappears. If UNHCR is regularly pressured to act against its convic-
tion by other powerful actors, or if the agency is regularly forced to legitimize
its actions in terms that contradict reasonable interpretations of its statutory
duty, then UNHCR cannot be said to play an independent role in international
refugee politics. The measure of UNHCR’s independence, then, is the degree
to which the refugee agency is able to pursue its primary goal of providing pro-
tection and solutions for refugees and ‘others of concern’, in accordance with
its own (reasonable) interpretations of how this goal is best achieved.
A Note on Terminology
Although employing the term discourse to describe UNHCR’s presentation of

its ideas, beliefs and world view, this study is not an attempt at deconstruction
Introduction 13
of language. The term discourse is employed more in a practical than a philo-

sophical fashion. I study the core concepts in UNHCR’s most central docu-
ments, publications and speeches, with an emphasis on how these concepts
appear, disappear and are, sometimes, reinvented for new purposes. This con-
gregation of concepts, and the links between them, is defined as UNHCR’s
‘official discourse’. To say that UNHCR employed a ‘security discourse’ in the
1990s, or returned to a ‘protection discourse’ in the 2000s, does not mean that
the agency only talks about security or only about protection. It is concerned
with many other things. The term ‘security discourse’ is used to denote the
relative emphasis on the central concept of security in the 1990s, as compared
to other core concepts, and how these other core concepts become reinter-
preted and subsumed within an overall discursive framework centred on
the concept of security. In the 2000s, the concept of protection performs a
similar role.
The exercise can be best described as an intellectual history of UNHCR,
based on traditional historical and archival research methods. The method
is interpretative, which unavoidably means that it relies to a certain degree
on the judgement of the researcher. However, the discourse analysis covers a
broad range of sources, and the account is illustrated by frequent quotations
from and references to the sources, in order to back up the interpretation and
minimize the problem of subjectivity.
What is UNHCR?
One clarification is necessary concerning the unit of analysis of this

book: UNHCR. Much IR theory assumes that states can be treated as ‘black
boxes’ with their leaders personifying the state ‘individual’. The shortcomings
of this approach have been demonstrated by several schools of foreign policy
analysis, emphasizing the importance of bureaucratic processes, the psychol-
ogy of policy makers, and the ‘belief systems’ within which ideas are formed
and decisions made, in determining the outcome of decision making processes
(Hollis and Smith, 1990; Allison, 1999).
The same ‘level of analysis’ problem can arise when regarding a complex
international organization such as UNHCR as an individual. There are nev-
ertheless good reasons for treating UNHCR as a unitary actor for the pur-
pose of this book. First, the analysis focuses on UNHCR’s official discourse.
Although rivalry between different sections of UNHCR’s bureaucracy has
played an important role in shaping the agency’s policy choices, this rivalry
has not displayed itself in UNHCR’s official discourse. In fact, this discourse is
remarkably similar across the range of documents, publications and speeches

studied. Thus, UNHCR has one voice with which it speaks to its external
audiences.
Second, UNHCR has a fairly centralized decision making structure, espe-
cially concerning longer-term strategic decisions and high-profile emergency
operations. The High Commissioner has a strong position within the agency,
and enjoys the undisputed status as the world’s official personal representative
of refugees. The UN still describes the massive organization that UNHCR has
become as the High Commissioner’s Office, underlining the singular impor-
tance of the High Commissioner’s role. Because of these two factors, the term
‘UNHCR’ is mostly used in this book to denote the High Commissioner and
her or his senior staff. When deemed necessary, the ‘black box’ is opened to
include bureaucratic processes and internal rivalry.
The structure of this b o ok
The study is divided into three parts. Part One explains the meaning(s) of
the concept of security and the widening of the international security agenda
which has taken place over the last three decades or so. Chapter 2 sets out the
transformation of security studies, and especially the constructivist turn in
much of the more recent theorizing on the meaning of security. At the same
time it argues that the concept of security has been more resistant to radical
change than has sometimes been suggested. Chapter 3 concentrates on how
forced migration became central to the widening of the international security
agenda. Two events have been particularly significant in ushering in new per-
ceptions of refugees and migrants as threats: the end of the Cold War and the
collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989–91; and the terrorist attacks in the United
States on 11 September 2001.
Part Two offers an intellectual history of UNHCR from its inception as a
non-operational protector of refugee rights to a global security actor. It traces
UNHCR’s discursive evolution over six decades from 1951, through an analy-
sis of a wide range of UNHCR documents, speeches and publications. The
analysis of UNHCR’s discursive evolution is based on four questions: First, was
UNHCR’s security discourse a new, post-Cold War, phenomenon? Second, if
it was new, what discourse did it displace? Third, how did UNHCR under-
stand the refugee problem as a security issue? And, fourth, how and why did
the agency abandon this discourse again in the 2000s? In Part Two, chapter 4
introduces the organization and mandate of UNHCR, while c hapters 5 to 8
concentrate on mapping the agency’s discursive evolution. Chapters 5 and
Introduction 15
6 set out the development of UNHCR’s discourse from its inaugural year in
1951 to the end of the Cold War. They show a discourse in continual evo-
lution, but which adheres to strict interpretations of a non-political, neutral
and non-operational ethos. This discourse effectively constricted UNHCR’s
actions and ensured that the agency remained small, anonymous and rela-
tively uncontroversial throughout the Cold War period. Chapter 7 then dem-
onstrates how UNHCR’s official discourse went through a period of swift and
substantial change in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This chapter documents
the evolution of UNHCR’s new security discourse. It shows how this discourse
emerged and gained strength in the optimistic ‘New World Order’ period after
the first Gulf War, then began to falter after several humanitarian disasters
in the middle of the 1990s. Chapter 8 describes how UNHCR abandons its
security discourse after the anti-migrant fall-out from 11 September 2001, and
performs a discursive return of sorts to a protection discourse—albeit a much
more expansive understanding of protection than the agency harboured in
the 1970s.
It is one thing to describe and document discursive shifts (and in the case of
UNHCR they have been momentous), it is another to answer the more impor-
tant question of whether and how these shifts have any practical significance.
Part Three of this book, entitled An Actor or Re-actor in International Refugee
Politics?, is therefore devoted to the dynamics of UNHCR’s discursive and
organizational evolution. It investigates the relationship between discourse
and action, or between what UNHCR says and what it does. I do this through
a study of the agency’s actions in some of the biggest humanitarian crises of the
past two decades: in northern Iraq, Bosnia, eastern Zaire, Kosovo, Afghanistan
and Iraq. The aim is to shed light on whether the evolution of a security dis-
course had an impact on the agency’s policy choices, and whether UNHCR’s
language of security played a role in augmenting or diminishing the refugee
agency’s influence in the arena of international refugee politics.
The discussion of UNHCR’s operational experiences and lessons from these
is divided into six chapters. Five of these cover particular emergencies, while
one strays from the pattern of the others in order to capture the many-faceted
repercussions for UNHCR on the terror attacks of 11 September 2001 on the
US. Chapters 9 and 10 covering northern Iraq (1991) and Bosnia (1992–96),
describe a period where UNHCR seizes the opportunities offered by the end
of the Cold War. It is a new beginning for the agency, accompanied by a new
understanding of the refugee problem: UNHCR becomes a global security
actor. Chapters 11 and 12 discuss the agency’s experiences in the refugee after-
math of the Rwandan genocide (1994–96) and the Kosovo war (1998–99). As
the chief, and highly visible, humanitarian actor in these complex emergencies,
UNHCR rediscovered the hard way the complicated and at times contradictory
relationship between protection and security, and received criticism from out-
side and within for having forgotten the former in its enthusiasm for the lat-
ter. Casualties among staff and the perceived disappearance of ‘humanitarian
space’ lead the agency to begin to re-evaluate its security discourse.
Finally, as the twenty-first century begins, chapters 13 and 14 follow
UNHCR in the aftermath of 9/11, an event that had major repercussion on
refugee and migration politics both in the global North and South. Chapter 13
discusses UNHCR’s attempt at carving out an independent and credible role
separate from Western powers in the polarized environment of the post-9/11
period, while Chapter 14 analyses the largest repatriation operation in the ref-
ugee agency’s history, that of over five million Afghans from Pakistan and Iran
after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
The conclusion discusses two interlinked dilemmas. First, the practi-
cal UNHCR dilemma of relevance versus independence. And second, how
the adoption, adaption and finally abandonment of the language of secu-
rity achieved its aim of acquiring both. I focus particularly on why UNHCR
took on a language of security in the first place—speaking the language of
states (security), but tweaking it in a manner that would promote solutions
to refugee problems. The studies of UNHCR’s operational experiences in Part
Three show that the agency’s security discourse had a significant impact on its
actions in the 1990s. However, the relationship between discourse and action
is a dynamic one. While UNHCR’s discourse helped shape the agency’s opera-
tions, the lessons learnt from the successes and failures of these operations
again led to innovations in the agency’s discourse, finally leading it to abandon
its ambitions to be a global security actor and to return to a more traditional
role of a non-political refugee protection agency.
Part One
Displacement and Security
The first part of this book accounts for the intellectual context in which
UNHCR has developed its own discourse on the nature of the refugee problem
and its own role in international refugee politics. This context can in short-
hand be described as the inclusion of migration in general, and refugee and
asylum seeker movements in particular, on security agendas, a process that
started around the end of the Cold War and gained momentum after the 9/11
terror attacks in the United States in 2001.
The next two chapters investigate the security dimensions of refugee prob-
lems. I argue that while some refugee groups throughout history have taken
part in the conflict dynamics of developing regions, the way in which the
refugee problem has been categorized as a security threat by Northern and
Southern states alike is unprecedented in the post-Cold War period. As the
concept of security has been widened, refugees and forced migrants have been
depicted as threats to identity and cultural homogeneity, the welfare state,
political cohesion, and, particularly after 9/11, as potential terrorist threats.
The next chapter provides an account of developments in the academic debate
on the meaning of the concept of security. It shows how the study of secu-
rity has become a much more diverse practice over the past two decades.
But based on an analytical framework for studying political concepts devel-
oped by Freeden (1996), I argue that there are, in practice, limits to how far
re-conceptualizations of security can go—and have gone. Political concepts
exist within a political, social and cultural practice, and are unlikely to stray
too far from what is acceptable or indeed comprehensible within this practice.
Such practices change over time, but political concepts tend to retain a certain
stability at least in the medium term.
The intense discussions on the meaning of security, and the attacks on
traditional security approaches from a range of ‘wideners’ who demand the
inclusion of new referent objects, new threats, and new research agendas, led
to a constructivist turn in security studies. If security can mean so many dif-
ferent things to so many different researchers, it is easy to jump to the conclu-
sion that security is not so much an ‘essentially contested concept’ (Baldwin,
1997) as an essentially constructed one.
Chapter 3 sets out three different ways in which refugees and forced migrants
have been discussed as security issues. First, displacement has been included as
one of the clearest threats to human security, and as a central item on compre-
hensive security agendas (promoted in particular by the UN). Second, asylum
has been reinterpreted as an issue of border control, crime and terrorism and
linked to fears of loss of identity and social cohesion (a particularly Western
agenda). And, third, displacement has been linked to violent conflict in poor
and underdeveloped regions of the world, both as a consequence of violence
and as a mechanism for the spread of conflict (a particular concern of refugee
host states in the South).
Part One has three aims. First, to establish that there has indeed been a
general trend towards understanding forced migration as a security issue,
both in the academic literature and in public discourses. Second, to place
the evolution of UNHCR’s security discourse within this intellectual con-
text, where it became increasingly natural to subsume the problem of forced
migration beneath a security umbrella. And, third, to emphasize that the
existence of so many diverging—and often competing—conceptualizations of
security within the field of International Relations makes it vital to examine
how exactly UNHCR conceptualizes security. The fact that UNHCR adopted
a ‘security discourse’ is in itself of limited interest, since this discourse can
be based on a variety of conceptualizations of security with dramatically dif-
ferent political and normative consequences. To understand the significance
and impact of this discourse on UNHCR’s policies and practice, it is neces-
sary to understand how the agency has defined, developed, and utilized the
concept of security.
It is also essential to understand how different conceptualizations of secu-
rity can clash, and how some security narratives can trump and undermine
others. Such clashes can take place within UNHCR’s own discourse, as Part
Two of this book shows. But, more consequential to the future of refugee pro-
tection, UNHCR’s attempt at utilizing the power of the concept of security to
garner support for its work to find solutions to the plight of refugees, could be,
and indeed were, undermined by competing, and more influential, security
narratives that were hostile to or fearful of forced migrants. Such competitions
between different security interests are discussed in Part Three of this book.
2
From Explaining to Constructing

Security
A Conceptual Analysis
The field of study concerned with national and international security can be
hard to recognize from its namesake two decades ago. This chapter provides an
introduction to the concept of security in IR, with particular emphasis on how
our conceptualizations of security have changed and diversified over the last
generation. I begin by arguing against the notion that ‘security’ is an essentially
contested concept in current IR debates. The concept is certainly essentially
contestable: it is theoretically entirely possible to promote conceptualizations
of security that do not overlap with each other in their meaning. The argument
of this chapter is that in actual practice within the security studies sub-field of
IR, this has not happened. I set out instead a minimal definition of ‘security’
that seems to be explicitly or implicitly employed by all current approaches
to security studies. I do this with the help of Michael Freeden’s framework
for analysing political concepts (Freeden, 1996). From this minimal common
ground I outline the ways in which different schools of thought have set about
widening the meaning of the concept of security.
From Hobbes to Habermas: An expanding

securit y debate
Efforts to transform the concept of security began already in the late 1970s,
but gathered strength from the end of the Cold War, when they were spurred
by the widely held perception that traditional security approaches were unable
to explain this momentous event in international affairs. The early 1990s saw a
vibrant debate in the field of security studies between proponents of traditional,
Realist approaches to security and advocates of various widening projects. By

the end of the decade, theoretical inspiration for the study of security, tradi-
tionally monopolized by Realist classics, spanned the spectrum from Hobbes
to Habermas, from Bismarck to Baudrillard. While Walt (1991: 212) held the
fort for Realists in a seminal article that reiterated the necessity to confine
security studies to ‘the study of the threat, use, and control of military force’,
Booth (1991: 319), inspired by the Frankfurt School, claimed in the same year
that ‘emancipation, theoretically, is security’. Between these extremes, Mathews
(1989), Homer-Dixon (1991 and 1994), and others created an environmental
security research agenda; Enloe (1990) and other feminists promoted the gen-
dering of security studies; Thomas (1987) and Ayoob (1995) were early argu-
ers against the Western-centric obsession with inter-state war and suggested
that in most parts of the world the main security threats came from within
state borders; Huntington (1993) famously championed culture or identity as
the main security fault line in the post-Cold War era; Weiner (1992/93 and
1995) warned of the security threats of mass migration; while Loescher (1992
and 1993) focused particularly on putting refugee movements on global secu-
rity agendas. Last, but not least, the United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP) (1994) introduced the idea of human security and argued that threats
to security arrive as much from poverty and disease as from political violence.
As a result of the debates engendered by all these innovations, some theorists
concluded by questioning whether proponents of different security approaches
were employing the same concept at all, or whether they instead use the same
word, ‘security’, but apply entirely different meanings to it (Baldwin, 1997: 5;
Dalby, 1997: 6). If this were the case, different security approaches would share
the same sign, ‘security’, to describe their subject matter, but this sign would
signify concepts that are mutually unintelligible, since the components of one
approach’s conceptualization would not overlap with that of another. A real
debate between these approaches would then be impossible. This idea that
the concept of security is essentially contested became a relatively fashionable
claim, but also questioned (see McSweeney, 1999; Booth, 2007).
Another, arguably more fruitful, way of framing the debate is to assert
that there is indeed a shared minimal definition of the concept of security in
International Relations, but that from this minimal content the concept can be
fleshed out in widely different directions. Although there are great differences
in the emphasis, values and recommendations between, for instance, military
strategists and advocates of environmental security, one group’s conceptualiza-
tion of security is not unrecognizable for the other.
The concept of security, like other political concepts, is a complex arrange-
ment of meaning which evolves through usage. Being a political concept, its
definition is a constant subject of political debate. But while its meaning is not
From Explaining to Constructing Security 21
static, neither can it be arbitrarily defined. Political concepts are ‘constructs

that reflect social and historical usage’ (Freeden, 1996: 52). As such, it is dif-
ficult to escape the common or at least overlapping meanings imposed by
the social, cultural and historical context in which the concept is immersed.
Political concepts, as is the case for language as a whole, are means of com-
munication. From this perspective, the test of whether a new interpretation
of the meaning of the concept of security is, well, meaningful, is whether it is
‘acceptable, or . . . in the process of becoming acceptable, to significant num-
bers of its users’ (Freeden, 1996: 53).1 It is theoretically possible in the field of
International Relations for two people to use the word ‘security’ in completely
non-tangential ways, thus either communicating with different audiences (or
user groups) or proposing conceptualizations that are generally rejected by
any audience. But it is more likely that different security approaches within IR
constitute different variations on the same conceptual theme.
Before providing an overview of the ways and directions in which the con-
cept of security has changed over the past couple of decades, I will outline a
conceptual framework that can help make sense of these changes. The frame-
work, based on Freeden’s work on ideology and political theory, is useful in
helping us understand not just how the concept has changed, but also how it
has remained the same in this period.
A minimal definition of securit y
Freeden (1996: 14) has devised a conceptual framework for analysing ‘those

fundamental political concepts which shape political argument’, such as free-
dom, justice, power and rights. Although it does not have a prominent place in
his study, security is one such fundamental political concept, since the deter-
mination of what is security has a significant impact on how states and com-
munities understand issues of survival and threat, risk and fear, conflict and
war. A political concept can be understood as a structure of meanings, made
up of an array of components. In the case of security, such components would
answer a range of questions, including: What is security’s normative value?
Where, in a hierarchy of values, is security placed? What is its relationship to
1
Other debates can take place from different perspectives: for instance, whether a new con-
ceptualization is morally superior to others, more logically cohesive than others, or better reflec-
tive of the phenomena it attempts to describe. These have certainly all been important aspects of
the security debate in IR, but I will argue that the starting point for all these debates has been a
shared understanding of a minimal core meaning of what ‘security’ signifies.
other concepts (for instance to freedom)? What are its opposites (insecu-
rity, threat)? Who or what are to be secured, or what are the referent objects
of security? What are the threats facing these referent objects? At what lev-
els of analysis are these referent objects and threats found? How is security
achieved? Can it be achieved universally or is it a ‘scarce resource’ that must
be competed for, and that can only be achieved by some at the cost of oth-
ers? The answers to these questions will make up the components of the
concept of security. There will be other components too, but this list covers
some of the more central ones in the IR security debates.
None of these components are fixed, nor are they logically determined.
They are the results of actual usage. In other words, security as a political
concept is a social construct, and as such its meaning can change over time
and across audiences. But at the same time, when conducting empirical
investigations of such actual usage, it becomes clear that political concepts
‘display a generally shared and therefore de facto conventionally “constant”
or stable feature’ (Freeden, 1996: 63).
The ensuing analysis of the concept of security in IR is inspired by Freeden’s
distinction between a concept’s ‘ineliminable’ and ‘quasi-contingent’ com-
ponents. An ineliminable component is the concept’s stable feature. It is
‘ineliminable merely in the sense that all known usages of the concept
employ it, so that its absence would deprive the concept of intelligibility
and communicability’ (Freeden, 1996: 62). However, no political concept
can, or should, be reduced down to its ineliminable components. Political
concepts are far too complex and sophisticated for this to be possible, or
indeed desirable. In addition to ineliminable components, then, political
concepts have a range of quasi-contingent categories that also need to be
filled. A concept’s quasi-contingent elements are not essential in the same
way as ineliminable components. They are ‘individually dispensable, [but]
occupy categories that are not’ (Freeden, 1996: 66). Freeden uses a table as
his example. A table must have legs, but the number and shape of its legs
do not determine whether the table should be called a table or not. ‘Legs’ is
thus a quasi-contingent category. It must be filled for the concept to have
content and meaning, but how it is filled is a matter of choice. I will first
discuss some ineliminable features of security and then go on to consider
its quasi-contingent components.
Ineliminable Features of the Concept of Security
Buzan (1991: 19) asserts that freedom from threat to survival is security’s ‘bot-

tom line’. This sums up well the baseline of agreement that continues to exist
among a large majority of security scholars.2 Scrutinizing the security debates

in IR, the concept of security displays in each of its different interpretations
some ineliminable features. First, security implies ‘freedom from threat’.
Second, the threat is to a highly valued and cherished good. Third, within the
context of IR, the threat is perceived to be of an existential nature. Fourth, the
existential quality of the threat is accompanied by a notion of urgency, neces-
sity and exceptionality. In this section I will first discuss briefly the inclusion
of threats to values or goods as an ineliminable component of security, before
discussing why threats seem to have to be existential and urgent before the
language of security is employed.
Do There Have to be Threats?

Is it possible to talk about security without implicitly or explicitly including a
notion of threat within the concept? Arguably not. Traditional security studies
take the notion of threat for granted, and usually define threats as military and
violent in nature. While critical security theorists challenge the narrowness of
the threat conception held by traditional security studies, they do not question
the inclusion of a notion of threat as part of the concept of security (see e.g.
Wyn Jones, 1999: 165–66). Foucauldian critics of traditional security studies go
further in their critique of security as instantly evoking a notion of threat. They
posit that a discourse of security serves the purpose of creating and maintain-
ing a difference between insiders and outsiders, where we, the insiders, need to
protect ourselves against the threat from them, the outsiders. Security is about
producing and reaffirming group identities through constituting ‘the other’
as both different and threatening (see e.g. Dillon, 2003; Walker, 2006: 8). But
again, like critical theorists, Foucauldian security analysts do not dispute (but
may deplore) the fact that this is how the concept of security works. Instead
they aim to reveal, in order to undermine, the power relationships created and
sustained by this inside/outside, friend/enemy dualism.
Do Threats Need to be Existential?

The insistence on the existential nature of threats sets the conceptualization of
security in the field of IR apart from the more generic use of the word. Survival
cannot be said to be an ineliminable component of the everyday use of the
term security. To put up security against a loan is usually not a matter of life
2
Note that, in line with Freeden’s analytical framework of the social, historical and inter-
subjective construction of meaning, I am aiming at finding a general, but not necessarily total,
consensus among security scholars.
and death. And, at least in stable and peaceful countries, most people who put
a security lock on their door do not do so because they fear for their lives, but
because they do not want their belongings stolen. However, within the sphere
of international relations, security became linked to the existential insecurity
of Thomas Hobbes’ life-threatening ‘state of nature’, where without security
there is ‘continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, soli-
tary, poore, nasty, brutish and short’ (Hobbes, 1991: 89). In Hobbes’ original
‘state of nature’, it was the life of the individual that was at stake, and escaping
death was the primary human interest. In the International Relations secu-
rity literature survival can, and usually does, apply to other referent objects,
such as state sovereignty, territorial integrity and national self-determination
(traditional security studies); ethical values such as freedom, equality, the rule
of law, human rights, community (Liberal approaches and critical security
studies); natural/physical goods such as water resources, oil, the biosphere
(environmental security approaches); and increasingly also individuals and
sub-state groups (critical and human security approaches). These referent
objects of security, in order to warrant the label, have in common that they can
be threatened with destruction, extinction or disappearance, and are highly
valued by the groups and individuals enjoying them.
Considering that there is a large and growing body of literature that criticizes
the assertion that security must be about existential threats, is it warranted
to retain survival as an ineliminable component of the concept of security?
Keeping in mind that the conceptualization of security provided here is based
on what constitutes actual usage, I would argue that it is warranted. To be sure,
there is no longer a general consensus over the Waltzian idiom that security
studies should concern itself with the survival of the state alone (Waltz, 1979).
But while an exclusive statism has not survived the widening of security stud-
ies, the notion of survival itself seems to have retained its place in a minimal
conceptualization of security.
Take for instance the criticisms of the notion of security as survival from
Foucauldian and critical security studies. Although it is not possible here to
do justice to the sophistication and diversity of the critical approaches that
have flourished in security studies over the past couple of decades, it is nota-
ble that these critiques tend to take for granted that, in actual security prac-
tices, the label security always invokes existential threats. Dillon (2003: 532),
for instance, describes (in order to critique) modernity’s ‘foundational
politics-of-security-as-survival, common to all politics of security’, where such
‘politics of security invest themselves with a timeless necessity in relation to
other political and ethical claims’.
The securitization approach of the Copenhagen School also highlights the
existential nature of threats as an ineliminable component of the concept of
security. According to this approach, if threats were not existential, and if the
object threatened was not highly valued, then the speech act (of which more
later) that claims something to be threatened would not be very successful
in achieving its objective. This objective is to move the topic away from the
arena of ordinary politics, take it ‘beyond the established rules of the game and
[frame] the issue either as a special kind of politics or as above politics’ (Buzan
et al., 1998: 23). Thus, according to the Copenhagen School, establishing the
existential nature of threats is a prerequisite for a successful securitization.
Booth (2007: 101–10) takes issue with the conflation of security and survival
that takes place in much traditional security analysis, as well as in the con-
structivist approach of the Copenhagen School. Survival is a precondition for
security, but not synonymous with it. In Booth’s words (2007: 107), ‘Survival
is being alive; security is living’—it is ‘survival-plus’. However, he does not dis-
pute Wæver’s (1995) understanding of security as a speech act that posits an
existential threat to a referent object. What he wants to do is to go beyond
this conception of security as survival, and survival only, towards a condi-
tion where people do more than merely stay alive: they flourish. While Booth’s
distinction between security and survival is pertinent, it nevertheless seems
appropriate to retain survival—or at least the existential nature of threats—as
an ineliminable component of the concept of security. It belongs to a mini-
mal definition of security, while the question of what needs to come on top
of survival (Booth’s survival-plus) belongs in the section on quasi-contingent
categories.
Does the Existential Nature of Threats Warrant Exceptional

Measures?
From existential threats flow the necessity to act, and to act quickly, to secure
the valued referent object against the threat. The concept of security is accord-
ingly associated with a sense of urgency and priority. When a problem is
described in security terms, there is an explicit or implicit imperative that
‘something must be done’ and be done right away.
Baldwin (1997) has challenged the idea that security is always a matter of
high priority. In his theoretical discussion of what components to include in
the concept of security, he argues that someone who already enjoys a high
level of security will value it less than someone who feels insecure. More accu-
rately, I would argue, it is the case that those who enjoy secure lives need to
think less about security rather than value it less. Furthermore, as Baldwin
(1997: 21) himself notes, ‘building urgency into the concept of security is a
common practice’. It is so common that it is difficult to find examples where
alarm over a particular security threat is raised without an accompanying
sense of urgency. Returning to Freeden’s (1996: 63) framework, to eliminate

the component of urgency and priority from the concept of security ‘means
to fly against all known usages of the concept (though this does not rule out
its removal in future)’. Political concepts are living things, continuously inter-
preted and reinterpreted by their users, and both shaped by and shaping the
political practices of the societies within which they are embedded. Thus there
may come a time when urgency no longer is an ineliminable component of the
concept of security, but this time does not seem to have arrived yet.
On top of the notion of urgency, the concept of security also dictates a
sense of exceptionality: if there is an urgent existential threat to a highly val-
ued good, then it may be necessary to go beyond the normal rules of behav-
iour in order to counteract the threat. Critics of traditional Realist approaches
to security have highlighted how this line of thinking can lead to infringe-
ments on civil liberties, the setting aside of the rule of law, the militarization
of politics and even the imposition of dictatorship (Williams, 2003). Walker
(1997: 63) charges modern accounts of security as complicit in ‘practices of
intolerable violence’. Thus, during the Cold War, superpower security strate-
gies meant that millions of inhabitants of Third World states died in proxy
wars while the populations of the Eastern and Western blocs were faced with
the constant overhanging threat of nuclear annihilation. In more recent times,
John Ashcroft, the US attorney general during the G. W. Bush administra-
tion, agreed that enemy combatants could be waterboarded (a torture method
simulating drowning) during interrogations as part of the war on terror, while
‘collateral damage’ has led to innumerably more civilian deaths than those of
combatants in Afghanistan and Iraq.
But it is not only the traditional, militaristic notion of national security that
stipulates exceptional responses in an emergency mode. For instance, envi-
ronmental campaigners, who have increasingly declared the issue of climate
change a matter of global security, argue that countries must put aside their
national economic interests and risk fundamentally changing the workings of
the international economic system in the name of combating the much greater
threat of environmental havoc. In this book, I analyse how UNHCR depicted
the refugee problem as a security matter in order to make it an issue of highest
priority and urgency for states, one that could even warrant military humani-
tarian intervention in sovereign refugee-creating states. Thus, the notion of
stretching, rewriting or even flouting the rules of the game is not only a char-
acteristic of traditional, Realist notions of security; it is also inherent, if less
violent, in various broadening accounts of the concept.
While a lot of the critical contributions to the security debate in IR
have focused on whether an overly militaristic understanding of security
as survival is dangerous and counterproductive, even theorists that find
the urgency and exceptionality of security distasteful do not disagree that

such notions form part of the concept of security. For instance, in Williams’
(2003) insightful critique of the Copenhagen School’s framing of securiti-
zation as moving an issue from the arena of ordinary politics to that of a
politics of exception and survival, he traces the antecedents to this under-
standing of security to the less than savoury legacy of Carl Schmitt. But he
does not for that reason suggest that this existentialist aspect of the concept
should be removed. What critics of the politics of exception and emergency
instead aim to do is to warn of the illiberal and intolerant consequences
that can result from allowing security logic to dominate politics. To frame
an issue as a security threat should, because of this potentially illiberal and
violent baggage, be something that is done only exceptionally and with great
caution. This conclusion is important for the study in Parts Two and Three
of this book. Particularly Part Three will analyse not only the intended con-
sequences of framing refugee movements as a security issue, but also the
fall-out from and unintended consequences of such a move.
Quasi-Contingent Categories
The above minimal ‘definition’ of security, focusing on the existential, compel-

ling aspects of threats to the security of cherished values or goods, provides
only the skeleton of a conceptualization of security. The definition needs to be
fleshed out by other components, the previously mentioned quasi-contingent
categories.
Buzan and Hansen (2009: 10) describe security as a ‘hyphenated concept’
and the academic discipline of international security studies as structured by
four questions: ‘whether to privilege the state as the referent object, whether
to include internal as well as external threats, whether to expand security
beyond the military sector and the use of force, and whether to see secu-
rity as inextricably tied to a dynamic of threats, dangers and urgency’. I have
suggested above that the answer to the fourth question is affirmative: While
critical and Foucauldian security approaches challenge the Realist notion of
security-as-survival because it may justify and maintain repressive, militarized
and violent politics, their critique confirms that this is—at least for now—how
the concept of security works. The aim is for a different politics, one where
issues are not dealt with in a security mode. For the Copenhagen School, the
aim is to desecuritize as many issues of domestic, international and global poli-
tics as possible. For the IR critical theorist Ken Booth (2007: 101–5), the aim
is to rethink not the urgency of the concept of security but what being secure
entails (being allowed to live as autonomous beings) and whose security
matters (those who are living determined lives, who may be surviving, but are
unable to make their own life choices).
Following Buzan and Hansen’s lead, I have set out five categories of ques-
tions below that have been answered very differently by different security
approaches. The first three correspond to Buzan and Hansen’s list. First, what
should be the (only or most important) referent object of security? Second,
at what level of analysis do we find threats—individual, sub-state, inter-state,
or global? Third, in what sectors of society do we study security? Do we stick
to the traditional focus on politico-military threats, or can security threats
also occur in the economic, environmental, cultural/societal spheres? Going
beyond Buzan and Hansen’s analysis, there are two further categories that
cause frequent discussion among security scholars. These are, fourth, what is
the ethical status or value of security? Does it, as Realists argue, trump all
other concerns? And fifth (in a not necessarily exhaustive list), can secu-
rity be co-operative and comprehensive or is it by necessity competitive and
zero-sum? Is it always the case that ‘our’ security trumps ‘yours’, leading to
tragic situations of security dilemmas?
This list has opened up a question that needs to be addressed before we can
move on. By providing such a list of fundamental questions and arguing that
very different answers to them have been provided, have I not inadvertently
confirmed the very fact that this chapter wants to dispute: that the various
security approaches within IR are so different that it is hard to talk about one
conceptualization of security? The opposite is the case: the fact that we are able
to categorize (with the loss of some nuance) security approaches according to
how they answer a relatively short list of questions, alerts us to the similarities
as well as the differences between these approaches. Despite the variety in the
answers given, the questions have in common that all security approaches feel
the need to answer them. They therefore qualify as quasi-contingent categories
of the concept of security. How these questions are answered determine how
these categories are filled with meaning. I will look at each in turn, starting
with the question of the value of security.
The Value of Security

The possibly most important quasi-contingent category is the question of
the ethical status of security and its relation to other values such as justice,
order and liberty. For Neorealists like Kenneth Waltz, the answer to the ques-
tion of the ethical value of security is simple. Security always trumps other
values. Since security is about the very survival of the state, it must always
come first: ‘In anarchy, security is the highest end. Only if survival is assured
can states seek such other goals as tranquillity, profit, and power’, (Waltz,
1979: 126). Thus there is no point asking the question ‘security or liberty?’
Without security there can be no liberty.
In reality, things are not that simple, and disagreements over the value of
security have taken several forms. First, since there is no such thing as abso-
lute security, or a risk-free existence, there are disagreements regarding how
far security concerns should be allowed to dominate over other goals and
aims. Furthermore, there may be situations where a group of people choose
to jeopardize security in the quest for other goals. For instance, the value of
self-determination has often in history been at odds with the value of state sov-
ereignty. Most nations or ethnic groups do not have their own unique state. If
an ethnic minority group lives within a state that does not threaten its physical
survival, the choice to embark on a quest for national self-determination may
lead to a more uncertain and possibly violent future. An attempt by an eth-
nic group to achieve self-determination by secession or irredentism may lead
to acute physical insecurity for the individuals belonging to that group. For
instance, the Biafran war of secession in 1967–70 led to the deaths of around
one million people. While there had been massacres of Igbos before the war
broke out, these had been confined to northern Nigeria, while the Igbo heart-
land in the east had been a relatively safe and stable place. The secessionist
war changed this dramatically, and the vast majority of deaths occurred from
starvation and malnutrition among civilian Igbo and other minority tribes in
eastern Nigeria.
Second, the value placed on security will differ between those who equate
security to survival and those who argue that security is more than survival.
If security is survival, and survival only, then it would usually be assigned,
as Waltz claims, the highest normative value. When faced with annihilation,
everything must be put on hold during the fight for survival. But, as Booth
(2007) has pointed out, this type of stark, direct and immediate threat is both
extreme and unusual. For most people, security is thought about as more than
survival. It is about survival and the ability to continue our way of life without
constantly feeling unsafe and threatened. If this is the case, then there will be
situations where arguments arise about the degree to which security priori-
ties should be allowed to impede on our freedom to go about these daily and
ordinary lives.
This takes us, third, to the sphere of security policy. There will always be dis-
agreements at the policy level about which security policies work and which
do not, which ones go too far and which do not go far enough. After 9/11, did
the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq increase the security of the United States
or create a set of new threats? During the Cold War, did nuclear weapons lead
to a stable stalemate between the two superpowers and hence increase inter-
national security, or did the risk of nuclear war make everybody less secure?
Such discussions add saliency to the question above regarding the degree to
which security should be allowed to dominate other values and goals. Since it
is never straightforward how security can be achieved, it is always necessary
to conduct a discussion of the impact of suggested security policies not just
on security but on other values. To take the most obvious example, did the
incarceration without trial of ‘enemy combatants’ at Guantanamo Bay increase
the security of the United States, and if by doing so did it justify the negation
of other cherished values such as the rule of law and the prohibition of cruel,
inhumane and degrading treatment?
Finally, the value of security will also depend on how broadly the security
sphere is understood. If insecurity only arises from the threat of political vio-
lence and war, then security belongs in a quite restricted sphere of society and
the question therefore arises more easily regarding the extent to which this
sphere (the politico-military) should be allowed to dictate value priorities for
society as a whole. However, if security is understood with Booth (2007) as
survival-plus, as a condition wherein individuals are empowered to live auton-
omous lives, then the value of security is presumably less disputed: security
would in this case include other values such as freedom and human rights and
could not be understood apart from these other values.
As this brief discussion reveals, the assertion that security must always reign
at the top of a community’s value hierarchy is no longer self-evident. On the
other hand, there is no question that security tends to be ranked highly in such
hierarchies, the higher the more threatened the community feels. But an inter-
esting question that has arisen due to the broadening and widening of security
studies is what sort of security should be valued higher. Is it state security or
that of the individual? That of the environment or our (carbon-emitting) way
of life? This takes us to the questions of referent objects, levels of analysis and
sectors of security. Because they are so closely linked I will deal with them
together.
Whose Security and Where?

The state, with its territory and institutions, no longer enjoys exclusivity over
the right to be secure (in the IR sense of the word). This opens up the pos-
sibility of contrasting and competing understandings of security, both in the
determination of referent objects of security and regarding which levels and
spheres of human life threats and referent objects are to be found.
Security analysts specify (whether explicitly or implicitly) threats and refer-
ent objects in two ways. The first specification concerns the ‘security spheres’
in which threats and referent objects are located: are they to be found within
the military, political, economic, societal (including identity and culture), or

environmental sphere?3 Or are they so cross-cutting that such categorization
makes little sense? While it is unusual for contemporary analysts to claim
watertight borders between spheres, we can envision a spectrum along which
security studies spread out, according to whether, and to what degree, spheres
are understood as autonomous from each other. For traditional security
approaches, the norm has been to merge the political and military spheres—
claiming, in line with Clausewitz, that military power is a particularly coercive
version of a state’s political power—but to ignore all other spheres.4 Neorealists
understand this politico-military sphere to be autonomous from, as well as
more important than, the other spheres. Others, such as Buzan (1991), see the
separation into spheres as a pragmatic matter of methodological simplifica-
tion rather than a reflection of practical reality. Most academics—including
a growing number of Realists—understand actions and events in the dif-
ferent spheres as interdependent and continually interacting. For instance,
Homer-Dixon (1994: 15) argues that population growth (societal sphere) in
the Philippines led to increasing strain on agricultural soil (environmental
sphere), which again led to increased poverty (economic sphere), which again
led to discontent, violence and instability (political sphere).
A linked question is whether threats and referent objects pertain to the
same sphere, as traditional security studies tended to assert, or whether they
can belong to different ones. For example, if desertification threatens the tra-
ditional way of life of a nomad community, then the threat would emanate
from the environmental sphere and be posed to a referent object in the soci-
etal sphere. Sometimes it is not at all clear what sphere in which to place a
particular perceived threat. To take an example pertinent to the subject of this
book: from what sector would migration hark as a security threat? Is it a soci-
etal phenomenon, an economically driven movement, or caused by political
factors? The answer is yes, a bit of all. The motivation for migrants to get up
and move from one country to another is, in the vast majority of cases, mixed
(Hammerstad, 2013). Migration movements are part of globalization, but are
also responses to a particular mix of political, economic or environmental
challenges and opportunities.
This latter point leads us to the second specification, concerning the level of
analysis at which security should be studied. All conceptualizations of security
contain a hierarchy of priorities that decide whether security policies and rec-
ommendations should focus around individual human beings, communities/
3
Barry Buzan (1983) was the first to divide the subject matter of security studies into sectors.
4
‘It is clear . . . that war is not a mere act of policy but a true political instrument, a continua-
tion of political activity by other means’ (Clausewitz, 1976: 87).
ethnic groups/nations, the state, the global community or an ecosystem.

Similar to the security spheres above, there is disagreement among academics
about the degree of autonomy and the nature of the links between levels.
Traditionally, the focus has been on the state, but not on the state’s internal,
domestic life. This statism remains strong in security studies. It is based on the
arguments that states are still by far the most important actors in global poli-
tics, (almost) all human beings are citizens of discrete states, and the security
of a state’s citizens can only be ensured by safeguarding the security of their
state. As Wight (1966) asserted: the subject matter of International Relations
theory is survival, while political theory (internal to the state) can afford to
concern itself with how to promote the good life of the state’s citizens.
Statism has, however, been attacked on many fronts. The Copenhagen
School argues that whether or not states should be a central focus of security
studies is a matter of empirical investigation rather than a priori knowledge.
Critical security theorists go further and see the relationship between the indi-
vidual and the state as both closely interlinked and often problematic. States
can indeed be the main providers of security for their citizens, but they can
also be the main source of their population’s insecurity. As long as this is the
case, individuals should be the ultimate referent object of security and the role
of the state should be investigated from the point of view of how far it threat-
ens or ensures the individual’s security.
Thus, from having been considered an ineliminable component of the con-
cept of security in the heyday of Cold War strategic studies, in contemporary
security studies statism has been relegated to the field of quasi-contingent
categories. Statism has become just one (if popular) of many answers to the
question: at which level(s) of analysis should a security analyst conduct his
or her research? This fate has also befallen the next quasi-contingent compo-
nent of security studies: whether or not security is a competitive game or a
common goal.
Zero-sum Game or Our Common Future?

Traditional security studies tend to see security as an adversarial game, where
a finite amount of national security is competed for within the confines of
an anarchical international structure. While this could arguably have been
included as an ineliminable component of security in the usage of the IR com-
munity from the end of World War Two until well into the 1980s, this can no
longer be said to be the case. The critical approaches to security have provided
a concerted attack on this particular aspect of Realist thinking. Feminist cri-
tiques argue that the portrayal of the sphere of security politics as an aggres-
sive, zero-sum game between mutually distrustful (at best) or hostile states
is the result of security studies being a particularly male-dominated research

community. In the words of McSweeney (1999: 98):
It seems clear that the perception of the security problem in the negative terms
of the realist school of national security is biased in favour of promoting those
human values linked with male attitudes and behaviour and against other human
values, oriented towards cooperation, inclusiveness, and the positive ameliora-
tion of inter-group relations, associated with female behaviour.
The Foucauldian critique of the violence inflicted on the world by this zero-sum
mind-set was mentioned earlier in this chapter. Furthermore, the more explicitly
normative approach of critical security studies sets out ‘emancipation [of individ-
uals] as the prism through which both the theory and practice of security should
be viewed’ (Wyn Jones, 1999: 166; see also Booth, 2007) and as such rejects the
amoral, social Darwinist account of security put forward by Realists.
Other security approaches less radical in theoretical terms have also moved
away from the idea of security as a confrontational zero-sum game. First of
all, liberals and English School thinkers never accepted this logic in the first
place, arguing that international society is a sphere of co-operation and trust
as well as competition and hostility (see e.g. Bull, 1977; Doyle, 1983; Keohane,
1984). But during the height of the Cold War these IR thinkers were not seen
to belong intellectually within security studies—or strategic studies, as it was
more narrowly known at the time. They were IR theorists, not security analysts.
The rejection of security as a zero-sum game is also shared by the range
of comprehensive security approaches advanced in particular by the United
Nations and its organs. An early example of this is the path-breaking Brundtland
Report (1987), ‘Our Common Future’, which in its discussion of sustainable
development, asserted that ‘a comprehensive approach to international and
national security must transcend the traditional emphasis on military power
and armed competition’ and address the interlinked threats of environmental
degradation, poverty and conflict (UN, 1987, Chapter III, para. 4).
As the adjectives ‘comprehensive’, ‘common’ and ‘human’ indicate, the con-
ceptualizations of security advocated by the UN assert that contemporary
security threats usually have international or global reach both in their ori-
gins and in their effects. Furthermore, they cannot be effectively dealt with by
one state or community alone. Concerted effort on behalf of the international
community is necessary. This is the case whether the security threat is nuclear
proliferation, environmental degradation, or poverty (as a root cause of con-
flict). Taking the case of nuclear proliferation, arms races between nuclear (and
would-be nuclear) powers is not a zero-sum game between the states involved,
where some win and some lose. It holds all states involved in the race as well
as the rest of the world hostage to the threat of nuclear war. Co-operation and
binding treaties on reducing nuclear stockpiles among existing nuclear powers

and stopping the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction would on the
other hand increase security for all.
Environmental security approaches, which have become increasingly prom-
inent over the past two decades, are particularly good examples of approaches
that emphasize the degree to which members of the human race are all in
the same boat. In the view of Myers (1993), for instance, national security
threats caused by military competition between states are relatively insignifi-
cant compared to threats to the environment. Environmental security trumps
other security concerns because it forms the basis for existence for human
and other life. The general scientific consensus achieved in recent years that
global warming is happening; that it is already having a detrimental impact on
climate and weather conditions around the world; and that it is to a significant
degree man-made, has ensured that this view of environmental security is no
longer relegated to the fringes of security studies.5
But the view that security is not necessarily a zero-sum game is not con-
fined to non-military additions to security studies. It can also be found in vari-
ous recent approaches to the study of civil war. Kaldor (2006), for instance,
argues that the dynamics of ‘new wars’ are heavily intertwined with the phe-
nomenon of globalization, and students of ‘complex emergencies’ (e.g. Keen,
2008) highlight, among other things, the regional and international dimen-
sions of domestic conflicts. In the view of this type of conflict analysis, both
the causes and impact of civil wars are spread far beyond the borders of the
afflicted state. As a result, conflict resolution is in the common interest of the
international community as a whole (or at least in the interest of neighbouring
states and regional and global great powers).
International or global, rather than national, security is increasingly the topic
of security studies. Globalization has made it increasingly unfeasible for states
to try to go it alone, whether their aim is to achieve development and prosper-
ity or security and stability. In a world where perceived threats are increasingly
interconnected and borderless, whether we talk about international terrorism
or global warming, unilateral responses are decreasingly effective.
Finally in this discussion of common versus competitive security, it would be
impossible to disregard the rise to prominence of human security. The concept
was developed by the United Nations Development Programme and launched
5
The inclusion by Dannreuther (2007), in his textbook International Security, of ‘Environment,
Resources and Migration’ as one of three main broad themes on the contemporary security
agenda is an example of how environmental security has moved from the fringes to the core of
security studies. It also shows a similar trend for the issue of population movements, which will
be discussed in the next chapter.
in its 1994 Human Development Report. According to the UNDP definition,

security belongs to individuals and groups of people, not states. And inse-
curity does not only arise from violence and political threats, but also from
poverty, disease and underdevelopment. Threats to human security involve,
according to the UNDP report (1994), economic insecurity from threats such
as unemployment and insufficient social security networks; food insecurity,
or a lack of access to adequate food resources; health insecurity from infec-
tious disease, pollution and inadequate health care; environmental insecurity
from degradation of local and global ecosystems, water scarcity, floods and
other natural disasters, deforestation, and pollution; personal insecurity from
the threat of physical violence executed by the state, criminal organizations,
within the family, in the workplace, or in industrial or traffic accidents; com-
munity insecurity from the threat of ethnic tensions and violent clashes; and
political insecurity from human rights violations and state repression.
The concept of human security is by far the broadest and most encompass-
ing of the understandings of security discussed in this chapter. For some it
includes ‘all types of security which involve human individuals and/or groups
protected or protecting against all kinds of threats found in their human
environments’ (Mushakoji, quoted in Lammers, 1999: 55). As a result of its
unwieldy nature, the term is often used more as a normative signpost than
an analytical concept, signalling that the author is concerned with the fate of
ordinary people rather than abstract states and institutions.
Since its arrival on stage in the mid-1990s there have been many efforts to
sharpen the definition of human security. The main question of contention
is the degree to which human security should include non-violent threats
such as poverty or lack of health care. King and Murray (2001–2: 592–3),
attempting a quantifiable definition of the concept, ‘define an individual’s
human security as his or her expectation of years of life without experiencing
the state of generalized poverty’. Somewhat confusingly they then include
in their definition of generalized poverty the lack of political rights such as
loss of freedom and torture. Thomas (in Thomas and Wilkin, 1999: 3) has
brought the concept closer to the critical security approach by including
in her definition both UNDP’s more material understanding of human
security and Booth’s emphasis on the emancipation of the individual from
oppressive social and economic structures, especially the capitalist world
economy. Human security is thus achieved when the individual enjoys both
basic human needs and ‘human dignity’ as an autonomous being. Suhrke
(1999) hints at a more ‘politico-military’ version of human security when
she emphasizes the link between human security and international humani-
tarian law (or the laws of war). Human security is thus first and foremost
about the protection of the rights and physical existence of victims of war
and violence. However, Suhrke (1999: 269) goes on to include all instances

of extreme human vulnerability, regardless of whether they are the results
of conflict, poverty or natural catastrophes.
No consensus has been reached on a more precise and limited definition of
human security. Paris (2001: 88) argues that the vagueness of the concept may
be partly deliberate, to keep a disparate coalition of states, the UN and NGOs
together in a Human Security Network: ‘Cultivated ambiguity renders human
security an effective campaign slogan, but it also diminishes the concept’s use-
fulness as a guide for academic research or policy making’.
The human security discourse has lost momentum somewhat in recent years,
due to the more hardnosed security agenda after 9/11 (Suhrke, 2004: 365). However,
human security has established itself as an almost inescapable component of the
debate on international security since the end of the Cold War. The protection of
people, whether in situations of war or domestic repression, has become a com-
monplace element of states’ security agendas—at least at the rhetorical level.
This book will show how the emergence of a people-centred human security
concept has had far-reaching consequences for the refugee regime in general
and for UNHCR in particular. It helped propel the refugee problem higher up
the international security agenda, and allowed it, for instance, to become a
frequent topic on the agenda of the UN Security Council. But the comprehen-
sive nature of human security makes the question of prioritization particularly
pertinent. What aspects of whose human security should be prioritized in par-
ticular situations? This ambiguity allows states to interpret in their own way
how human security ‘threats’ manifest themselves in particular instances, leav-
ing UNHCR often confounded and disappointed by the more self-interested
security responses of states to the refugee agency’s human security appeals.
This problem will be discussed further in Part Three.
To sum up, there has been a growth in security approaches that assert secu-
rity as a common quest. However, despite these many attempts at humanizing
security, it should be noted that the competitive, egotistical understanding of
security as national security still remains by far the stronger conceptualiza-
tion—especially once we move our focus away from academic debates and UN
circles to state policy makers.
The constructivist turn in securit y

studies
So far I have attempted to dissect the concept of security in order to under-

stand not only what proponents of different security approaches disagree
about, but also what they have in common. I have also argued for the view
that conceptual change tends to take a long time. The broadening, deepening
and humanizing trends in security studies over the past decades have changed
to some extent the contents of a minimal definition of security—especially
when it comes to the choice of referent object, where the state no longer has a
monopoly on the right to be secure, and the nature of threats, which no longer
have to be military only. But it is at the same time the case that many things
have not changed, or they have only changed at the margins. The dominant
mainstream of security studies, as well as the instincts of most state foreign
and security policy makers, remain wedded to understanding security policy
as a necessarily self-interested activity. Security is about countering existential
threats to cherished objects, and doing so urgently and when necessary even
with the use of exceptional measures. When this kind of logic is in play, then
the consideration of the interests and needs of others have a tendency to fall
by the wayside.
This said, there has been a clear intellectual evolution, driven forward by
fierce debate, within the study of security. When there can be such fierce debate
about what issues do or do not belong on states’ security agendas (or secu-
rity analysts’ research agendas), this points to the reflexive and constructed
nature of the concept itself. Following the constructivist turn in IR theory,
and to abuse Alexander Wendt’s (1992) phrase: security is what states (and
others) make of it. There is nothing inevitable about whether a state or society
construes a particular issue as a security threat, or whether it instead frames
it as an ordinary political problem to deal with outside of emergency mode
(although some issues, such as nuclear proliferation, lend themselves more
naturally to being depicted as security threats than others). This is the insight
that forms the foundation for securitization approaches to the study of secu-
rity: the determination of what is a security issue is battled out on the political
arena, and the winners of such security debates are successful in securitizing
the issue, i.e. transferring it from the sphere of normal politics to that of the
politics of threat, exception, urgency and survival.
While not directly employing the analytical framework of securitization
approaches, this book also investigates the construction of particular groups,
trends or phenomena as security issues. The study of UNHCR’s venture into the
field of security politics confirms the insight of securitization approaches that
the framing of an issue as a security threat is a political practice, an argument
over which issues should receive more resources, efforts and attention, and
which should receive fewer. The Copenhagen School, the most influential of
the securitization approaches, describes the process of securitization as a speech
act: ‘by saying the words, something is done’ (Buzan, Wæver and de Wilde,
1998: 26). A securitizing speech act presents a threat and, when successful,
creates a sense of crisis and urgency which allows for exceptional and emer-
gency measures to be taken to counteract the threat. To focus on speech acts
to determine securitization processes means to focus primarily on contending
threat definitions (Huysmans, 2006: 2). But while this is important, it is not
enough. ‘The speech act of security draws upon a historically constituted and
socially institutionalized set of meanings. Like the grammar of a language, it
evolves over time but it cannot be changed at random’ (Huysmans, 2006: 25).
This quotation from Huysmans resonates strongly with the analysis of
conceptualizations of security in this chapter. It has two implications: First,
it is difficult to succeed if your conceptualization of security and depiction of
threat stray too far from historically and socially embedded practices. Second,
to frame an issue that had previously been understood in a non-security man-
ner as a security issue is to embed it in a whole structure of meaning inherent
in the language of security. And the history of the language of security is one of
national security in the face of the threat of war. To embed a new issue in such
a history has both intended and unintended consequences. As this book will
show, the latter are as important to understand as the former.
The next chapter addresses the way in which the concept of security has
come to be employed in our understanding of displacement. It maps out three
different but overlapping and somewhat mutually reinforcing security dis-
courses that exist around the topic of displacement. In the constructivist lit-
erature on security, there has been a debate between those who, following the
Copenhagen School, argue that a topic has to be framed in a discourse of excep-
tion, emergency and imminent threat in order to be understood as securitized,
and those who argue that we should not apply ‘a fixed meaning of security and
the practices associated with it’ and who suggest that some securitizations can
emphasize ‘preventive, nonconfrontational measures’ (Trombetta, 2008: 600).
If we look at how displacement has been framed as a security issue, both exis-
tential threat discourses and preventative, non-confrontational ones have been
central. In addition, a less overt form of securitization of forced migration has
taken place, described by Bigo (2005) as the politics of unease. For instance,
Huysmans and Buonfino (2008: 782) argue in their analysis of the link between
asylum and terrorism in parliamentary debates in the UK that:
Instead of dramatic speech acts articulating existential threats and thereby legiti-
mating calls for exceptional politics, security practice consists of knitting various
discourses of unease and danger into a patchwork of insecurities that facilitate the
political exchange of fears and beliefs and the transfer of security practices from
one policy area to another.
There are numerous examples of forced migration being implicitly embed-

ded in a security context, for instance in European governments’ discourses on
asylum seekers. In the case of UNHCR’s discourse, the politics of unease has
taken on a different hue to that of governments. As the analysis in Part Two of
this book will show, UNHCR’s discourse in the 1990s, when the agency ambi-
tiously aimed to become a global security actor, was riddled with hints of fear
and danger—or insecurity in all its dimensions. But, after all, UNHCR is not
interested in creating a threat picture of refugees as culprits; it did not want to
increase people’s fear of asylum seekers or refugees. Instead the refugee agency
aimed to create an atmosphere where states saw it as in their own security
interest to deal in a comprehensive and humane manner with the root causes
of flight.
In other words, the refugee agency attempted to create the sort of ‘pre-
ventive and nonconfrontational’ security discourse around the refugee issue
that Trombetta (2008: 600) suggests might be possible. UNHCR enveloped
the refugee problem in a language of insecurity, danger and risk, while try-
ing to avoid suggesting that refugees could be directly threatening to the
refugee agency’s audience (an audience mostly situated in Western donor
states). To resolve the problem of displacement, UNHCR proposed, is to
reduce internal conflict and violence, while allowing refugees to live mean-
ingful lives while in exile. This will lead to less risk of spill-over of conflict
to neighbouring states, to fewer failed states, and to less risk of political
radicalization fuelling terrorism. Thus, indirectly and in the longer term,
UNHCR suggested, by protecting, assisting and finding humane and dura-
ble solutions for refugees, we improve global security. And by improving
global security we contribute to improving the national security of donor
states themselves. The degree to which this depiction of the refugee prob-
lem as a security issue was successful (in convincing the governments of
major donor and refugee host states to act urgently, comprehensively and
humanely to resolve refugee problems) and desirable (from the point of
view of upholding and strengthening international refugee protection prin-
ciples) is a key theme of this book.
3
Victims or Threats?
Placing Displacement on Three Security Agendas
The rise of UNHCR as a global security actor in the 1990s could not have
taken place were it not for a wider political trend of viewing migration, asylum
seekers and refugees from a security perspective. This trend again depended
on the process of widening our understanding of the concept of security. The
widening manifested itself in conceptual debates, as well as in the broader
public discourses on what and who to fear after the end of the Cold War and
the collapse of the Soviet Union. With this broader trend in mind, this chapter
looks at three main ways in which forced migration has been depicted as a
security issue over the past couple of decades.
I first discuss forced migration viewed from a human security perspec-
tive—a point of view driven by actors such as UNHCR and other UN agen-
cies, but also taken onboard by a range of states, especially so-called middle
powers such as Canada, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands. Second,
and particularly salient in the global North, it has become commonplace to
assume a link between migration, international crime and terrorism, and to
bolster this link with a more diffuse discourse of unease and fear concern-
ing a community’s societal or identity security faced by ‘waves’ of migrants.
Thirdly, displacement has been linked with conflict and insecurity in the
global South. In this view, refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and
other forced migrants are not only sufferers from conflict and insecurity but
also an inherent part of conflict dynamics—sometimes indirectly, sometimes
inadvertently, and sometimes as direct actors in the conflict. Forced migrants
can, in other words, be both victims of insecurity and threats to the security
of others.
In theory these different understandings of displacement as a security issue
are quite separate, revealing different conceptualizations of security and differ-
ent political agendas. However, in practice they often morph into each other.
It has been particularly difficult in practice to retain a separate human security
Victims or Threats? 41
discourse without opening up for other, more state-centric security concep-

tions. From the experience of UNHCR, it seems difficult to allow one form of
security narrative without also increasing the currency of others; and it is par-
ticularly hard to advocate newer, less established, security conceptions such
as human security without a concurrent rise in the more traditional, national
security kind. This problem faced by UNHCR of controlling the details of how
a security agenda develops once first advanced takes us back to the question
of the unintended consequences of framing an issue in terms of security. An
important aim of this book is to demonstrate how the human security dis-
course has, despite framing itself in opposition to traditional conceptions of
security, nevertheless played a role in contributing to a generalized sense that
forced migration constitutes a risk or threat, not only to individuals, but to
communities and states.
The analysis in this chapter provides a backdrop to the study of UNHCR’s
venture into security politics and its rise and decline as a global security
actor. Due to the diverging interests and understandings of its key audiences,
UNHCR needed to straddle all three interpretations of the security dimen-
sions of forced migration discussed below. This has been a difficult balancing
act to perform.
Refugees and IDPs as human securit y

victims
Being among the most vulnerable people in the world, refugees are by defini-
tion central referent objects of human security. In traditional IR thought, it
is the state that provides security for its citizens, a condition that was long
taken for granted to the extent that IR theorists argued that it was unnecessary
for students of international politics to concern themselves with the internal
affairs of states (Wight, 1966). Refugees, who have lost the protection of citi-
zenship, would in this world of competing sovereign states with discrete citi-
zenries be eminently insecure.
Wight’s stark contrast between the inside and the outside of states is less
pronounced in reality, and a range of international—and, in most countries,
domestic—legal and ethical norms afford refugees a considerable degree of
legal and practical protection, whether provided by host states or by the inter-
national community through the UN, the ICRC and humanitarian NGOs.
Refugees nevertheless are among the more insecure people in the world.
Having fled from persecution, generalized violence or war (or a combina-
tion of these), refugees leave the direct threat of violence but arrive to a life
of uncertainty. Their refuges are often not safe havens, especially when refu-
gee camps are situated close to the border of their home state (Loescher and
Milner, 2005). Their legal status is often not secure, leaving many refugees con-
stantly worried about the threat of forced repatriation or refoulement, such as
when Lao Hmong refugees were forcibly returned from Thailand in December
2009 after spending years in detention centres, and despite strong protests
from UNHCR (2009d). As a result of such insecurities, refugees have been
among the core beneficiaries of human security advocacy. The same is the case
for other forced migrants, especially IDPs, who in many cases lead even more
insecure lives than refugees (Cohen and Deng, 1998).
A Political Rather than Research Agenda
As chapter two made clear, it is difficult to pin down the exact meaning of
human security. In many cases the term performs the role of a rallying cry
for those who want to humanize security agendas—that is, place individu-
als and groups of human beings at the centre of any quest to improve secu-
rity. Like most rallying cries, it benefits from not being too specific. Since the
analysis in this chapter is concerned with general trends, a precise defini-
tion of human security is neither necessary nor desired. The aim is to dem-
onstrate in broad strokes the processes that established refugees and other
forced migrants as particularly vulnerable human security victims and
central beneficiaries of common or comprehensive security approaches. It
will therefore suffice to use the deliberately general definition provided by
MacFarlane and Khong (2006: 14) of human security as ‘freedom from threat
to the core values of human beings, including physical survival, welfare and
identity’. Comprehensive security tends to be equally ill-defined, but often
manifests itself as the other side of the coin of human security: Focused more
on inter-community and inter-state security, the starting point for common
or comprehensive security approaches is nevertheless a concern with human
security. If all human beings, rather than individual states, are the focal
point for security policies, then security ceases to be a competitive, aggres-
sive enterprise. Instead, it is something states, helped by their international
agreements, organizations and regimes, can build together based on common
interests and goals.
Advocacy of human and comprehensive security approaches has from
the outset been linked to refugees and forced migration. Early forerunners
of today’s human security discourse included the inter-war debates and deci-
sions of the League of Nations on how to deal with refugees from revolution
and civil war in Russia and Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany and Austria
(MacFarlane and Khong, 2006: 54–5). The outcome of neither process was
particularly successful from a human security point of view, but they were
early indications of the understanding of refugees as particularly vulnerable
and insecure individuals, towards whom the international community as a
whole had a responsibility. The institutions and tools created to deal with these
refugee crises became the early beginnings of today’s elaborate international
refugee regime.
As the current human security discourse emerged in the early 1990s, refu-
gees and other displaced persons were at its centre from the beginning. This
can be seen in statements from major UN and NGO actors (e.g. UNHCR,
1997; Commission on Human Security, 2003); the work of the Human
Security Unit at the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
(OCHA); the work of the Human Security Report Centre and that of many
influential researchers and academics (e.g. Suhrke, 1999; Kaldor, 2007;
Cohen and Deng, 2009). For instance, the Human Security Report Centre
begins its definition of human security by saying: ‘Human security ( . . . ) is
now widely used to describe the complex of interrelated threats associated
with civil war, genocide and the displacement of populations’ (HSRP, 2010).
Suhrke (1999: 272) in her discussion of the usefulness of the term ‘human
security’ reserves it for ‘extremely vulnerable’ people, and includes refugees
among this group. Mary Kaldor (2007: 183) follows suit when she suggests
that ‘[p]‌erhaps the indicator that comes closest to a measure of human secu-
rity is displaced persons’. She argues that the displaced are victims of both
physical and material insecurity, and that mass displacement is a ‘typical
feature of contemporary crises’.
A recent interpretation of forced migration as a human security threat can
be found in the literature on climate change and displacement (see e.g. Barnett
and Adger, 2007; McAdam and Saul, 2008; Norwegian Refugee Council,
2009). However, efforts to analyse the relationship between climate-related
migration and conflict—a more traditional security concern—are even more
common. Generally, those concerned with climate-related displacement and
human security tend to combine this with conflict perspectives. As such I will
return to this in the section on displacement, conflict and insecurity in the
developing world.
The human security discourse has been more politically than academically
driven, since many academics find the concept too unwieldy and broad for
rigorous analysis (see e.g. Paris, 2001; Security Dialogue, 2004). In academic
analyses of displacement the term human security is increasingly avoided or
used in a non-analytical fashion to flag a particular study’s concern with the
protection of people rather than traditional security concerns (see e.g. Helton
and Voronina, 2000, for an example of such symbolic usage). Astri Suhrke, an
early enthusiast for the potential analytical value as well as political power of
human security (Suhrke, 1999) labels it ‘a stalled initiative’ only five years later
(Suhrke, 2004).
The UN has been at the forefront of the promotion of a ‘human secu-
rity’ agenda from the initial launch of the concept by the UNDP in 1994.
MacFarlane and Khong’s (2006) detailed review of the UN’s role in the
development of human security thinking, highlights the importance of
UNHCR and UNDP in this process. While the UNDP tended towards the
basic needs and human development side of the concept, UNHCR focused
on protection and physical security against violence and war, highlighting
displaced populations (whether IDPs or refugees) as especially vulnerable
to such protection-related human security threats. For instance, in 1997,
the refugee agency dedicated a whole volume of its widely read State of
the World’s Refugees to the concept of human security, and from the same
period onwards High Commissioner Sadako Ogata rarely made a speech
without relying on the concept.
But the UN has not been the only actor advocating a human security per-
spective on displacement. Forced migration-oriented human security advo-
cates in the UN system have forged alliances with like-minded governments
of some states, especially so-called middle power states such as Canada and
Norway. In 1999 Ogata was invited as keynote speaker to the first ministerial
meeting of the human security network known as the Lysøen Group. The group
consisted of eleven states, led by Canada and Norway, who promised to com-
mit their foreign policies to human security goals. Ogata’s prominent presence
ensured that this state-led human security initiative focused from the outset
on refugees. The Chairman’s summary repeated her insistence that, ‘[f]‌rom
a refugee perspective there is an urgent need to address the issues of human
security comprehensively both during and after conflicts’. The Canadian con-
cept paper presented at the first Lysøen meeting, Human Security: Safety for
People in a Changing World (1999), echoed Ogata’s description of the displaced
as particularly vulnerable:
Assisting people in highly insecure situations, particularly in the midst of violent
conflict, is a central objective of the human security agenda. Refugees have long
been the focus of international attention. The same focus on vulnerability high-
lights the immediate needs of the internally displaced, and demobilized combat-
ants. (DFAI, 1999)
In their efforts to promote a human security agenda with vulnerability
at its centre, the Lysøen Group of governments and High Commissioner
Ogata joined ranks to introduce human security thinking to the UN
Security Council.
Human Security, Displacement and State Practice in

the Security Council
Ogata was the first High Commissioner for Refugees to speak to the Security
Council, and became a frequently invited speaker throughout the 1990s.
Together with the efforts of Canada (1999–2000) and Norway (2000–01) as
non-permanent Security Council members, she contributed to the broaden-
ing of that body’s understanding of international peace and security. It is in
fact remarkable the extent to which refugees and displacement figured in the
Security Council’s deliberations in this period. The 1990s saw a clear increase
in the Security Council’s inclusion of refugee movements as a factor when
determining whether a particular development constituted a threat to inter-
national peace and security. Correspondingly there was an increase in the
Council’s involvement in refugee emergencies (Roberts, 1998: 382–8). This
can been seen in resolutions on particular conflicts or crises, such as north-
ern Iraq (Res. no. 688, 1991) and Haiti (Res. no. 940, 1994), as well as in the
Council’s new habit of making resolutions on general challenges to (a broader
and more humanized understanding of) international peace and security. One
such theme is the series of resolutions on civilians in armed conflict, begin-
ning with Res. no. 1265 (1999). All of the resolutions under this theme include
refugees and IDPs as core beneficiaries of the Security Council’s concerns (see
e.g. Res. no. 1894, 2009).
A closer look at some of these Security Council resolutions displays both
the increased traction and the limitations of a human security perspective on
forced migration. It displays its traction in that this bastion of great power
interests was persuaded to take a human security perspective seriously and
use it in (some of) its resolutions on displacement crises. Security Council
statements such as the 1992 remark that ‘non-military sources of instability in
the economic, social, humanitarian and ecological fields have become threats
to peace and security’ (UNSC President, 1992) and the 2009 confirmation that
‘the deliberate targeting of civilians ( . . . ) and the commission of systematic,
flagrant and widespread violations of applicable international humanitarian
and human rights law in situations of armed conflict may constitute a threat to
international peace and security’ (UNSC Res. no 1893, 2009: para. 3), show that
human security concerns for vulnerable groups have become more important
in Security Council deliberations. This is a considerable development from the
Council’s practice during the Cold War period, when the way in which states
treated their own population was considered their own business, regardless of
humanitarian consequences. In 1971, India’s invasion of East Pakistan to stop
the mass slaughter of Bengalis by West Pakistani troops and to facilitate the
return of millions of Bengali refugees who had fled across the border to India,
was met with global disdain. In the run-up to the invasion Henry Kissinger,
President Richard Nixon’s national security advisor, warned India’s ambassa-
dor to Washington that ‘you can’t go to war over refugees’ (Kissinger quoted in
Bass, 2013: 141). Two decades later the Security Council’s northern Iraq and
Haiti resolutions suggested otherwise.
But Security Council practice also shows the limitations of the human security
perspective, as can be seen in the half-hearted, selective and ambiguous ways in
which the Council uses the term when dealing with particular displacement cri-
ses. For instance, in the case of the 1991 exodus of Iraqi Kurds in the aftermath
of the first Gulf War, the reasons given by the Security Council to legitimize the
creation of a no-fly zone and the stationing of UN peacekeepers in northern Iraq
were traditional concerns with state stability and the threat of regional conflict.
Turkey would at no price let more Kurds enter its territory, and the danger of
a Turkish invasion to stop the flow would have been imminent if international
action had not been taken. Thus, while the Council showed concern for the
human security of Kurdish refugees, the actual threat to international peace and
security lay in Turkey’s potential response to their flight:
Gravely concerned by the repression of the Iraqi civilian population in many

parts of Iraq, including most recently the Kurdish populated areas which led to a
massive flow of refugees towards and across international frontiers and to cross
border incursions, which threaten international peace and security in the region.
(UNSC Res. no. 688, 1991)
In other cases, it seems on the face of it that the sheer suffering of displaced
human beings is considered reason enough for coercive action. Security
Council Resolution 940, authorizing military intervention in Haiti in 1994,
declared it was:
Gravely concerned by the significant further deterioration of the humanitarian

situation in Haiti, in particular the continuing escalation by the illegal de facto
regime of systematic violations of civil liberties, the desperate plight of Haitian
refugees and the recent expulsion of the staff of the International Civilian
Mission . . . . (UNSC Res. no. 940, 1994)
Resolution 940 does not mention that the desperation of the refugees was
compounded by the harsh tactics employed by US coastguards to hinder
them in seeking asylum on US territory. The reasons for the Security Council
Resolution authorizing intervention in Haiti must be sought to a large extent
in US interests, significant among which was the aim of stopping the refugee
flow at its source. Without such interests at work, the wish to relieve human
suffering alone would probably not be enough for the US to stage a Security
Council endorsed armed intervention.
The Security Council’s treatment of the refugee crises in Zaire after the
Rwandan genocide (see e.g. UNSC Res. no. 912, 1994: para 6) and its resolutions
on the conflict and displacement crisis in Darfur, confirm this ambiguous use of
human security reasoning. In both cases, the Security Council showed concern
with the human security of victims of violence, but this concern did not translate
into the justification for coercive action mandated under Chapter VII of the UN
Charter. In the case of the Rwandan refugees in Zaire, the Security Council did
determine after Rwanda’s attack on the refugee camps in 1996 ‘that the magni-
tude of the present humanitarian crisis in eastern Zaire constitutes a threat to
peace and security in the region’, and called for ‘the urgent need for the orderly
and voluntary repatriation and resettlement of refugees, and the return of inter-
nally displaced persons, which are crucial elements for the stability of the region’.
It mandated a multinational force with the sole aim to protect the humanitarian
relief operation in the region (UNSC Res. no 1078, 1996). Thus human security
considerations were translated into belated action, but only when they were rein-
forced by traditional security concerns (the Rwandan attack affecting regional
stability). Previous numerous pleas by UNHCR and other humanitarian actors
to send such a multinational protection force had been ignored.
In the case of Darfur’s displaced population, in 2007 the Council author-
ized an EU military deployment in eastern Chad and north-eastern Central
African Republic to protect refugees and humanitarian staff, as well as ensur-
ing the demilitarized nature of refugee camps (UNSC Res. no. 1778, 2007). This
was done with the agreement of the Chad government. But the much larger
number of displaced within the borders of Darfur have not benefited from the
protection of this EU deployment, since the Sudanese government has refused
non-African peacekeeping troops entry to its territory. The Security Council
has not forced the matter through a Chapter VII resolution.
In short, the human security of displaced populations is today considered
a legitimate concern for the Security Council, but not as a cause on its own
for labelling the situation a threat to international peace and security. Roberts
(1998: 383) noted that states who undertake military interventions to halt or
reverse a refugee exodus will usually have other, more self-centred motives
besides their stated human security concern. One of these motives is to keep
refugees and asylum seekers from arriving at their own borders. Fifteen years
later, there seems to be no cause for reassessing Roberts’ conclusion.
At the Forefront of a Fading Discourse
The discussion so far shows that displacement has been at the forefront of
human security discourses—both within the UN and in the foreign policy
deliberations of some states. This said, no state (not even Norway or Canada)
or the Security Council has allowed human security concerns of any sort to
reach the very top of its security agenda. Some states, such as the United States,
ignore the concept almost altogether (MacFarlane and Khong, 2006: 266), oth-
ers have been happy to pay it lip service. Where the human security discourse
has been the most central, is within networks concerned with development,
humanitarian and human rights affairs. These networks consist of coalitions
of government, NGO and UN representatives, and such coalitions have at
times been influential, as we have seen with the creation of the International
Criminal Court and the ban on landmines.
The interest in framing forced migration as a human security issue has faded
after its zenith in the early 2000s. The long awaited report by the High Level
UN Commission on Human Security, Human Security Now (2003), did not
have the anticipated impact in academic or policy circles (Suhrke, 2004: 365;
Paris, 2004: 371). Former human security champions have moved on to other
pastures. For instance, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs hardly uses
the term after 2004. Part Two of this book shows a similar development within
UNHCR. While the language of human security has not disappeared, it has to
some extent been displaced in the discourse of the humanitarian community
by the newer agenda of a ‘Responsibility to Protect’.
Displacement, conflict and insecurit y

in the developing world
While human security has been on the wane, a conflict perspective on dis-
placement has gained momentum. It is linked to the human security discourse,
in that it shows concern for the security of displaced persons. However, the
main concern raised by this conflict perspective is the security impact mass
displacement can have on conflict dynamics.
Most forced migrants, whether refugees or IDPs, are displaced by (gen-
eral or targeted) violence and war, or by conflict-induced insecurity com-
bined with a sharp deterioration of living conditions (due to environmental
and/or economic strains). Displacement is increasingly seen as intrinsic
to conflict. For instance, the definition of ‘complex emergencies’, a rela-
tively new term used to show that contemporary conflicts are character-
ized by large-scale humanitarian crises as much as by the actual fighting
between warring parties, includes ‘extensive violence and loss of life; mas-
sive displacements of people; widespread damage to societies and econo-
mies’ (OCHA, quoted in Keen, 2008: 2). Sometimes displacement occurs
as a side-effect of conflict, sometimes as a tactic (as a means of controlling

populations to control territory), but other times as a war aim in itself,
taking the form of ethnic cleansing or even genocide. Kaldor (2006: 9), for
instance, includes in her definition of ‘new wars’ the aim ‘to control the
population by getting rid of everyone of a different identity (and indeed
of a different opinion) and by instilling terror’, explaining this as the rea-
son behind ‘the dramatic increase in the number of refugees and displaced
persons’ in contemporary conflicts. Such targeting of particular groups of
civilians based on their ethnic, religious or other group identity has been a
common aspect of many of the bloodiest post-Cold War conflicts, includ-
ing the former Yugoslavia, the Great Lakes of Africa and Sudan, as well as
in lower-intensity conflicts in parts of, for instance, Kenya, Nigeria and
many former Soviet republics.
But it is not only identity politics and ethnic animosities that create dis-
placement. Displacement can ensue from an economically motivated agenda
of preying on civilian populations, ranging from pillaging or protection money
(Keen, 2000: 29–30) to the creation of ‘shadow states’ based on patronage and
predation (Reno, 2000). Displacement can also be the result of warring fac-
tions clearing an area of (some of) its population in order to conduct illegal
economic activities (mining, cultivating, logging, extracting and/or smuggling
valuable commodities such as diamonds, timber, oil, drugs) unencumbered by
the presence of civilians (Shearer, 2000: 191).
The self-evident observation that conflict creates displacement has
increasingly been complemented by the assertion that the causal relation-
ship between displacement and conflict runs both ways. Or rather, this
relationship can be described as a vicious cycle of conflict and displace-
ment, where each feeds into the other and both contribute to underdevel-
opment, environmental strain, and weakened state structures. Such conflict
and displacement cycles can destabilize local areas, states and regions.
Displacement, counter-displacement and the uncertain citizenship created
by serial flight contribute to the protracted and intractable nature of many
conflicts. Such conflict and displacement cycles have been particularly vis-
ible in regions such as the Great Lakes of Africa.
In this section I will look at how refugees and other forced migrants have
been depicted as harbingers of insecurity and carriers of ‘the contagion of con-
flict’. I discuss how forced migrants are deemed to contribute to vicious conflict
cycles—not only as victims of insecurity and violence, but also as perpetrators
and threats. I also consider why this ‘contagion of conflict’ perspective has
become more widespread and influential, and discuss if one consequence of
such a perspective could be to contribute to perpetuating vicious cycles of con-
flict and displacement.
Refugee Warriors During the Cold War
The human security perspective on displacement labelled forced migrants as

victims of insecurity. The conflict perspective does not dispute this label, but
focuses on displaced groups and diasporas as actors who regardless of their
own victimhood can pose security threats to their host or home states and
play an (active or passive) role in local, national or regional conflict dynam-
ics. The traditional focus in this regard was on refugee warrior communities
(Zolberg, Suhrke and Aguayo, 1989). During the Cold War, numerous such
communities were prominent in superpower proxy wars, such as the Afghan
Mujaheddin, who used refugee camps in Pakistan as their bases for the fight
against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. In southern Africa, various
liberation movements fighting against white minority rule in South Africa,
Rhodesia and Namibia, were hosted in refugee camps in black-majority ruled
southern African countries.
The use of aggrieved refugees as pawns in proxy wars allowed the two super-
powers to pursue their global rivalry without being drawn into large-scale
diplomatic or military confrontation with each other. Supporting refugee war-
riors was also a way in which regional powers could undermine their rivals
in a relatively inexpensive and low-risk manner. For this reason, host states,
regional powers and superpowers continued throughout the Cold War period
to arm and train refugee warriors and provide them with financial backing.
Usually a superpower would work in tandem with a regional ally: the super-
power would provide quiet, sometimes secret, assistance to the refugee warrior
communities, and channel aid through its regional proxy, while the refugee
host state would provide more direct and overt assistance. For instance, after
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistan and the US supported the Afghan
Mujaheddin with humanitarian assistance, weapons and CIA expertise and
allowed the Mujaheddin to assume control over the civilian camp population
in northern Pakistan. Similarly, in the 1980s, the US and Thailand backed the
Khmer Rouge’s guerrilla war, waged from camps in Thailand against Vietnam’s
puppet regime in Cambodia.
Refugee warriors were not only often (willing) pawns in the military super-
power struggle, but also in the superpowers’ ideological combat (Loescher,
1993: 59). The Afghan Mujaheddin were hailed by the US as heroes of
self-determination and Afghan refugees in Pakistan received generous sup-
port from the West. The militarization of the Afghan refugee population
was institutionalized and endorsed to the degree that Afghan refugees had
to become members of one of the Mujaheddin parties based in the Pakistani
refugee camps in order to be eligible for assistance from UNHCR. In Central
America, Nicaraguan anti-communist refugees in Honduras could seek work
and move around freely, while Guatemalan and Salvadoran refugees in the
same country, who fled from a repressive but US-backed right-wing regime,
were forced into squalid, prison-like camps (Loescher, 1993: 26). Due to the
military and ideological value of refugee populations during the Cold War,
there was a clear trend in the US and Western Europe for refugee admittance
policies and humanitarian aid to refugee groups to be guided by their wider
security interests (Loescher, 1993: 58–61; Shain, 1993: 303).
Refugee warrior groups posed threats to their home states—and sometimes
also their hosts—in numerous parts of the global South during the Cold War.
However, perceptions of refugee groups as threats rather than victims were not
widespread in the same period. Since refugees were an integral part of Western
anti-communist propaganda, they were seldom presented during the Cold War
as matters of security. If refugees were to have an effect as moral trump cards,
they had to be presented as victims of injustice and deserving objects of apo-
litical humanitarian interests, not as pawns in a political power struggle. In
public discourse, refugees remained victims rather than threats.
The Post-Cold War Period: From Victims to Threats
The romantic sheen conferred on refugee warriors through association with

anti-colonial or anti-racist liberation struggles, as well as—in Western views—
fighting for freedom against communism, disappeared when the last bastions
of white minority rule crumbled in Namibia and South Africa in the early
1990s and when communism no longer appeared as a threat after the demise
of the Soviet Union in 1991. With the dream of a new, more peaceful, world
order policed by a benign superpower, the aim in the early post-Cold War
period was to resolve long-running conflicts. From this conflict resolution
perspective, fighters-in-exile and their hold on power in refugee camps consti-
tuted an obstacle to peace rather than a symbol of resistance.
Thus, the trend to highlight displacement not only as a consequence of con-
flict, but also as a contributor to continued fighting became widespread from
the early 1990s onwards, both in academic research and in public discourses.
Part Two of this book analyses how this new emphasis manifested itself in the
discourse of UNHCR, but the agency was far from alone in warning about
the potential of mass refugee movements to trigger, exacerbate, entrench,
or prolong conflict. For instance, I showed earlier how the Security Council
became increasingly interested in refugee situations in the 1990s. This was
partly due to a broader, human security, understanding of ‘threats to inter-
national peace and security’. But a stronger motivation lay in the potential of
mass refugee flows to destabilize regions. Such concerns were evident in the
Security Council’s resolution 688 (1991), concerning the Iraqi Kurdish flight
towards Turkey in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, and in Resolution 1078
(1996) on the Rwandan Hutu refugee camps in Zaire. Preoccupation with the
conflict-inducing potential of displacement went beyond the role of milita-
rized refugee warrior groups to also encompass a range of broader and vaguer
security impacts on host communities and regions, such as increased crimi-
nality and violence, environmental impact and resource scarcity, and ethnic
animosity and conflict.
Turning to the perceived link between forced migration and ethnic or com-
munal violence first, it is commonplace to view forced migrants as potential
carriers of the contagion of conflict. Taking an extreme example, Mamdani
(2001: 205) argues that members of the 200,000 strong Burundian Hutu refu-
gee community who had fled to Rwanda in 1993 after a Tutsi-led coup and
massacres in their country, brought with them their bitterness against Tutsis
and were responsible for some of the most gruesome acts during the Rwandan
genocide.
The depiction of mass movements of forced migrants as harbingers of war
and carriers of the contagion of violence, has merged into, and become a cen-
tral part of, relatively recent and influential research perspectives that high-
light the complexities of contemporary conflicts. Whether framed as ‘New
Wars’ or ‘complex emergencies’, displacement plays a politically and economi-
cally significant part in these perspectives’ description of the complex local,
regional and global interactions and transactions that characterize contem-
porary conflicts. Thus, Terry (2002), although disliking the term ‘complex
emergency’, raises the alarm over how displaced populations, partially due to
the humanitarian aid machinery set in place to assist and protect them, can
become part and parcel of conflict dynamics, setting the stage for future disas-
ters. Describing the attacks on refugee camps and the slaughter of refugees in
eastern Zaire in 1996 that started the first Congo War, she argued that ‘[t]‌he
history of the Rwandan refugee camps graphically illustrates the paradox of
humanitarian action: it can contradict its fundamental purpose by prolonging
the suffering it intends to alleviate. ( . . . ) In short, humanitarian aid, intended
for the victims, strengthened the power of the very people who had caused the
tragedy’ (Terry, 2002: 2).
More common than Terry’s in-depth case studies has been to make sweep-
ing statements about the perils of displaced populations. For instance, Kaldor
writes in her influential book on ‘New and Old Wars’ that:
Not only are these huge concentrations of refugees an immense economic bur-
den on countries that are already poor, but they represent a permanent source of
tension between the refugees and the host populations—for economic reasons,
since they are competing for resources; for political reasons, since they constitute
a permanent pressure on host governments to take action in order that they can
return; and for security reasons, because the camps are often used as bases for
various radical factions. (Kaldor, 2006: 115)
The depiction of forced migration as conflict-inducing has particularly

revolved around the role of refugee (or IDP) camps, and the humanitar-
ian operations that keep these camps going. There has been a flurry of
research on the politico-military aspects of refugee flows, in particular the
militarization of refugee camps (e.g. Terry, 2002; Lischer, 2003 and 2005;
Loescher and Milner, 2005; Muggah, 2006; Lebson, 2013). Militarized
camps have also been a long-standing concern of UNHCR and its govern-
ing body, the Executive Committee (EXCOM), made up of major refugee
host states and donors. For instance, in 2000, EXCOM ‘recalled that rebel
movements, host countries and other States, both within and beyond the
regions directly concerned have often made use of refugee populations
in the quest to attain their political and military objectives’ (UNHCR,
2000e: para. 3). During the refugee crises in the Great Lakes after the
Rwandan genocide, High Commissioner Ogata warned the world that ‘we
are increasingly confronted, not just in this region but worldwide, with the
problem of separating refugees from fighters, criminals, or even genocid-
aires’ (Ogata, 1998). Statements from the Security Council (see e.g. UNSC,
2007) and UN Secretaries-General have argued similarly. Kofi Annan, then
UN Secretary-General, concurred in a much-cited report to the Security
Council that ‘[t]‌he potential threat to African States posed by the move-
ment of large numbers of refugees when they are mingled with combatants
must be acknowledged’ (UN Secretary-General, 1998). He followed this up
in another report a few months later, where he stated that ‘[i]n countries of
asylum, the civilian character of refugee camps has been compromised by
the presence of armed elements and has become a source of instability and
insecurity for refugees, the host community and humanitarian personnel’
(UN Secretary-General, 1998b: para. 12).
In the 2000s, environmental strain became included in this narrative of dis-
placement as conflict inducing. That refugee influxes can have an impact on
the local environment is hardly disputed. As refugees are increasingly hosted in
camps, rather than being allowed to settle locally (Loescher and Milner, 2005),
enormous refugee camps with tens of thousands of inhabitants can upset a del-
icate ecological balance, particularly in areas such as the Horn of Africa that
already suffer from environmental problems, scarce resources and poverty
(Mbonile, 1998: 157; Lee, 2001: 111–12). Such displacement-induced environ-
mental strain has been argued to have a potential knock-on effect on political
instability, communal violence and even ethnic conflict. Thus, resource com-
petition and environmental degradation have come to be included as key com-
ponents in the vicious conflict and displacement cycle.
This form of argument is prominent in the debate over the phenomenon of
‘protracted refugee situations’ (defined as more than 25,000 refugees living in
camps for at least five years without a solution in sight) and the conflict risk
created when large numbers of people spend years and decades living in over-
crowded camps, set apart from, competing with and treated with hostility by
the local population. UNHCR has raised this issue on several occasions (e.g.
Crisp, 2003; UNHCR, 2004c and 2008). Loescher and Milner (2005) argue that
environmental strain and ethnic animosity often go hand in hand in regions
hosting long-term refugee populations: As competition for scarce resources
intensifies, so does hostility to newcomers. This can lead to clashes between
refugees and locals, as well as to increased animosity towards central authori-
ties, since they are seen as unable or unwilling to cope with the refugee influx
in a manner that does not jeopardize the livelihood of their own citizens.
Since the mid-2000s, the climate change debate has also contributed to the
conflict perspective on displacement. A rash of high-level reports and state-
ments has asserted causal links between climate change, migration and con-
flict. For instance, then UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan argued that:
Climate change is also a threat to peace and security. Changing patterns of rain-
fall, for example, can heighten competition for resources, setting in motion poten-
tially destabilizing tensions and migrations, especially in fragile states or volatile
regions. There is evidence that some of this is already occurring; more could well
be in the offing. (Annan, 2006)
The report of the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC), Climate Changed,
People Displaced, argued that ‘[d]‌isasters and degradation can trigger displace-
ment and conflicts, and conflicts and displacement, in turn, often cause further
environmental degradation’ (NRC, 2009: 7), lumping together ‘displacement
and conflicts’ without specifying the relationship between the two. Some
European governments also began to link climate change, displacement and
conflict. The report Climate Change and International Security of the Council
of the European Union (2008: 4) lists environmentally-induced migration as
one of seven main threats posed by climate change, and argues that ‘[s]uch
migration may increase conflicts in transit and destination areas’—without
elaborating how or when this may be the case.
Even government actors not traditionally concerned with migration and dis-
placement issues, took an interest: the Development, Concepts and Doctrine
Centre (DCDC) of the British Ministry of Defence’s 2007 Global Strategic
Trends Programme report, puts ‘population and resources’ as the report’s first
‘key theme’. The risks created by both climate change and population move-
ment feature prominently in the report. And while it is careful not to draw direct
causal links between climate change, migration and conflict, it nevertheless does
so indirectly: Having first stated earlier in the report (DCDC, 2007: 29) that a
‘combination of resource pressure, climate change and the pursuit of economic
advantage may stimulate rapid large scale shifts in population’, the report later
suggests that such population shifts create grave security risks:
Conflict and crises will continue to trigger the displacement of large numbers of
people, mainly into proximate regions, which may themselves be at risk of instabil-
ity. Recent conflicts have also demonstrated the potential for sudden movements
of people over longer distances, with the potential for related shocks and knock-on
effects. This instability is likely to fuel extremist politics in some societies, possibly
based on a beleaguered middle class, which may result in resurgent nationalism and
authoritarianism. (DCDC, 2007: 36, emphasis in the original)
Such reports and statements characteristically combine high prominence given
to discussions of climate change, migration and insecurity with vague accounts of
actual empirical or causal mechanisms backing up their hypotheses of risk and
threat. But even when arguing in indirect ways, such discourses contribute to
creating associations and assumptions of causal links between climate change,
migration, insecurity and conflict.
Is it New? Is it Helpful?
Officials and academics expressing alarm over the conflict-inducing threat of

forced migration have tended to assume that such security threats have been
a growing problem in the post-Cold War period. For instance, Shawcross
(cited in Lischer, 2000: 1) suggested that ‘in the eighties [the militarization
of camps] had been the exception . . . In the nineties it became commonplace’.
As my account of refugee militancy during the Cold War makes clear, this
assertion is not backed up by evidence. In fact, detailed empirical research
tends to conclude that refugee militarization remains limited to a small,
albeit significant, percentage of camp populations (Lischer, 2000; Salehyan
and Gleditsch, 2006; Johnson, 2011). Terry (2002) argues that it is not con-
flicts that have become more complex, but the international humanitarian
response to them. In fact, as Terry points out, conflicts have—generally
speaking, with some major exceptions—become less deadly and destructive
(Human Security Report Project, 2010).
The assertion that rates of displacement have increased dramatically in
the post-Cold War period is empirically difficult to verify. UNHCR statistics
confirm that the refugee problem is not worsening. The number of refugees,
globally, peaked in 1992 with 18.1 million.1 In the 2000s, the number of refugees
has fluctuated around 10–12 million. Salehyan and Gleditsch (2006), having
confirmed the statistical link between refugee flows and the regional spread-
ing of conflict, make two points clear: First, this is far from a new post-cold
war phenomenon, citing the civil wars in Lebanon and Jordan among earlier
examples; and, second, the vast majority of individual refugees, and indeed
the vast majority of refugee communities, whether camp based or not, do not
cause or contribute to violent conflict in their region of settlement.
Empirical research on the potential relationship between refugee
influxes, environmental strain and conflict also show ambivalent results.
Martin (2005) concludes that the degree to which conflict between refu-
gee and host communities over scarce resources becomes violent depends
on whether participatory and inclusive resource management regimes are
put in place. Scarce resources do not automatically lead to violent con-
flict between refugee and host communities. The same ambiguity is found
in research on climate change related displacement and conflict. Climate
change related migration is likely to increase. This will not necessarily lead
to more violent conflict (Gleditsch, Nordås and Salehyan, 2007), although
it is hypothesized that it could do so in certain circumstances (Barnett and
Adger, 2007). There is nothing deterministic about the relationship between
forced migration and conflict, whether or not economic and environmental
strain or scarcity is thrown into the mix.
If there is little empirical evidence to claim that the conflict role played by
some forced migrants is more significant today than during the Cold War
period, why has the perception of a strong causal link from displacement
to conflict become commonplace? This is not a purely academic question.
How we describe and think about an issue affect how we deal with it, and the
entrenchment of the view that displacement is conflict-inducing has encour-
aged particular policy choices, especially the increasing reluctance of states
to host refugees on their territory and the increased ‘warehousing’ of refu-
gees in camps that look more like detention centres than temporary homes.
As Loescher and Milner (2005) and Salehyan and Gleditsch (2006) argue,
apart from its normative failings, this practice is counterproductive from a
practical point of view. It creates angry, frustrated and bored refugee popula-
tions with little to lose and little hope for the future. Salehyan and Gleditsch
1
At the same time UNHCR reports a massive increase in IDPs. While there is probably a rise
in these figures, it is hard to interpret how much of the growth is down to the fact that UNHCR
is much more involved with IDP populations today than before, and thus in a better position to
count them.
(2006: 361–62) argue that instead ‘generous asylum and refugee programs—

both in the initial host countries as well as in developed countries of resettle-
ment—can limit the spread of armed conflict as well as curtail the escalation
of conflict in sending countries’.
Asylum, b order control, crime and

terrorism after 9/11
Some analysts have argued that the strong states of the North are not entirely
immune against the contagion of instability and conflict carried by mass refu-
gee influxes (Ayoob, 1995: 196). Kaplan (1996) envisions a scenario where mass
cross-border movements carry with them crime, disease, human misery, and
destructive conflicts. This is both a result and further cause of the erosion of
borders, and thus of states and the stability they provide. Furthermore, Kaplan
argues that the global nature of refugee movements ensures that this contagion
of violence is not contained within developing regions, but will spread across
the world. Albeit adding to a generalized sense of alarm about migration from
the South to the North, Kaplan’s vision has not gained widespread currency.
The depiction of forced migration as conflict-inducing, as described above,
has in most of its invocations been focused on weak and poor states in the
global South. For instance, when in the early 1990s Germany began to receive
hundreds of thousands of new asylum seekers every year, this raised many
concerns, but not warnings of violent conflict.
Security concerns over forced migration have taken another form in the
rich, strong and stable countries of the global North. Reflecting a different—
and higher—baseline of security, there is little concern over civil war and polit-
ical upheaval, and more with the protection of political and cultural values and
a particular way of life. Forced migration as a potential threat has mostly been
understood within the context of asylum, border control, crime and terror-
ism. I begin by describing the impact of the terror attacks on New York and
Washington on 11 September 2001 on Western perceptions of asylum as a ter-
ror risk, before moving on to map out the precursors to this discourse found
in concerns with identity security.
The Immediate Impact of 9/11
The 9/11 terror attacks in New York and Washington, shook the Western
world and ushered in a new phase in global politics characterized by US-led
counter-terror operations and wars, and local responses and resistance to

this globally reaching campaign. But it is the home front dimension of the
counter-terror agenda that is of particular interest here. Departments of
homeland security, increased surveillance of (parts of) the population, and
strict new border controls were introduced almost immediately. For advo-
cates of a more comprehensive and people-friendly concept of security, their
hopes of replacing traditional national security thinking with an inclusive and
non-aggressive human security approach waned after 9/11. Northern states
reverted to old-fashioned security perspectives focused on protecting state
borders, not in the classical Realist manner of preparing for invading armies,
but in tightening immigration regimes in order to keep out dangerous foreign
individuals intent on committing acts of political violence on the state’s sov-
ereign territory.
The impact of this security thinking on perceptions of asylum was almost
immediate. For instance, David Blunkett, then British Home Secretary, for-
mulated the new2 fear of asylum seekers as potential terrorists already in
November 2001:
This is our home—it is our country. We have a right to say that if people seek to
abuse rights of asylum to be able to hide in this country and organise terrorist
acts, we must take steps to deal with them. (quoted in Huysmans and Buonfino,
2008: 773)
Considering that none of the plane hijackers on 9/11 were asylum seek-
ers—they were in the US as residents, tourists or students—Blunkett’s imme-
diate targeting of asylum seekers seems somewhat puzzling. Although there
was also a general backlash against immigration, he was far from the only
one to single out asylum seekers as potential threats. As an already visible and
unwanted group of migrants, they were vulnerable to attack. Asylum policy in
the North became imbued with fears over the possibility of harbouring fun-
damentalists and terrorists among refugees (Newland, Patrick, Van Selm and
Zard, 2002: 4). The US administration were as quick off the mark as the British
government to make this link (Guild, 2003), and most other Western gov-
ernments followed suit. The UN Security Council also contributed to setting
the tone when it already on 28 September 2001 agreed on Resolution 1373.
The resolution required states not to harbour individuals who ‘finance, plan,
support or commit terrorist acts’, but did so without defining ‘terrorism’ or
provide caveats regarding individual rights, due process and fair trial. This,
2
In parts of Europe, particularly in France, concern over Islamic fundamentalism and
ethno-political terrorism perpetrated by asylum seekers and migrants predated the events
of 9/11.
together with a series of executive directives and judicial interpretations in

many Western states, made it easier for governments to apply the Refugee
Convention’s definition of ‘political crime’ in a restrictive manner and to leave
the use of the Convention’s exclusion clauses more to executive discretion and
less to judicial scrutiny (Blake, 2003: 445–7).
Both in discourse and action, national security concerns began to dominate
asylum politics across the industrialized North in the post-9/11 period. The
asylum system was seen as a serious weak spot in Western countries’ security
measures, a weak spot ruthlessly exploited by international terrorists (Givens,
Freeman and Leal, 2009). A few high-profile cases of terror charges against
asylum seekers, or asylum seekers whose applications had been rejected but
who had not been returned to their country of origin, contributed to this per-
ception. The British Sunday Times wrote in 2007 that ‘[t]‌he estimated backlog
of 400,000 failed asylum seekers who have not been removed from the country
is said by opposition MPs to be one in a series of systemic failings that under-
mine the security of Britain’s borders’ (Leppard and Ungoed-Thomas, 2007).
In addition to the small number of asylum seekers tried and convicted of ter-
rorist offences, a much larger number of news stories covered high-profile
arrests of migrants and asylum-seekers—without mentioning their release
without charge a few days or weeks later.
When the then UK shadow home secretary David Davis complained in
2007 that ‘[i]‌t is a straightforward matter for people with criminal or terror-
ist intent to cross our borders in both directions with almost no control on
them’ (quoted in Leppard and Ungoed-Thomas, 2007), he was taking part in
a cross-party, cross-European—indeed cross-Western—political competition
over who could be the toughest on asylum. This competition had its origins
long before the events of 9/11, in the sudden and dramatic increases in the
number of asylum applications lodged in Western countries in the early 1990s.
Thus, 9/11 was not the starting point for the depiction of asylum as a secu-
rity threat. An emerging trend could be seen already in the 1980s, where
immigrants in general (especially from the global South), and asylum seek-
ers in particular became gradually subsumed within a discourse of fear and
unease (Huysmans, 2006: 63). The speed and ease with which asylum and
international terrorism were grouped together in the immediate aftermath of
9/11 hinted at how the ground had already been prepared. The link was made
almost automatically and without substantial political debate, since asylum
seekers had been vilified and treated as (at least potential) criminals already
for a couple of decades. Gibney (2006) tracks how this process, which began
already in the 1970s, had by the early 1990s led to a transformation in pub-
lic opinion of people seeking asylum. ‘Increasingly, the term “asylum seek-
ers” became shorthand in public and media discourse for “economic refugees”,
people taking advantage of the asylum route to escape normal immigration

control; immigrants in pursuit of the benefits of a welfare state at the expense
of citizens; or, especially after 11 September 2001, as potential terrorists or
security threats’ (Gibney, 2006: 146). ‘Asylum seekers’ had become a dirty
word in Northern political discourse long before 9/11, and had become so due
to a heady mix of economic, cultural, identity and traditional security fears.
The vilification of asylum seekers was to some extent the result of the clos-
ing down of legal routes for economic migrants to make the journey from the
South to the North. Asylum numbers rose in the late 1980s and early 1990s
partly because the overall number of refugees rose at the same time, but also
because economic migrants saw it as a loophole in Western immigration con-
trols. Having said that, the correlation between major conflict hotspots/repres-
sive regimes, on the one hand, and the countries of origin of asylum seekers,
on the other, has always been very high. Asylum seekers tend to arrive from
countries in the midst of civil war or under the violent thumb of dictatorial
regimes. Their motivations for travelling to the North are usually mixed—a
combination of political and economic push and pull factors. The line between
a political refugee and an economic migrant is not easy to draw.
The aim here is not to determine the degree to which the asylum systems of
Western states are being abused by purely economic migrants. More important
is that the widespread opinion of asylum seekers as mostly ‘bogus’, combined
with the fear among Western electorates of uncontrolled ‘flows’ and ‘tides’
of immigrants arriving through asylum channels, led to an almost complete
official clampdown on legal ways for asylum seekers to lodge their applica-
tion. Gibney (2006: 153) recounts how, ‘[w]‌hen asked in 2002 whether there
existed any legal avenues by which legitimate refugees might enter the UK,
the Minister of State for Immigration, Lord Rooker, answered bluntly, “No”’.
Gibney continues by highlighting the ‘one group of entrepreneurs who have
profited (albeit illicitly) from the changing boundaries of immigration con-
trol: smugglers and traffickers’.
This clampdown on legal migration and asylum routes has received sym-
bolic visibility in the recently erected US, Indian and South African border
fences, put up to keep the citizens of their poorer neighbours out. Increasingly,
the policing and security aspects of migration management have gained the
upper hand on other considerations. The focus has been on ‘irregular’ and
‘illegal’ migration, ‘bogus asylum seekers’, ‘mixed flows’ (of refugees and eco-
nomic migrants), people smuggling, trafficking, and in general what has been
termed ‘the criminalization of migration’ (Haas, 2005:13). Quoting Gibney
(2006: 143) again: ‘We have reached the reduction ad absurdum of the con-
temporary paradoxical attitude to refugees. Western states now acknowledge
the rights of refugees but simultaneously criminalize the search for asylum’.
And once asylum seekers had been criminalized (by having to enter their
asylum destinations illegally), it was a natural next step, once the events of
9/11 added international terrorism to this already pungent mixture of concern
and fear, to also perceive them as security threats. Headlined by the linkages
made between asylum, crime and terrorism, the security discourse on asylum
seekers joined together a mix of more or less explicitly pronounced concerns,
where cultural/identity fears, sometimes tinted with xenophobia, provide a
vaguely formulated but pervasive background atmosphere to more clearly
articulated and specified concerns relating to the national security of the state
and the economic welfare of its citizens. Unlike the more hysterical tabloid
press, governments do not usually overtly make direct links between asylum
and security. Instead, they list asylum seekers—without making an explicit
connection—together with other issues that are more directly, and tradition-
ally, seen as threatening, such as human trafficking and international terror-
ism. Thus asylum becomes coloured with security language by the company
it keeps.
Conclusion
In the Western world, and particularly in Europe, soon after the Cold War
had ended it became commonplace for both policy planners and security ana-
lysts to discuss flows of refugees and asylum seekers from other, less devel-
oped regions, as a security issue. The propensity to add migration in general
and asylum seekers in particular to security agendas was made easier once
these agendas were widened to include economic, environmental and ‘iden-
tity’ security; and especially after the spectre of terrorism started to colour
migration policies after the terror attacks of 9/11. Asylum seekers were, espe-
cially when arriving in large numbers, increasingly discussed in terms of their
potential for being economically disruptive, culturally threatening, connected
to trans-national crime, or belonging to international terrorist networks. The
trend of discussing asylum from a security perspective can also be seen in
academic literature, although a large part of this literature critiques such a per-
spective as illiberal, exaggerated or largely unwarranted (see e.g. Bigo, 2005;
Huysmans, 2006). Nevertheless, in line with the conceptual framework set out
in the previous chapter, the fact that there is a considerable body of literature
discussing, even if critically, the inclusion of asylum on states’ security agendas,
is another indicator that it has achieved a central place in public discourses.
In conclusion, there seems to be a self-perpetuating aspect to the depiction
and perception of asylum as a security threat, and there has also been a signal
effect from Northern attitudes to asylum to Southern concern with displace-

ment as conflict-inducing. First, by criminalizing asylum seekers, thus boost-
ing a thriving and brutal market for international crime networks specializing
in human smuggling and trafficking, Western asylum host states laid the
foundation for viewing asylum as a combined border control and terrorism
threat. Furthermore, the cultural ‘fortress mentality’, displayed particularly in
Europe, risks creating vicious insecurity spirals. Two decades ago Loescher
(1992: 21) warned: ‘The likely effect of an unduly exclusionary policy will be
to create an exploited underclass of illegal migrants in Western societies, to
increase friction between host and immigrant communities, and to damage
relations with labour-exporting countries in the South’. This observation is
more pertinent than ever in the post 9/11 climate, which has brought with it
new levels of suspicion and alienation between Muslim immigrants (and their
descendants) and their Northern host communities. There is, in other words,
an element of self-fulfilling prophesy in the depiction of asylum as threat in
the North.
Second, there is also an element of ‘insecurity contagion’ from the North to
the South. From the perspective of the South, which hosts around 80 percent
of the world’s refugees (and an even higher percentage if including the inter-
nally displaced), if the relatively small number of asylum seekers in the North
is determined a security threat, what then about the mass influxes of refugees
in the South? After all, despite European rhetoric indicating otherwise, only
around 14 percent of the global refugee population leave their own region
(UNHCR, 2008: 27). Other chapters in this book will discuss the worsening
protection climate for refugees and forced migrants in general in the 2000s. But
it is worth highlighting here that in policy terms, the two discourses on forced
migration as security threats in the North and the South, seem to have led to a
race to the bottom in terms of finding ways to deter and contain refugees and
asylum seekers. The hopes of the third, human security, discourse have not
materialized. There are few signs that shared security concerns will create a
common incentive to deal with the ‘root causes of flight’ and find durable and
humane solutions to the plight of refugees. Instead, conditions of refuge have
deteriorated in both the North and the South. In the former, detention centres
and ‘a thousand small Guantanamos’ (Gibney, 2006) dominate. In the latter,
refugees usually have the choice between two evils—either ‘warehousing’ in
insecure camps with little chance of solutions (Loescher, Betts and Milner,
2008: 60) or risking a marginal existence often as ‘illegals’ by making their
way to urban centres such as Nairobi and Johannesburg (Campbell, Crisp and
Kiragu, 2011; Hammerstad, 2012; Thomson, 2013).
It is appropriate to conclude this chapter by returning to the theoretical find-
ings of c hapter 2. This chapter’s analysis has confirmed the suspicion raised
there that it is difficult to wrest the concept of security out of the suspicious,
competitive and survivalist mentality of traditional national security thinking.
Although it would be wrong to claim this as the sole cause, deteriorating con-
ditions of refuge have gone hand in hand with the growing tendency to under-
stand forced migration within a security perspective. Because the mindset of
national security favours zero-sum thinking, it has become easy to depict the
asylum seeker, refugee or other forced migrant as the (threatening) ‘other’. It
has also encouraged the perception of responses to forced migration move-
ments as ‘a highly competitive game in which a state can only gain benefits at
the cost of other states’ (Huysmans, 2006: 23), thus enabling, especially over
the past decade, the competitive race to the bottom in the international protec-
tion regime.
Part Two
An Intellectual History of UNHCR
The late 1990s saw a fierce academic debate over the evolution of UNHCR’s
security discourse. The debate followed a stark division between legalists and
pragmatists, the former appalled by the politicization of the refugee agency; the
latter keen to reveal the inherently and intensely political nature of humanitar-
ian action and urging UNHCR to become more politically savvy. The debate
was conducted on the basis of limited empirical evidence. Usually, a single edi-
tion of The State of the World’s Refugees from either 1995 or 1997 was quoted
as evidence enough for UNHCR’s post-Cold War transformation (e.g. Chimni,
1998b). While this publication is important, it is not adequate as a basis for
generalizations on the refugee agency’s discursive evolution. In articles where
more UNHCR volumes and documents are referred to, the period before 1990
is usually ignored, making comparative claims difficult (e.g. Goodwin-Gill,
1999). Part Two will therefore investigate the evidence for UNHCR’s discur-
sive evolution. Four main questions will be addressed: First, was UNHCR’s
security discourse a new, post-Cold War phenomenon? Second, if it was
new, what—if any—discourse did it displace? Third, what was the content of
UNHCR’s security discourse, and how did it evolve over time and finally fade?
Fourth, with what did UNHCR’s security discourse become replaced?
Chapter 4 gives an overview of UNHCR’s sixty years of institutional devel-
opment, while the remaining chapters in Part Two can best be described as
accounting for the agency’s intellectual history. Chapter 5 is dedicated to
UNHCR’s official discourse during the first three decades of the agency’s exist-
ence, a relatively stable period for the refugee agency—at least in discursive
terms. Chapter 6 focuses on the 1980s, when discursive changes gathered pace.
These changes prepared the ground for the evolution of a security discourse
in the 1990s; the topic of chapter 7. This chapter investigates the arrival of the
concept of security at the centre of UNHCR’s discourse in the early 1990s and
its continual reinterpretation as the decade wore on. Finally, chapter 8 studies
the gradual abandonment of the language of security in the 2000s, and its
replacement by a discourse of protection.
Sources
The usefulness of discourse analysis stands and falls with the appropriateness
and representativeness of the sources studied. Because of this, the analysis in
chapters 5 to 8 is based on a broad range of the most widely distributed of
UNHCR’s official documents and publications, in order to provide a repre-
sentative picture of the agency’s official discourse. The material includes the
speeches of the High Commissioners; the agency’s Notes on International
Protection; its Reports to the General Assembly; its Refugees Magazine; the
firstly biannual and later occasional publication The State of the World’s
Refugees; and various other central documents and publications.1 All have in
common that they are widely available and aimed at UNHCR’s external audi-
ences, be they representatives of donors, refugee host states, academics, or the
general public.
The publications are aimed at different parts of UNHCR’s audience: The
State of the World’s Refugees and Refugees Magazine target all individuals and
organizations with a general interest in refugee issues, while the Notes and
Reports are aimed at diplomats and policy makers with a particular interest in,
and influence over, UNHCR’s activities, budget and organization. The Notes
and Reports are the two most central official documents that UNHCR pro-
duces on a yearly basis. The Reports are subject to an annual debate in the
General Assembly’s Third Committee and constitute the basis on which the
Assembly makes resolutions on refugee problems and UNHCR’s mandate. The
Notes constitute UNHCR’s main forum for disseminating its views on develop-
ments in its core field of concern, that of refugee protection. The Notes are sub-
mitted to the Executive Committee of the High Commissioner’s Programme
(EXCOM) and constitute one of the centrepieces for EXCOM’s annual debates.
The High Commissioners’ speeches are usually an opportunity for UNHCR
to help shape the agenda of refugee politics. They often reveal, in a condensed
form, the issues with which UNHCR is currently grappling. The speeches are
therefore a good source for tracing changes in the concepts and ideas that
1
Speeches, Notes and Reports can be found on the UNHCR website <www.unhcr.org>. The
issues of The State of the World’s Refugees are subtitled The Challenge of Protection (1993); In
Search of Solutions (1995); A Humanitarian Agenda (1997); Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action
(2000); Human Displacement in the New Millennium (2006); and In Search of Solidarity (2012).
The Rise and Decline of a Global Security Actor 67
dominate UNHCR’s official discourse. Except for those made to academic audi-
ences, the speeches are parts of UNHCR’s highest level of formal interaction
with state policy makers and diplomats, in fora such as the General Assembly,
EXCOM, the Security Council, the African Union, and the European Union’s
governing organs. These policy makers represent the states and the regional
or international institutions that have the power to affect both UNHCR’s
agenda and the conditions under which it is allowed to operate. The High
Commissioner’s speeches give broad statements on behalf of the agency as a
whole, not only the personal preferences of individual High Commissioners.
Although each High Commissioner has put his or her own stamp on the
agency, their ideas are not conceived in a vacuum but reflect changes in the
agency’s environment and institutional traditions. This fact becomes clear
when, for instance, the speeches of High Commissioner Sadako Ogata are
compared to those of her immediate predecessor Thorvald Stoltenberg.
4
Institutional and International

Developments
This chapter provides a short account of the more than sixty year history of UNHCR,
identifying the main factors that have influenced the direction in which UNHCR has
expanded and developed. By mapping the factors that have constrained, influenced
and facilitated how UNHCR has developed its policies and framed its ideas and lan-
guage, this chapter provides the foundation for the next four chapters’ account of the
evolution of UNHCR’s official discourse over the same period.
I have chosen to group these factors into four categories. The first is UNHCR’s
Statute, which prescribes the agency’s core principles and responsibilities.
The second contains UNHCR’s external governing bodies: the UN General
Assembly, with the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), EXCOM, the UN
Secretary-General, and the UN Security Council—all of whose requests and rec-
ommendations have allowed a gradual and significant widening of UNHCR’s
mandate and operational scope. The third category comprises the interests of
states, the structure of international society, and the nature of refugee emer-
gencies. Together, these may be denoted UNHCR’s ‘operational environment’,
restricting the agency’s scope for action, limiting its range of options and forcing
it to think innovatively about how to fulfil its mandatory tasks. The fourth cat-
egory contains UNHCR’s institutional features, since an organization’s bureau-
cratic structure and institutionalized priorities help channel its choice of activities
and sense of identity and purpose. Although these factors are closely interlinked
in practice, their analytical separation can help clarify the relationship between
UNHCR’s discourse, its internal dynamics and its external environment.
UNHCR’s creation and Statute
UNHCR was founded by the General Assembly in December 1950 (UNGA,

1949 and 1950), and started operating in January 1951. Its lifespan as a
subsidiary agency of the General Assembly was originally intended to last

only three years, but the persistence of refugee problems led the General
Assembly regularly and without controversy to extend the agency’s tenure for
five years at a time. UNHCR’s basic responsibilities are set out in paragraph
one of the agency’s Statute (UNGA, 1950), stating that UNHCR shall provide
international protection for refugees and seek permanent solutions to their
plight. Today, material assistance is usually listed together with protection
and solutions as one of UNHCR’s three main tasks. However, the only men-
tion of material assistance in the Statute concerns administration of assistance
funds, not the performance of assistance tasks. The Statute states that the High
Commissioner’s assistance funds are to be distributed ‘among the private and,
as appropriate, public agencies which he deems best qualified to administer
such assistance’.
UNHCR’s Statute, in common with the mandates and guidelines of most
other UN and non-governmental humanitarian agencies, prescribes that its
work shall be ‘of an entirely non-political character; it shall be humanitar-
ian and social . . . ’. The Statute specifies that the agency’s objective is primarily
to provide protection (not assistance) to a limited category of people—refu-
gees. This protection-oriented and refugee-specific mandate gives UNHCR a
unique competence among humanitarian agencies.
UNHCR’s Core Constituency
Refugees, then, constitute UNHCR’s core constituency. The Statute under-

stands refugees to be persons outside the borders of their own country of
nationality or residence (in the case of stateless persons) whose own country is
no longer willing or able to provide them with the national protection which is
their due. The Statute follows the 1951 United Nations Convention Related to
the Status of Refugees in making ‘a well-founded fear of being persecuted for
reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group
or political opinion’ a defining characteristic of refugee status. However, unlike
the Convention, which limits the term ‘refugee’ to those who fled due to events
taking place in Europe before January 1951, UNHCR’s Statute does not have a
temporal or geographic restriction to its refugee definition.1 In its early days,
the agency’s work was nevertheless concentrated on Europeans displaced by
World War Two or fleeing from communist Eastern Europe and the Soviet
Union (UNHCR, 2000: 275).
1
The UN refugee definition was not given global scope until the Protocol Relating to the Status
of Refugees was added to the Convention on 31 January 1967.
Institutional and International Developments 71
UNHCR’s understanding of the 1951 refugee definition, and particularly

of the term ‘persecution’, has generally been more inclusive than that of most
state signatories to the Convention. From UNHCR’s establishment states have
been content with allowing the agency’s mandated obligations to extend to
refugees who are not necessarily persecuted according to a narrow interpreta-
tion of the Convention, but who nevertheless need international protection
due, for instance, to situations of war or generalized violence in their country
of origin. The states that created the UN Refugee Convention and established
UNHCR did not do so purely out of humanitarian concern for those displaced
by World War Two. Of stronger concern were the practical political problems
of sovereignty, stability and tensions among states, which were triggered when
the nationals of one state sought the protection of another. The creation of the
Convention and of UNHCR was an effort to defuse refugee movements as
threats to inter-state stability and co-operation, while at the same time keeping
their own obligations towards displaced persons at a minimum.2
Not all refugees fall under UNHCR’s jurisdiction. Some refugees are consid-
ered not to be in need of international protection through UNHCR. They include
refugees who enjoy most of the same rights and obligations that are granted
to the citizens of the state in which they live, and refugees already receiving
United Nations protection or assistance. Today, this latter group only includes
Palestinian refugees who are assisted by the UN Reliefs and Works Agency for
Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) (UNHCR, 1992). In addition,
some refugees are excluded because they are considered not to deserve interna-
tional protection. They include persons with respect to whom there are ‘serious
reasons for considering’ that they have: committed a crime against peace, a war
crime, or a crime against humanity; committed a serious non-political crime; or
been guilty of acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations
(see UNGA, 1950: para 7(d) and UNHCR, 1992: paras. 147–63 and 175–80). The
exclusion clauses regarding undeserving cases became more frequently invoked
by states in the post-Cold War period than they were in the early days of the
Refugee Convention (Goodwin-Gill, 1996: 95–114). Especially article 1F(c) of
the Convention, regarding the purposes and principles of the UN, could poten-
tially exclude many refugees from protection, if defined broadly.
After 9/11, the Security Council helped the further broadening of the poten-
tial for invoking the exclusion clauses when its Resolution 1373 (28 September
2001) stipulated that states should not harbour individuals who ‘finance, plan,
support or commit terrorist acts’ without defining the term terrorism nor setting
2
For UNHCR’s interpretation of the discrepancy between its mandate and the narrower obli-
gations states have given themselves, see UNHCR (1994b: Chapter III.a.1). On the political back-
ground to the creation of the post-War refugee regime, see: Goodwin-Gill (1990: 22–31).
out safeguards regarding individual rights, due process and fair trial. In general,
according to Blake (2003: 445–7), the use of the Refugee Convention’s exclusion
clauses and definitions of ‘political crime’ has increased after 9/11, and has been
left more to executive discretion and less to judicial scrutiny than before.
Protection and Solutions
The aim of international protection is to fill the gap created by the failure of
the refugee’s own state to fulfil its obligations towards its citizens. International
protection ‘signifies, at a minimum, ensuring respect for the fundamental
rights and freedoms that the refugee is unable to secure from the country of
origin’ (Mooney, 1999: 200–1). A solution to the refugee’s problem is found
when he or she is again able to enjoy the national protection that full citizen-
ship in a state accords. This can be achieved either through voluntary repa-
triation, when the severed link between the refugee and her state of origin is
re-established, or through integration into the host state or resettlement in
another state, when the refugee can enjoy full rights as a member of a new
national community. Only when such a solution is found does UNHCR’s obli-
gation to provide international protection cease.
What it actually means to provide ‘international protection’ has been widely
discussed both within and outside UNHCR. A person lacks the protection
of his own state if the authorities of that state persecute him through, for
instance, torture or unlawful arrests. But he also lacks protection if his own
state authorities are unable or unwilling to safeguard him from serious threats
to life, liberty and security that emanate from other actors operating within
their borders. Although state signatories to the Refugee Convention have only
committed themselves to provide protection to a narrowly defined group of
displaced persons—so-called Convention Refugees—they allow UNHCR
to base its obligations on wider criteria. As UNHCR practice and General
Assembly resolutions show, for UNHCR it is the lack of effective protection,
rather than persecution narrowly defined, that determines whether a person
falls within the agency’s competence. Thus all those who flee across an inter-
national border because their own state could not or would not protect them
against serious threats to their life, liberty and security, fall within UNHCR’s
international protection mandate (Goodwin-Gill, 1996: 15).
The protection duties of states, as described in the Convention, include first
and foremost the obligation to honour the principle of non-refoulement (that
is, not to return a refugee to danger), and to adhere to the basic standards of
treatment that the Convention accords to refugees. UNHCR’s Statute includes
a wider range of international protection duties for the agency. The Statute
specifies ‘international protection’ to incorporate promotion and supervision

of international legal conventions for the protection of refugees; promotion of
state measures to improve the situation of refugees and to reduce the numbers
requiring protection; assistance to states’ or private groups’ efforts to promote
voluntary repatriation or assimilation into a new national community; promo-
tion of the admission of refugees to the territories of states, since, although ref-
ugees have a human right to seek asylum, states do not have a corresponding
duty to provide it (although states have the duty of non-refoulement); gathering
of statistical evidence concerning the number and conditions of refugees and
the national laws and regulations concerning them; and close co-operation
with states and organizations dealing with refugee issues. In other words,
UNHCR’s protection duties are mostly described in terms of promotional and
advocacy activities on behalf of refugees aimed at state authorities, rather than
the day-to-day practical protection of individual or groups of refugees.
However, the actual needs of refugees spurred UNHCR early on to elabo-
rate on the measures necessary to provide effective international protection for
refugees. According to Goodwin-Gill (1996: 16), ‘international protection’ has
two dimensions. First, and not mentioned in the Statute, is internal protection,
or what will here be called physical protection, providing effective guarantees
in matters such as life, liberty and the security of the person. Second is exter-
nal protection, or legal protection, providing identity and travel documents,
recognition of the rights of refugees and of the human right to both leave and
return home to one’s state of nationality/residence. During the early stages of
massive and sudden refugee exoduses, the refugee often lacks the former form
of protection most acutely. Without food, shelter and medicines during the
turbulent and critical initial period of a refugee crisis, refugees are in need of
aid to survive before they can be able to enjoy the provision of legal protec-
tion. While physical protection is crucial in the short term, it is often legal
protection activities that enable the refugee to find a long-term solution to her
problem. Without recognition of her existence, status and rights as a subject
under the law, and without travel and identity documents, the refugee will
have difficulties in finding an end to her rootless existence through integration
in her country of asylum, resettlement in a third country or repatriation.
In the post-Cold War period, UNHCR began to count life-saving humani-
tarian assistance as an aspect of international protection. For instance, in
its 1994 Report to UNGA, UNHCR placed the following under the heading
‘International Protection’: ‘In addition to the core principles of protection
[admission to safety and non-refoulement], UNHCR has ascribed greater
prominence to the physical security of refugees in recent years, emphasising
their right to personal safety, as well as their right to receive the humanitarian
assistance they may need in order to survive’ (UNHCR, 1994: para 15). This
is a fairly recent development. In 1971, in spite of its experiences from sev-

eral humanitarian emergency operations, the agency acknowledged the links
between providing material aid and international protection, but was careful
to keep the two distinct. Emergency relief was described as an assistance activ-
ity, rather than a protection activity:
[I]‌t had become an accepted fact that the High Commissioner’s task cannot be
accomplished solely through providing international protection, and that a sec-
ond component—material assistance—may also be needed if durable solutions to
the problems of refugees are to be achieved. (UNHCR, 1971: 15)
This quotation underlines the close links between protection, assistance and
solutions. The three durable solutions to refugee problems identified in UNHCR’s
Statute are local integration, resettlement, and voluntary repatriation. Once a
durable solution is found and implemented satisfactorily, the refugee concerned
ceases to be a refugee—and ceases to be of concern to UNHCR. Throughout
UNHCR’s existence, when deemed possible, voluntary repatriation has been seen
as the preferred solution, both for refugees and for their countries of origin and
asylum (see e.g. UNHCR, 1971: 16–17). However, in the Cold War climate of
ideological rivalry, resettlement and local integration was often the more politi-
cally viable solution. Only when the Cold War ended did voluntary repatriation
become the preferred solution par excellence (of states as well as UNHCR).
To sum up, UNHCR’s statutory task is to protect and find solutions for perse-
cuted individuals (broadly defined) who are outside their country of nationality
or habitual residence, and who are unable to avail themselves of the protection
of their own country. According to the Statute and UNHCR’s practice in the
first few years of its existence, the agency’s mandate is purely refugee-specific: to
alleviate and overcome the legal and humanitarian problems arising after flight
across a border. However, UNHCR’s Statute allows a widening of the agen-
cy’s mandate by adding that ‘The High Commissioner shall engage in such
additional activities, including repatriation and resettlement, as the General
Assembly may determine, within the limits of the resources placed at his dis-
posal’ (UNGA, 1950: para. 9). UNHCR’s governing bodies made use of this
paragraph from early on to request that the refugee agency broadens the origi-
nally refugee-specific and advocacy-focused mandate provided by its Statute.
The role of UN governing b odies
There are four UN bodies that influence and sometimes determine UNHCR’s
activities. Arranged roughly according to when the body in question assumed
a position of influence vis-à-vis UNHCR, the four are: the General Assembly

with ECOSOC; EXCOM; the UN Secretary-General’s Office; and the Security
Council.
The General Assembly
UNHCR is governed by the General Assembly. The High Commissioner is

required to ‘follow policy directives given to him by the General Assembly
or the Economic and Social Council’ and to report annually to the General
Assembly, through ECOSOC.3 The General Assembly’s first act of broaden-
ing UNHCR’s competence took place almost immediately after the agency’s
establishment. UNHCR was originally not intended to provide direct mate-
rial assistance to refugees and had no funds or mandate to engage in opera-
tional activities. In the agency’s own words (UNHCR, 1971: 5), it ‘was to carry
out its functions by advising governments and the voluntary organizations
recognized by them, and by encouraging, proposing and promoting their
action, rather than by embarking on projects itself ’. However, the first High
Commissioner, Gerrit J. van Heuven Goedhart, was concerned with the criti-
cal importance of physical protection, particularly in the initial phases of a
refugee crisis, but also for sustaining long-standing refugee camp populations
such as the 400,000 refugees from World War Two who remained in Europe
in 1951 (UNHCR, 2000: 17). He advocated that his agency should have an
assistance programme in addition to its legal protection functions, and was
authorized by the General Assembly to appeal for funds ‘for the purpose of
enabling emergency aid to be given to the most needy groups among refugees
within his mandate’ (UNGA, 1952).
From this meagre beginning, material assistance programmes have gradu-
ally grown in size, scope and importance among UNHCR activities, until in
the 1990s the agency came to be seen as the UN’s ‘humanitarian arm’ (Helton,
1994: 1). This process, however, has been a drawn-out one. In the 1960s and
1970s, UNHCR still characterized itself as a non-operational agency, relying
on operational partners: ‘UNHCR is an agency which acts essentially as a plan-
ner and a co-ordinator, calling on all organizations, national or international,
government or private, which are in the best position to help with the solution
of a problem’ (UNHCR, 1969). A few years later the agency stated that, ‘As
a rule, UNHCR is not operational’—it steps in only when governments and
NGOs cannot cope, particularly in the early emergency phase of a refugee
3
Statute, paras. 3 and 11.
crisis (UNHCR, 1973).4 This in contrast to UNHCR’s routine self-description

today as a ‘humanitarian organization’ which performs a wide range of assis-
tance functions from emergency relief operations to longer term ‘care and
maintenance’ programmes for refugees, IDPs, war affected populations and
others of concern.
Apart from allowing for an emergency relief fund in 1952, the General
Assembly made the first use of its prerogative to request UNHCR to partake
in additional activities through the use of its good offices in the late 1950s. The
term ‘good offices’ was used by the General Assembly as an umbrella category
under which to bring refugees who did not come within UNHCR’s statutory
duties (Goodwin-Gill, 1996: 9–10). In November 1957, the General Assembly
asked UNHCR to find a pragmatic solution for mainland Chinese in Hong
Kong. For the first time, the refugee agency was authorized to assist refugees
who did not come fully within the reach of the 1951 refugee definition, but
whose situation was ‘such as to be of concern to the international community’
(UNGA, 1957). This resolution paved the way for a series of General Assembly
resolutions requesting UNHCR to use its ‘good offices’ on behalf of refugees
outside the ‘immediate competence’ of the agency.5 From the mid-1960s the
terminology changed to ‘refugees who are the High Commissioner’s concern’.
This meant people who were not necessarily eligible for Convention refugee
status, but who had crossed international frontiers as a result of anti-colonial
wars, post-colonial conflict or generalized violence arising from the unravel-
ling of the European colonial empires taking place in the developing world.6
The General Assembly’s requests made it possible for UNHCR to deal with
other categories than Convention refugees in an increasingly automatic fash-
ion, while at the same time states did not become obliged to provide these
‘refugees of concern’ with the same protection standards to which Convention
refugees were entitled.
4
UNHCR has become increasingly, not less, operational in face of the sharp rise in the num-
ber, size and economic clout of NGOs in the last couple of decades.
5
See e.g. UNGA (1959) on assistance to refugees who do not fall within the competence of
the United Nations; UNGA (1961) on emergency assistance to Angolan refugees in Congo; and
UNGA (1963), which requests UNHCR ‘to continue to afford international protection to refu-
gees and to pursue his efforts on behalf of the refugees within his mandate and of those to whom
he extends his good offices’.
6
See e.g. UNGA (1966), which requests UNHCR ‘to continue to provide international pro-
tection for refugees who are his concern, within the limits of his competence, and to promote
permanent solutions to their problems’); UNGA (1969), which stresses that African refugees ‘of
concern’ should have UNHCR’s particular attention); UNGA (1972), which repeats the formula
‘refugees who are his concern’, and adds that it ‘Requests the High Commissioner to continue to
participate, at the invitation of the Secretary-General, in those humanitarian endeavours of the
United Nations for which his Office has particular expertise and experience’.
From the late 1970s onwards the language changed again and the General
Assembly began to request UNHCR to work on behalf of ‘refugees and dis-
placed people’, including victims of man-made humanitarian disasters, partic-
ularly civil wars.7 Due to the conditions in which many of these war-displaced
persons found themselves, the provision of international protection, particu-
larly its legal dimensions, became secondary to providing life-saving assis-
tance. Internally displaced persons (IDPs) were not mentioned in general
terms in the resolutions of the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was still neces-
sary to cross an international border for a displaced person to be considered
of obvious concern to UNHCR. The General Assembly nevertheless author-
ized and encouraged UNHCR to extend its efforts to certain groups of IDPs,
particularly in Africa.8 In the 1990s, the General Assembly usually described
the agency’s responsibilities to be ‘refugees, displaced persons and others
of concern to UNHCR’. In 1993, the Assembly set out strict restrictions on
UNHCR’s involvement in IDP situations, stating that this should only hap-
pen in particular situations, on request from the UN Secretary-General, with
consent of the state concerned, if other organizations or agencies were una-
ble to do the task, and if the IDP situation was linked to a refugee situation
(UNGA, 1993).
Towards the end of the 1990s, the debate on UNHCR’s responsibilities
towards IDPs became more heated. Richard Holbrooke, broker of the Dayton
Agreement and then US ambassador to the UN, suggested that UNHCR be
given universal responsibility for IDPs alongside its refugee mandate (see
UNSC, 2000). Holbrooke’s suggestion was resisted by many NGOs and other
UN agencies, and was not even clearly supported by the American government
or the refugee agency itself. For UNHCR, whether to take on responsibility for
IDPs was also a question of credibility: a universal mandate to protect and
assist IDPs without the power and extra resources to pursue it faced with recal-
citrant host authorities and reluctant donors, would damage UNHCR’s cred-
ibility as an effective and serious protection agency. Soon after he took office in
January 2001, the new High Commissioner, Ruud Lubbers, shelved ambitions
to make UNHCR into a general displacement agency when he restated the
1993 General Assembly Resolution and gave it a restrictive interpretation. In
practice, UNHCR is now heavily involved in IDP situations, but as one among
several UN agencies who share the responsibilities between them according
to a coordinating mechanism called the cluster approach (more on which in
later chapters).
7
See UNGA (1976, 1977) and UNGA (1982), which mentions ‘refugees, returnees and dis-
placed persons of concern to the Office’.
8
See e.g. UNGA (1980) on displaced persons in Ethiopia.
The Executive Committee
The General Assembly was crucial in widening UNHCR’s scope of activities, to

the degree that today refugees constitute a minority among persons ‘of concern’
to the agency. In 2011, UNHCR counted 35.4 million persons under its respon-
sibility, of which 10.4 million were refugees, 895,000 were asylum-seekers,
15.5 million were IDPs and the rest were stateless, returning refugees and IDPs,
and a residual group of ‘others of concern’ (UNHCR, 2012b: 7).9 However, the
impetus for this development, endorsed by the General Assembly, has often not
come from the Assembly, but from EXCOM. EXCOM was set up by ECOSOC
in 1958, on the request of the General Assembly (UNGA, 1957b; ECOSOC,
1958), and consisted in 2013 of representatives from 87 states with a particular
interest in refugee matters, either as refugee hosts or UNHCR donors. The
role of EXCOM, prescribed by the General Assembly, is to advise the High
Commissioner in the exercise of his or her international protection functions
under the Statute, to review and approve UNHCR’s assistance programmes and
to set the financial targets needed to implement them. UNHCR is obliged to
seek the advice of EXCOM, particularly in difficult cases. EXCOM’s decisions
and conclusions on UNHCR’s activities are sent in an annual report to, and
are subsequently endorsed by, the General Assembly. EXCOM’s conclusions
are not legally binding on states, but the fact that the Committee is composed
of a broad range of states with particular interests in refugee matters ensures
that consensus achieved in EXCOM becomes widely accepted as international
standards.
Although its role was initially expected to be limited, EXCOM and its
Standing Committee (which, as EXCOM’s membership was growing large
and unwieldy, was created in 1995) have come to exercise considerable
influence both on UNHCR’s day-to-day activities and on policy develop-
ment (Goodwin-Gill, 1996: 214). For instance, EXCOM greatly encouraged
UNHCR’s policy transformation in the 1990s, by repeatedly arguing that the
environment in which the agency operated had radically changed with the end
of the Cold War, and that, as a consequence, UNHCR must seek out innovative
solutions to new types of displacement problems.10 One reason for the increas-
ing importance for UNHCR of EXCOM’s opinions and decisions in the 1990s
was the agency’s rapidly growing budget. UNHCR’s total expenditures were
9
Back in 1999 refugees still constituted a narrow majority of the agency’s persons of concern:
11.6 million out of 22.2 million in total (UNHCR, 2000b: Table I.1). Before the end of the Cold
War refugees constituted a large majority of the agency’s caseload.
10
See e.g. speeches of EXCOM’s outgoing and incoming Chairmen at its 42nd session
(EXCOM, 1992). To help UNHCR develop innovative solutions, EXCOM established a Working
Group on Solutions and Protection (EXCOM, 1990).
US$497 million in 1980, US$544 million in 1990, US$1 billion in 1999,

US$1.6 billion in 2008, and US$2.3 billion in 2012 (UNHCR, 2013b: 9811). All
of UNHCR’s major donors are members of EXCOM. As billion dollar budgets
became the rule rather than the exception from the 1990s onwards, the views
and opinions of the states providing these funds weighed heavier both on
UNHCR’s choice of policies and choice of words to describe the challenges it
faces. This said, the relationship between UNHCR and EXCOM also provides
the former with means to influence the latter. EXCOM’s report to UNGA as
well as most of the discussion papers and information notes considered in the
meetings of EXCOM and its standing committee are drafted by UNHCR, thus
giving the agency an opportunity to raise the problems and questions it deems
most important.
The UN Secretary-General
The High Commissioner is elected by the General Assembly, on the nomi-

nation of the UN Secretary-General. This procedure was intended to ensure
UNHCR’s non-political and humanitarian character in the highly politicized
international environment of the Cold War, by being open and democratic
and by setting the agency apart from the (it was presumed) more political
activities of the Secretary-General’s Office and, particularly, the Security
Council. However, the election procedure has not been as open or democratic
as was hoped. Except for the election of the first High Commissioner, the
Secretary-General has never suggested more than one candidate. The nomina-
tion is then rubber stamped by the Assembly ‘vote’. The procedure used to pick
this one candidate is secretive negotiations between Security Council powers
and major donor states.12
The Secretary-General has also influenced UNHCR policies and practice.
He has encouraged the agency to become the main co-ordinator of large-scale
relief operations. In 1971, he entrusted UNHCR, for the first time in its history,
with the role of ‘focal point’: the main organizer, fund-raiser and co-ordinator
of the UN Emergency Relief Programme for ten million Bengali refugees flee-
ing from East Pakistan (later Bangladesh) into India (UNHCR, 1973). He also
helped turn UNHCR’s attention towards countries of origin. In May 1972,
11
Figures for 1980, 1990 and 1999 provided by UNHCR’s Donor Relations and Resource
Mobilization.
12
The election of Ruud Lubbers as High Commissioner in 2000 is a good example. He was
sought out at the last minute because, as a former prime minister of the Netherlands, he could
trump the bid of Dutch foreign minister Jan Pronk, whose more leftist and activist leanings were
unpopular with the United States.
following the (temporary) end of internal conflict in Sudan, he requested

UNHCR, for the first time in its history, to co-ordinate all humanitarian relief
efforts inside that country to facilitate the repatriation of Sudanese refugees.
On 25 October 1991, the Secretary-General asked the High Commissioner
directly to lend her ‘good offices’ to co-ordinate the international humani-
tarian effort in the former Yugoslavia, officially confirming UNHCR’s ‘lead
agency’ status in May 1992 (UN Secretary-General, 1992: para. 16). This
request was unprecedented, since the massive relief operation took place not
as part of a repatriation project, but in the midst of war, and assisted refugees,
IDPs and war-affected populations alike (UNHCR, 2000: 220). Furthermore,
in the former Yugoslavia, UNHCR functioned not only as fund-raiser, plan-
ner and co-ordinator of the efforts of other humanitarian organizations, but
as the main operational agency (working with hundreds of local and inter-
national NGO partners). Although the Secretary-General does not have any
statutory authority over UNHCR, in reality his requests have seldom, if ever,
been refused by the agency.
The Security Council
New procedures in the 1990s increased UNHCR’s links to the Security Council.
The High Commissioner began to report regularly to the Security Council
in 1992, coinciding with a significant increase in the Council’s interest in the
potentially destabilizing effects of refugee and displacement crises (as dis-
cussed in c hapter 3). In the past two decades, concerns over refugee emergen-
cies (or their possibility) were included in the arguments of Security Council
Resolutions declaring the situation in Iraq, Somalia, the former Yugoslavia,
Rwanda/DRC, Haiti, East Timor, Darfur and Chad to be threats to ‘peace and
security’.
In the view of some commentators, UNHCR’s involvement with the UN’s
bastion of great power politics led the agency to concentrate on ‘humanitarian
action’ in aid of war-affected populations at the expense of its mandatory duty
to provide international protection for refugees proper. It has also been argued
that UNHCR’s closer proximity to the Security Council made the agency
more receptive to the interests and will of states to the detriment of principled
adherence to its mandate (Goodwin-Gill, 1999: 224). UNHCR’s relationship to
states will be discussed below, but it should be noted that UNHCR is an inter-
governmental organization whose Statute obliges it to co-operate with states.
In the 1990s, however, there were changes in how this co-operation took place.
UNHCR’s relationship with the Security Council in the post-Cold War period
may have brought the agency closer to the interests of the major international
powers, at the expense of the interests of refugee host states. Particularly when
the host state is weak, conflict-ridden, or in the midst of war, UNHCR’s opera-
tions have often relied more on the consent of the international community,
represented by the Security Council. The UN ‘protectorates’ of East Timor and
Kosovo are the clearest examples of the refugee agency carrying out humani-
tarian activities in a vacuum of state sovereignty.
The involvement of the Security Council, as well as that of the
Secretary-General, in refugee issues has been a mixed experience for UNHCR.
While on the one hand lending authority and power to UNHCR’s operations
and putting pressure on actors opposing UNHCR’s work, it also puts politi-
cal pressure on the refugee agency itself. For instance, on several occasions
during the Bosnian war, UNHCR was pressured by the Secretary-General,
the Security Council, or its permanent members, to continue the relief opera-
tion when the agency itself contemplated pulling out due to concern over staff
security or breaches of protection and humanitarian principles (Morris, 1997:
496–7; and Cutts, 1999).
State interests, international

structures and the nature of refugee
emergencies
UNHCR performs three types of functions: protection, assistance and solutions.

It is possible to discern a trend in the agency’s development from a stronger
emphasis on legal protection in the first decade or so, to more weight on assis-
tance from the period of decolonization in Africa and Asia onward, to finally a
quest for solutions that render both protection and assistance unnecessary. In
the 1990s UNHCR also advocated ‘preventive’ solutions—preventing refugee
crises from erupting in the first place. This section will discuss in broad strokes
the shifts in UNHCR’s external environment—in the structure of international
society, in the nature of refugee flows, and in states’ perceptions of their inter-
ests vis-à-vis refugee problems—that contributed to bringing about shifts in the
relative importance UNHCR attributes to each of its three functions.
The Structure of International Society
During the first four decades of the refugee agency’s existence, UNHCR’s
scope for action was limited by the bi-polar dynamics of the Cold War. In
the developed world, UNHCR encouraged Western states hosting refugees

from Communist countries to adhere to their international legal obligations
according to the 1951 Refugee Convention. Especially in the 1950s and 1960s,
the Communist bloc considered UNHCR as an illegitimate tool of Western
imperialism, and usually did not co-operate with the agency.13 In the Cold
War context, both UNHCR and its Western donors usually saw resettle-
ment as the preferred solution to refugee problems—at least as long as the
refugees concerned were arriving from Communist countries. This practice
suited the West’s anti-Communist worldview: those who fled from the evils of
Communism were to be given a new life in the Free World. Later, UNHCR’s
operational scope was expanded to assist and protect refugees fleeing from
war and violence in the developing world, particularly from anti-colonial
struggles such as in Algeria, and from protracted superpower proxy wars, such
as in Afghanistan and Angola. Refugees from the developing world were sel-
dom given the opportunity to resettle (Indochinese refugees were a significant
exception). However, since there was a superpower interest in most of these
conflicts, there was also an interest in hosting and supporting the refugees
created by these conflicts, both the civilian refugees and the ‘freedom fighters’
among them.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of Cold War superpower
rivalry offered new opportunities for dealing with refugee crises, while also
generating new displacement. Most superpower proxy wars came to an end,
although some proved to have a life of their own. In the 1990s, violent con-
flicts usually emanated from and were fuelled by local or regional sources.
At the same time, these conflicts were also more easily contained regionally,
since global powers in most cases did not consider their vital national inter-
ests affected by these wars. In the cases where major powers became involved
in conflicts in the 1990s they usually did so as peace-brokers, peace-keepers,
peace-enforces and supporters of humanitarian action. This changed again in
the post-9/11 era, when US-led coalitions initiated major wars in Afghanistan
(2001) and Iraq (2003). The US also took a more aggressive stance in other
conflicts, such as in Somalia, where it backed and provided substantial sup-
port for an Ethiopian invasion in late 2006, and in Libya in 2011, where it was
a major contributor to a military intervention force sanctioned by the Security
Council.
Post-Cold War violent conflicts have typically been internal rather than
inter-state wars, or a combination of the two, such as the two wars in the
DRC in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Contemporary wars tend to include
13
One exception was the Hungarian refugee crisis in 1956, where Hungary co-operated with
UNHCR in the repatriation of those refugees who wished to return.
a complex array of local and international warring factions, whose activities

spread across borders to regionalize the conflict, and whose violence hits civil-
ians harder than combatants—and usually deliberately so. In such ‘new wars’
(Kaldor, 2006) or complex emergencies (Keen, 2008), UNHCR has operated
in a highly fluid, complex and dangerous environment. In complex emergen-
cies, a host of rebel, government and paramilitary factions, with differing and
often hostile attitudes to humanitarian relief, must all be taken into account
in UNHCR’s operational decisions. In addition, there has been a proliferation
of international actors involved in trying to deal with such conflicts, includ-
ing global and regional powers, regional and international peacekeepers and
mediators, other UN agencies, international criminal tribunals, international
humanitarian, development and human rights NGOs, etc. The humanitarian
(market) space has become a crowded one.
A second development in the structure of international society that
impacted on UNHCR’s work was the creation and expansion of an interna-
tional human rights regime. This process started with the UN Charter in 1945
and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It gained momentum
in the 1970s with the coming into legal force of the two separate covenants on
human rights, the UN Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights,
and the UN Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. It accelerated again after
the end of the Cold War, when human rights abuses became subject to war
crimes courts (for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Cambodia), extradi-
tion procedures (e.g. the Pinochet case) and humanitarian interventions
(in, for instance, northern Iraq, Somalia, Kosovo and Sierra Leone). At the
beginning of the twenty-first century, over one hundred human rights instru-
ments existed in the forms of declarations, treaties, codes of conduct, courts,
etc. (Weiss, Forsythe and Coate, 2001: 141 and 149–63). As a result of this
institutional development, and despite disagreements on how human rights
norms should be interpreted and applied, an international culture of human
rights has evolved, with a ‘widely shared common language, an inclusive moral
vocabulary and an authoritative and well-developed normative structure from
which very few groups are prepared to try and exempt themselves’ (Hurrell,
1999: 299).
The institutionalization of human rights in international society also
affected international refugee politics. The Human Rights Covenants
embedded the more narrowly defined and narrowly applied refugee rights
in the universal language of human rights norms, thus providing scope for
the widening of the international community’s will and ability to deal with
refugee problems in more ways than providing asylum once flight was a
fait accomplí. This became particularly apparent in the first few years after
the end of the Cold War, when human rights principles became part of the
arguments used to legitimize humanitarian interventions in northern Iraq

and Somalia. Human rights, and the restrictions these rights place on states’
sovereignty, also enabled the international community to switch its atten-
tion from the obligations of refugee host countries to the responsibilities of
refugee sending countries, emphasizing refugee policies that deal with the
human rights situation that forces people to flee, and impedes their repa-
triation, rather than reactive and palliative policies catering for refugees
in exile.
The Changing Nature of Refugee Flows
Although fluctuating yearly, the number of refugees, globally, increased steadily

in the years after UNHCR’s inception, and dramatically in the 1980s and early
1990s, until it peaked at over 18 million in 1992. It dropped to under 12 mil-
lion in 1999, then fluctuating mostly around 10–12 million in the 2000s.14 If
we consider all ‘people of concern’ to UNHCR, rather than only refugees, the
growth is more dramatic. However, the numbers are difficult to interpret for
two reasons: First, UNHCR is not involved with all forced migrants of the
world and its way of counting the displaced has changed over time. Second,
the statistics may reflect the agency’s operational expansion (into aiding IDPs,
returnees and war-affected populations) as much as a growth in the scale of
forced displacement.
Another trend of the 1990s was that particular forced population move-
ments seemed larger and more sudden than previously (Crisp, 1999). During
the Kosovo war, around 800,000 people fled the province in a matter of weeks
(UNHCR, 2000: 234). The Rwandan genocide and ensuing civil war created an
even more dramatic outpouring of refugees. Around 250,000 people crossed
into Tanzania in 24 hours on April 28, 1994, while three months later more
than one million refugees flooded into the eastern Zaire town of Goma in
four days (Refugees Magazine, 1997b: 8). Most recently, the Syrian refugee
crisis has escalated, from 230,671 refugees in September 2012 to two million
in September 2013. However, vast and sudden refugee flows are not a new
phenomenon. The rapid exodus of Palestinian refugees in 1948, and the ten
million Bengali refugees from East Pakistan that entered India between April
and December 1971, are only two early examples. This said, the frequency of
massive and sudden outflows in the 1990s was unprecedented in the lifetime
of UNHCR, making it a particularly eventful decade in the agency’s existence.
14
UNHCR counted around 6 million refugees in 1980, 10 million in 1983 and 15 million
in 1990.
It is often argued that, with the arrival of the jet age in the late 1970s, refugee
movements became a truly global crisis, affecting every corner of the world,
including the privileged North (Loescher, 1993). This perception became
widespread once asylum seekers began to make their way in larger numbers
over longer distances to the airports and harbours of wealthy industrial-
ized countries. However, although refugees and other displaced persons can
be found in most countries of the world, most refugee movements remain
regional, not global. For instance, the only mass flows into western Europe in
the post-Cold War period have come from the Balkans, within the borders of
Europe. The other flows much debated by European politicians and media, are
more accurately described as streams—steady, but limited—of asylum seekers
hailing from all corners of the world.
The statistics bear out this fact. In 2013, 97 percent of Syria’s two million
refugees resided in neighbouring countries, especially Jordan, Lebanon and
Turkey (UNHCR, 2013). Taking refugee figures from 2006, another turbu-
lent year, the two largest refugee populations originated from Iraq (1.5 mil-
lion) and Afghanistan (2.1 million). In both cases the vast majority sought
refuge in neighbouring countries. Of the Iraqi refugees, 1.2 million settled in
two countries only: Jordan and Syria (UNHCR, 2007: 7). Almost two million
Afghani refugees lived in Pakistan and Iran. In contrast, the country hosting
the third largest Afghani refugee population was the UK, with 23,069 persons
(UNHCR, 2007: table 5). In 2006, Pakistan and Iran together hosted one-fifth
of the world refugee population (UNHCR, 2007: 6).
Even when looking at asylum figures, the regional trend remains strong: In
2006, 19,000 new asylum claims were lodged by Zimbabweans in neighbour-
ing South Africa, compared to 2,100 in the UK (the former colonial power)
(UNHCR, 2007: 10). Most Zimbabweans fleeing the political oppression
and economic collapse of their country do not lodge asylum claims at all but
enter illegally into South Africa, making the regional nature of the flight from
Zimbabwe even more pronounced (Hammerstad, 2012). Of the main coun-
tries of origin of asylum seekers, it is only Chinese asylum seekers who tend
to travel further than their own immediate region to lodge their applications
(UNHCR, 2006b: 7–8; and 2006c: tables 1, 2 and 6).
Noting the regional nature of both refugee and asylum seeker flows, it
becomes apparent that the notion of a singular global crisis is overstated.
However, even though refugees and asylum seekers arrive in much lower
numbers in the industrialized than they do in the developing world, their
arrival in the former was both a new and unwelcome phenomenon. The intro-
duction of ‘jet-age’ refugees moving on their own accord from the developing
world to the West in the 1970s coincided with a period of increasing strain on
Western European economies and social welfare systems, a strain European
governments dealt with by, among other things, closing their borders to new
immigration (Loescher, 1993: 93–94). Unlike resettled refugees, Western host
states had no control over who or how many asylum seekers arrived at their
borders. As the number of asylum seekers increased, gradually in the 1980s
and massively in the early 1990s, the problem of asylum soared to the top of
state agendas, especially in Western Europe. In 1976, the number of asylum
seekers to Europe was approximately 20,000 (Loescher, 1993: 111). Growing
throughout the 1980s, it peaked in 1992 with 667,770 new arrivals in the
European Union (UNHCR, 1999b: table V.1).
Since 1992 asylum figures have dropped dramatically—due to a series of dra-
conian measures taken by many states to keep this maligned and unwanted cate-
gory of migrants out. In 2005, the 25 EU countries experienced the lowest asylum
figures since 1988. In North America and Oceania, asylum applications dropped
by 54 percent and 75 percent, respectively, in the period between 2001 and 2005
(UNHCR, 2006c: table 1). Global numbers have fluctuated since. A steep rise in
2008 was due to the number of asylum applications in South Africa quadrupling
to 207,000 claims—more than half of which came from Zimbabwe (UNHCR,
2009: 15), not due to increases in traditional Western asylum countries.
Finally, distinctions between refugees and other displaced or war affected
people became less important in the post-Cold War period. The crossing of an
international border had less significance for the refugees’ situation than before.
Forced displacement in Africa is the best example of this trend. During the
wars of independence/against white minority rule and the post-independence
civil wars of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, refugees who made it across the
border into neighbouring states were usually put up in fairly orderly camps
in areas designated by their host authorities and supported by UNHCR and
NGOs. When the wars finally were over, the refugees repatriated. There were
many examples of armed refugee groups, such as, for instance, Rwandan Tutsi
refugees in Uganda and the African National Congress (ANC) camps in South
Africa’s neighbouring states. But most such armed refugee groups had their
host states’ blessing, as allies in regional or global power struggles.
Deteriorating economic and political conditions in many African countries
during the 1980s and 1990s changed this situation. In the 1990s, the most pro-
tracted displacement crises in Africa were in regions made up by states riddled
with economic problems, weak or collapsed authority structures, and civil
war. The displaced populations of one country often fuelled the problems of
their neighbours, and significant parts of the region’s populations were on the
move within and across borders at any one time. Such war-and-displacement
nexuses were found between the West African states of Sierra Leone, Guinea,
Liberia and, later, Côte d’Ivoire; in the Great Lakes region of Africa; between
Sudan and Chad; and between Somalia and its neighbouring border regions.
As a consequence of such deteriorating conditions, the interests of states

regarding displaced populations also began to change, generally hardening
their attitudes towards refugees and asylum seekers. This made UNHCR’s
quest to find solutions to refugee problems increasingly complicated.
State Perceptions of the Impact of Refugee Flows on

their Interests
UNHCR’s Statute states that the agency’s tasks of protection and solutions must
be sought in close co-operation with states and that the agency shall endeavour
to encourage state co-operation and action on behalf of refugees. The agency
is also dependent on state donations. Only a small proportion of adminis-
trative expenditure comes from the UN budget. All other expenditures are
financed through voluntary contributions. The budget expansion over the past
two decades has not only enabled UNHCR to engage in an increasing number
of humanitarian emergencies, but also made it more reliant on the political
interests of its donors. For these Statutory and financial reasons, UNHCR has
always performed its tasks in close cooperation with states.
UNHCR’s successes and expansion as an agency have been closely connected
with how states have viewed its efforts. For instance, the US was suspicious
of UNHCR in the agency’s first few years, and was inclined to steer clear of
another presumed inefficient and expensive UN bureaucracy. The Hungarian
refugee exodus in 1956 changed this, not only because UNHCR handled the
crisis skilfully, but because the agency’s actions fitted well with the Cold War
preferences of the US and its allies (Loescher, 1993; UNHCR, 2000: 26–34).
From 1956 onwards the US became UNHCR’s prime financial and political
supporter, an essential factor in the agency’s subsequent expansion.
During the Cold War period’s relatively stable ideological and military fault
lines, it was fairly straightforward for UNHCR to know the preferences of
donor and host states. Most refugee movements would fall within the sphere
of interest of one or the other superpower. The less predictable dynamics of
global politics in the post-Cold War period, together with changes in the
nature of refugee movements, discussed above, also led to shifts in how ref-
ugee host states preferred to deal with refugee problems. These changes did
not arrive overnight with the end of the Cold War, but gradually from the
mid-1980s onwards. They may be summarized as follows:
Richer, more powerful states, particularly in Europe, increasingly wished
to deter refugees and asylum seekers from crossing their borders. Developing
states, even those with a previous excellent record of refugee hospitality, fol-
lowed suit. For instance, Tanzania’s then Deputy Minister of Home Affairs,
E. Mwambulukutu (quoted in Mahiga, 1997: 15), defended his country’s

forced repatriation in 1996 of Rwandan refugees:
Hosting refugees has become a heavier and more painful burden than ever
before to countries of asylum like Tanzania. Protecting and assisting refugees has
brought new risks to national security, exacerbated tensions between states and
caused extensive damage to the environment.
The fate of the Rwandan refugees is an example of a general trend towards

involuntary repatriation: according to one study, six percent of all repatria-
tions in 1994 were involuntary, while in 1996, the number increased to 30 per-
cent (Preston, 1999: 19). UNHCR has not approved of this practice, but has
loosened its doctrine on voluntary repatriation. While it would previously
maintain that repatriation should be a strictly voluntary decision made by the
refugees, the agency now takes on the task itself to assess and decide when the
conditions are right for repatriation (Loescher, 2001: 283–4). UNHCR also
began in the 1990s to refer to repatriation not only as the preferred solution
to refugee problems, but also the most feasible one—earlier, local integra-
tion and resettlement had been seen as more practical. In the early 1970s, for
instance, UNHCR (1971: 16–17) declared that voluntary repatriation is ‘the
primary solution’, although integration into the asylum country ‘is the most
realistic, practical and durable solution today’. In the past two decades, the
option of local integration has become rare, so that voluntary repatriation is
often both the primary solution and the only solution available to refugees. In
one controversial repatriation project, UNHCR assisted the return of 229,500
Rohingya refugees to Myanmar, without being able to monitor their security
and well-being once returned (UNHCR, 1999b: table II.2).
The end of superpower rivalry made it possible for states, especially the rich
and powerful states of the West, to employ policies that more closely mirrored
their interest in keeping refugees and asylum seekers out. These policies con-
centrated to an unprecedented degree on the refugee-producing state, to facili-
tate the prevention, containment or, when that is too late, the reversal of refugee
flows. Through the funding of large-scale humanitarian assistance operations
in combination with military intervention, Western states attempted to protect
and contain (potential) refugees as close to their homes as possible. As a result,
UNHCR increasingly provided relief in the midst of war or violent conflicts,
sometimes against the wishes of important local political and military actors.
Donor states were explicit in stating their preference for refugee containment
rather than asylum.
There were many large repatriation movements in the 1990s and 2000s, and
the number of refugees declined steadily until around 2006. But this positive
trend had its negative counterparts: First, the number of internally displaced

grew rapidly as the number of people fleeing across borders went down.
Second, the lack of resettlement and local integration as available solutions,
combined with the intransigence of many conflicts, lead to a rise in so-called
protracted refugee situations, where refugees were warehoused for years and
even decades with no solutions in sight (Loescher and Milner, 2005). Finally,
there were criticisms that hasty repatriations not only threatened the safety
and security of returnees, but could jeopardize fragile peace agreements and
contribute to further fighting and displacement.
UNHCR’s institutional features and

bureaucratic development
This book does not provide an in-depth organizational study of UNHCR. This
has been done elsewhere (Loescher, 2001), and it suffices to paint here a rough
picture of the internal processes contributing to the evolution of UNHCR’s
policies and discourse. In common with the other factors discussed in this
chapter, UNHCR’s institutional features have not remained constant. First
of all, the size of the organization has grown immensely: Goedhart, the first
High Commissioner for Refugees, recalled that on opening his Office on 1
January 1951 he ‘found three empty rooms and a secretary and had to start
from scratch’ (quoted in UNHCR, 1971b: 28). Six decades later, in 2013, the
refugee organization employed over 7,700 local and international staff work-
ing in more than 125 countries. The most dramatic growth took place under
the leadership of High Commissioner Sadako Ogata. During her tenure, from
December 1990 until December 2000, both expenditure and staffing levels
doubled.15 This rapid growth led to increased managerial and communication
problems within the agency in the late 1990s, since not all parts of UNHCR’s
organizational structure managed to keep up with the pace of expansion.
The criticism of UNHCR’s reaction to the Kosovo refugee crisis, which over-
whelmed the agency in the first few days, often came down to managerial and
co-ordination problems (Suhrke et al., 2000: x; UNHCR, 2000c).
Due, among other things, to such problems, UNHCR was forced by its
donors at the end of the 1990s to cut back on staffing levels as well as on
programme expenditure. The instructions given by the Secretary-General
15
It is difficult to find reliable data on UNHCR’s earlier staffing levels, but figures from an
internal UNHCR database suggest the agency employed 2,496 persons in 1990, 5,467 persons in
1997, and 5,060 in 2000.
and donors to the new High Commissioner, Ruud Lubbers, in 2001, were to
scale down, increase efficiency and cut back on bureaucracy.16 His successor,
Antonio Guterres, who took the helm in 2005, received similar instructions to
streamline the agency’s expensive and expansive bureaucracy at the Geneva
headquarters. As a result, although staff levels continued to grow, there has
been a marked change in where staff are employed. Field offices have grown
while headquarters have shrunk, and the number of nationally employed staff
dwarfs that of the agency’s international staff, with national staff constituting
more than seven out of every ten UNHCR employees.
UNHCR has always been in a state of more or less acute financial insecu-
rity. The needs of refugees (and others ‘of concern’), and consequently those
of UNHCR, have always been bigger than the funding the agency has been
able to solicit. Some periods have been more critical than others. In the 1960s
and early 1970s, UNHCR’s operational scope was still small and resources
for its (limited) operations relatively readily forthcoming. In the latter half of
the 1980s, on the other hand, UNHCR experienced its worst financial crisis
(UNHCR, 1990: Chapter III, paras. 126–32; Loescher, 2001: 262–4). Under
the leadership of Jean-Pierre Hocké (High Commissioner from 1986 to 1989),
UNHCR became perceived by donors as over-staffed (especially at the mana-
gerial level), wasteful and rigidly inefficient (Morris, 1990: 48–57; Loescher,
2001: 262–4). Although displacement crises were steeply on the rise, match-
ing donations to UNHCR were not forthcoming, due to a lack of trust in the
agency by major donor states. Hocké was more or less forced out by EXCOM
in October 1989 and replaced as High Commissioner by Thorvald Stoltenberg
in January 1990.17 His commencement in office coincided with the end of the
Cold War, enabling a ‘new start’ for UNHCR. With a career deeply steeped in
politics, as Norway’s Defence, then Foreign, Minister, followed by a stint as
the country’s ambassador to the UN, Stoltenberg introduced during his nine
month tenure as High Commissioner the themes that proved, in a period of
optimistic beliefs in the possibility of a ‘new world order’, both invigorating for
the agency and popular with its donors.
Stoltenberg’s successor, Sadako Ogata, a Japanese International Relations
professor, picked up where he left and led UNHCR on the path towards an
all-round humanitarian agency. She was, as her comments and policy choices
showed, determined to place the agency firmly at the centre of the international
effort to prevent refugee flows by dealing with their ‘root causes’. Accordingly,
16
Reported in interviews with several UNHCR officials, winter 2000–1.
17
Stoltenberg did not hide the crisis the UNHCR was emerging from, talking about the
need for structural reform ‘if we are to regain our credibility with the international community’
(Stoltenberg, 1990).
she added the assistance and protection of war-affected populations to the

agency’s core activities. This was an important departure: as late as in 1986,
UNHCR stated publicly that the issue of causes, albeit important, lay outside
the agency’s mandate. Its statutory role was purely reactive, setting in once a
refugee crisis was a fact (Hocké, 1986). Ogata also continuously underlined
the relationship between displacement and international peace and security.
Under her tenure, UNHCR regained its early reputation as one of the more
successful and efficient of the UN agencies, especially during the agency’s high
profile operation in Bosnia. It was Ogata’s aim not only for the refugee agency
to remain relevant to state interests and needs, but to become a central actor
in post-Cold War global security politics. Thus the role of individual High
Commissioners, especially when they are perceived as strong and competent
and when their beliefs and choices correspond well with trends and thoughts
in their external environment (the two often go together), may have a signifi-
cant impact on the success or failure of their organization.
Individual High Commissioners are also important due to the staffing and
structural decisions they make. For instance, High Commissioner Ogata,
intensely interested in the political nature of refugee problems (and thus the
need for political means with which to solve them), was at the helm of a dras-
tic down-scaling of the agency’s previously mighty Division for International
Protection.18 Through this process, protection (conservatively defined) minded
international lawyers came no longer to dominate UNHCR. In the 2000s, the
International Protection division was somewhat rehabilitated, and the role of
‘Assistant High Commissioner for International Protection’ created. This coin-
cided, not surprisingly, with a shift in UNHCR discourse back towards a more
non-political, rights based language.
No High Commissioner, regardless how strong, has managed to win all
UNHCR staff over to his or her own views. During the Ogata years, for instance,
there was a relatively small clique around the High Commissioner who shared
her views, while the rest of the organization was divided into what can be
denoted ‘legalist’ and ‘pragmatist’ camps. Members of the former were typically
the older generation, educated as lawyers and positioned at the middle-senior
level of management, such as bureau leaders and, particularly prominent in
the Division for International Protection. The latter were more typically the
younger generation, educated in political science and International Relations
and positioned at the lower management levels and in field offices.
This disagreement among staff on what are, and should be, UNHCR’s guid-
ing principles has been related to the agency’s fast growth and operational
Although Hocké before her had started this process.

18
expansion. Unlike the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC),

new staff do not go through a thorough training programme where princi-
ples and working methods are drilled. Unclear communication structures
within the agency have allowed the difference between the priorities of High
Commissioners and those of staff, particularly in field offices, to diverge
considerably. Disagreements have a tendency to come to a head at the end
of a High Commissioner’s tenure. For instance, Ogata received increasingly
open internal criticism from legalists at the end of her tenure; while Lubbers’
‘Convention plus’ agenda received short shrift the moment he left the HQ
building. The increasingly ‘field-heavy’ nature of the organization has only
served to widen such communication gaps.19
It is no coincidence that UNHCR’s ambition to become a global security
actor occurred at the same time as the agency acquired a leadership with a
political science background rather than international legal experts. For the
former, the language of security and interests came naturally, while the latter,
staunchly committed to political neutrality, regarded security reasoning as a
particularly unsavoury aspect of politicking.
Conclusion
This chapter’s account of UNHCR’s evolution in size, mandate, operational

tasks and scope has shown two things. First, that this evolution has been
gradual, not the result of one sudden leap in 1989–1990 into an entirely new
approach to refugee problems. The events that led to and followed the end of
the Cold War had a strong impact on UNHCR, but many of the agency’s ‘new’
approaches of the 1990s had been tried, or at least formulated and discussed,
before. Second, that none of the four groups of factors described above can
alone account for this evolution. Instead we must look at the dynamic interac-
tion between them.
The remaining chapters of Part Two will discuss the changes in UNHCR’s
discourse since its inception. They will show a similar gradual (but somewhat
accelerating) evolution in the agency’s ideas, beliefs and perceptions of the
refugee problem, an evolution closely linked to a concern that has always been,
and will continue to remain, at the front of the agency’s mind: the need to
remain relevant to the interests of the main (mostly state) actors in interna-
tional refugee politics.
19
The information in this section is to a large extent based on interviews with UNHCR staff.
The interviews took place in Geneva in the winter of 2000–01 and again in spring 2008.
5
The 1950s to 1970s: Timidity and

Restraint in UNHCR’s Discourse
UNHCR’s dramatic transition from a timid, non-operational guardian of

international refugee law to a global security actor is best understood by inves-
tigating the dynamic interrelationship between the refugee agency’s official
discourse and its experiences on the ground, in particular refugee emergen-
cies. But this interrelationship cannot be examined before we have ascertained
how exactly UNHCR’s official discourse used to sound, and how it has changed
over time. Thus this and the next three chapters provide a detailed account of
the evolution of UNHCR’s discourse—revealing some startling changes over
the decades in how the refugee agency perceives and portrays the problem of
displacement and its own role in dealing with it.
The present chapter dissects UNHCR’s formal discourse over the three dec-
ades from its inception in 1951 to 1980. It shows a discourse in continual evo-
lution but which adheres to strict interpretations of a non-political, neutral and
non-operational ethos. This discourse effectively constricted UNHCR’s actions
and ensured the agency remained small, anonymous and relatively uncontrover-
sial – albeit viewed as on the Western side of the Cold War divide. The next two
chapters will show how the agency’s discourse expanded and regrouped around
new concepts and agendas in the 1980s (chapter 6), before clustering after the end
of the Cold War around a new core concept, ‘security’ (chapter 7). Finally, chapter 8
covers the 2000s, a period marked by the renewal of a discourse of protection.
The overall question guiding this intellectual history of UNHCR is why a
security discourse became so prominent in the 1990s, and then receded almost
as abruptly again in the 2000s. The analysis of this chapter reveals that the term
‘security’ was almost completely absent from UNHCR’s official discourse in
the 1950s to 1970s. The analysis of UNHCR’s ‘pre-security’ discourse begins
with a brief account of the 1950s and 1960s, before a more thorough investiga-
tion is made into UNHCR publications and documents in the 1970s.
The independent role of discourse in

shaping action
It is necessary to start with a caveat. The novelty of UNHCR’s security dis-

course must be distinguished from the question of whether the security impli-
cations of refugee movements are a new phenomenon. The first is a question
of the conceptual framework within which UNHCR makes sense of, contex-
tualizes and presents the problems it faces and the policies it employs. The
second is a question of actions and events in the environment in which the
agency operates. If the refugee problem did not have a salient security dimen-
sion before 1990, then we would have to conclude that the evolution of a secu-
rity discourse within UNHCR in the post-Cold War period simply reflects the
fact that the refugee problem itself changed fundamentally with the end of the
Cold War. This would mean that a study of UNHCR’s official discourse would
be superfluous. If discursive changes merely reflect a changing operational
environment, then a study of this environment would be enough to account
for the direction in which UNHCR’s language and policies develop. Discourse
would have no independent effect.
This is not the case however. While UNHCR’s security discourse is a
post-Cold War phenomenon, throughout the agency’s existence the refugee
problem has had important security dimensions, as made clear in Part One of
this book. Furthermore, UNHCR itself was deeply involved in highly fraught
security situations throughout its history, although the frequency of such situ-
ations has increased in the past two decades. But the increased preoccupa-
tion with security does not merely reflect changing operational circumstances.
First, when investigating UNHCR’s earlier involvement in international secu-
rity crises it is hard to avoid noticing how the refugee agency goes out of its
way to defuse and de-politicize the situation. In 1956 for instance, the agency
was already placed in the middle of a major international security crisis. The
Cold War tensions between East and West heightened dramatically when
Soviet troops crushed the Hungarian uprising and a large Hungarian refugee
exodus ensued to Austria and Yugoslavia. By agreeing to let UNHCR handle
the refugee crisis as a purely humanitarian problem, the Soviet and Western
Blocs took some of the tension out of a highly explosive political situation.
Thus the UNHCR operation, framed in a non-political manner, played an
important part in the resolution of a serious international security crisis at the
height of the Cold War (Loescher, 1993: 56).
Other examples of this attempt at taking refugee situations out of the sphere
of security politics can be found in UNHCR’s handling of the war in East
Pakistan (later Bangladesh) in 1971–72, a war characterized by massacres of
The 1950s to 1970s: Timidity and Restraint in UNHCR’s Discourse 95
hundreds of thousands of civilians and the mass refugee exodus of 10 mil-
lion East Bengalis (Bass, 2013). Despite India threatening, then launching, a
war to enable the refugees to return, none of the Reports covering this period
make references to security. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, UNHCR was
also trying to protect Cambodian refugees in Thailand,1 while a war involving
Khmer Rouge rebels and Cambodian government forces, as well as Thai and
Vietnamese forces, was raging. UNHCR Reports describing these operations
do not mention security problems at all. Instead we find dry accounts, filled
with statistics, of UNHCR’s exact activities of repatriation, resettlement, coun-
selling, self-sufficiency programmes, etc.
Second, UNHCR involvement with refugee populations that are politically
and militarily active in inter-state politics is far from a post-Cold War phenom-
enon. In the late 1970s and the 1980s, UNHCR supplied assistance to ‘refugee
warrior’ communities such as the Afghan Mujaheddin in Pakistan. Several
Mujaheddin ‘refugee villages’ were even equipped with anti-aircraft weapons
(UNHCR, 2000: 120). In 1979, the representative to the General Assembly
from Afghanistan’s Soviet-backed regime accused UNHCR of contravening
the refugee Convention by providing assistance to ‘fugitive insurgent elements
in Pakistan’ (UN, 1979: 920). Indeed, in the refugee camps, Afghan refugees
had to become members of one of the Mujaheddin groups in order to be issued
with ID cards that entitled them to refugee aid.2 A similar situation could be
found in Southern Africa in the 1980s, where the armed liberation groups of
the African National Congress (ANC) and Pan Africanist Congress of Azania
(PAC), fighting South Africa’s Apartheid regime, did not only receive assis-
tance from UNHCR, but were given official status as UNHCR’s operational
partners (see e.g. UNHCR, 1987: para. 138).
Third, states barring refugees from asylum due to (alleged) security consid-
erations have been a perennial problem for UNHCR. For instance, Thai mili-
tary forces violently returned tens of thousands of Cambodian refugees into a
minefield in 1979. Hundreds, maybe thousands, died (Robinson, 1998: 45–50).
The Thai government declared on several occasions that Indochinese refugees
(whom it chose to call ‘displaced persons’) were threats to national security.
UNHCR responded by making a few mild protests against push-backs and by
searching more intensely for refugee resettlement opportunities to discourage
the Thai authorities from sealing the country’s borders (Robinson, 1998: 110).
Fourth, from the moment UNHCR became operational in the field in the
1960s, it had to deal with the question of staff security. There has been an
1
Most of the Cambodian refugees were assisted by UNBRO, but UNHCR had responsibility
for particular camps singled out as resettlement camps (Robinson, 1998).
2
Interview with senior UNHCR official. Interview no. 2007A.
increase in attacks on UNHCR personnel in the post-Cold War period, coin-

ciding with the increased involvement of the agency in providing relief and
protection in war zones. At least 21 of the agency’s international staff mem-
bers have been killed in deliberate and calculated armed attacks in the period
1990–2006.3 According to Tennant et al (2010) the situation has not improved
since. The number of killings increases dramatically when including national
staff.4 But is this an unprecedented development? Many UNHCR staff were
attacked and even killed by warring factions hostile to their actions before the
targeting of humanitarian personnel during the Bosnia war made the tackling
of this problem a priority task within the agency. Congo has a long history of
claiming the lives of humanitarian workers. In 1964, a UNHCR official was
murdered while trying to protect refugees in one of the Rwandan Tutsi refu-
gee camps in the Kivu area—the same area that was to become host to over a
million Rwandan Hutu refugees in 1994 (UNHCR, 2000: 206). The immense
growth in the number of UNHCR operational staff, together with an increased
UNHCR presence in war zones, has clearly made a considerable contribution
to the increase in the absolute number of security incidents and deaths. Since
there are no UNHCR-specific statistics available, it is hard to gauge whether
killings have increased proportionately to staff levels.
Fifth, there has also been a change in organizational outlook. In an interview,
one long-serving UNHCR staff member pointed out that UNHCR officials
have always encountered dangerous and hostile situations in the course of their
work. While earlier it was felt to be inappropriate to complain about this ‘inevi-
table’ part of the job, in recent years it has become a top priority issue within
the agency, and within the UN family as a whole.5 Another senior UNHCR
official told of a security incident in the early 2000s that miraculously left him
and other UNHCR staff involved unharmed—and able and willing to continue
their job as before. His response at the time was to play it down and get on with
the work. But the staff security and risk management procedures put in place in
the years after, would have forced him to suspend activity in the area.6
To sum up, the observations of two long-serving UNHCR staff recounted
above illustrate the change that has taken place within the refugee agency in
3
UNHCR (1998: xi) counted 15 from 1990 to 1998. Since then, three UNHCR international
staff members were murdered in West Timor in 2000, and another in Guinea the same year. In
2003, an international staff member was murdered in a targeted drive-by shooting in Afghanistan;
while in 2006 an international staff member was killed in an ambush on an UNHCR compound
in South Sudan.
4
To take an extreme example, 33 national staff were killed or died during the Great Lakes
crisis between 1994 and 1997 (UNHCR, 1997b).
5
Interview with UNHCR Official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2000-2001B.
6
Interview with UNHCR Official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008F
terms of security awareness. In the 1970s, UNHCR would once in a while

discreetly acknowledge a particular security problem, but generally play it
down. From the mid-1990s onwards, the agency would openly discuss secu-
rity threats and challenges in both general terms and in specific circumstances,
and it would frame the challenges it met, including staff safety, within the gen-
eral framework of a security discourse.
Was there Ever a Golden Age of Non-Political

Humanitarianism?
The lack of security language in the 1970s may indicate the existence of a golden
age of ‘humanitarian’ discourse within UNHCR, an era to which some of the
agency’s critics wistfully allude (especially Chimni, 1998b). However, Chimni
does not define what the components of such a humanitarian discourse would
have been, apart from emphasizing concepts such as ‘protection’, ‘humanity’
and ‘solidarity’. The remainder of this chapter will investigate whether the first
decades of UNHCR’s existence in fact constituted such a golden age. The answer
on the whole is ‘no’. Firstly, the agency’s early discourse is so timid and legalistic
that it would be difficult to muster great enthusiasm for it. Second, a focus on
humanitarian ideals, especially the centrality of human rights, is in fact a rela-
tively new trend itself, finding its place in UNHCR vocabulary not that long
before the concept of security did so. And third, as the next chapter will show,
not all aspects of this traditional discourse disappeared with the evolution of
UNHCR’s security discourse. Finally, as we will see in Chapter 8, UNHCR may
in some ways be closer today to the humanitarian discourse whose loss Chimni
lamented in 1998, than it ever was in the ‘golden age’ of the 1970s.
The early years (1951–69): Fidelit y to the

Statute
UNHCR’s early discourse, compared to later periods, is remarkably stable,

characterized by its strong reliance on the norms and principles set out in its
Statute and in the 1951 Refugee Convention. As a consequence, the agency’s
early discourse is mainly legalistic, interpreting all its activities according to
how they accord with the tenets of the Convention, Statute and other interna-
tional legislation that affect refugees.
Moreover, UNHCR’s early discourse contains a more narrow understand-
ing of what constitutes relevant legal issues than the agency and other refugee
experts would espouse today. In general, UNHCR’s early discourse is oriented

towards the legal obligations states have towards each other, rather than any
legal obligation states have towards individual human beings. Human rights are
almost completely absent from the refugee agency’s early discourse. Repeated
mention is made of specific refugee rights, which are set out in the Convention,
but these rights are usually understood from a statist point of view. The Reports
set out in detail the rights which particular host states have granted refugees,
not universal rights that refugee individuals can claim against their host state.
The refugee rights most often referred to are subsumed under the category of
‘social rights’ and include the right to work, social security and other measures
enabling the refugee to become self-supporting and economically useful to his
host country.
A fundamental concern with international agreements, conventions
and treaties pervades the descriptions of almost all UNHCR activities. For
instance, the task of providing international protection to refugees is primarily
seen to be promoted by state accession to and ratification of international legal
instruments relevant to the refugee problem. All UNHCR Reports and Notes
studied from this period contain long sections on the status and progression
of international legal instruments, often under the heading of ‘international
protection activities’. All the Notes studied are dedicated to developments in
international refugee legislation.
Although the 1950s and 1960s were a period of stability in UNHCR’s core
concepts and ideas, one important innovation in its official discourse took
place. A material assistance function was not mentioned in UNHCR’s Statute,
but nevertheless quickly became part of the agency’s mandate. Accordingly,
references to material assistance to refugees, particularly in the early emer-
gency phase of a mass refugee influx, increased rapidly in UNHCR documents
throughout the period.
As refugees’ need for material assistance became a stronger concern,
UNHCR did its utmost to describe its new assistance function in terms that
would not contravene the text of the Statute. This was done by emphasizing
that the refugee agency itself would have nothing to do with the practical
distribution of aid. Thus another central idea in UNHCR’s early discourse is
that of being non-operational:7 UNHCR’s tasks are to set standards for refugee
protection and assistance, and to plan, co-ordinate, supervise and sometimes
finance the practical refugee relief work performed by host states, voluntary
agencies and specialized UN agencies. UNHCR itself does not perform prac-
tical tasks, such as setting up and running refugee camps, but functions as
7
E.g. UNHCR (1953: para. 5) states that ‘it was clearly the intention of the Assembly, in set-
ting up my Office, not to create another operational organization’.
an employer for numerous implementing or operational partners. The Reports

highlight in particular the importance of NGO partners, praising ‘the innu-
merable voluntary agencies which form the link between the international
bodies and the refugees’ (UNHCR, 1966: para. 4). UNHCR’s own responsibil-
ity is ‘to act as an intermediary of goodwill and as a catalyst by enlisting the
necessary support from members of the international community and from
other sources, and by initiating and co-ordinating measures of assistance as
may be necessary’ (UNHCR, 1966: para. 70). The driving force behind all of
UNHCR’s actions is not material assistance, but the basic principles of ‘legal
protection which still forms the essence of [the High Commissioner’s] man-
date’ (UNHCR, 1966: para. 3).
Another main characteristic of UNHCR’s early discourse is its literal reading
of its Statute’s demand that it ‘exercise its activities in a non-political, humani-
tarian and social spirit’ (UNHCR, 1961). Such formulations are repeated in
all Reports from this period. The non-political provision in the Statute is both
vehemently adhered to and narrowly defined. The agency is careful not to crit-
icize states overtly or voice any opinion that cannot be firmly anchored in the
provisions of the 1951 Convention. Thus UNHCR reminds all states of their
legal obligations towards refugees, but does not accuse any state in particular
of eschewing those obligations. This cautious and legalistic approach ensures
that the agency cannot be accused of meddling in the internal affairs of sover-
eign states (and thus of ‘acting politically’).
The question of human rights is scarcely mentioned during UNHCR’s first
two decades. One explanation for this is that human rights legislation was in
its early stages in this period. Human rights—unlike specific refugee rights—
are not mentioned in the 1951 Refugee Convention8 or in UNHCR’s Statute,
and UNHCR’s official discourse relies, as we have seen, heavily on these two
legal frameworks in the 1950s and 1960s. During the course of the period, and
particularly towards the end of the 1960s, there is however a gradual increase
in the agency’s interest in human rights, reflecting the deepening concern with
human rights matters in the wider UN family and in the international com-
munity in general. An early, atypical, example is the 1969 Note on International
Protection, which observes that ‘it has become increasingly evident that the
granting of a satisfactory legal status to refugees is not only called for from
the point of view of human rights, but is also a prerequisite for the solution of
refugee problems through local integration or resettlement’ (UNHCR, 1969b).
Even though human rights are mentioned more frequently in the late 1960s,
they are always discussed in relation to refugees’ rights in their host country,
8
Except in the Preamble.
not to the human rights abuses that led the refugees to leave their countries
of origin in the first place. The reason for this can again be found in UNHCR’s
heavy reliance on its Statute’s prescription that its work should be entirely
non-political in nature. In its early discourse UNHCR interprets this in the
strictest way, as prescribing silence on the issue of human rights violations that
take place before a person becomes a refugee, even if these human rights viola-
tions are the causes of flight. To mention the causes of flight would be to meddle
in the internal affairs of a sovereign state and therefore a politically controver-
sial act. Consequently, there are no references in the Reports from this period to
practices of persecution, war, violence, or any other event or action that make
people flee their own country. Refugees’ countries of origin are like black boxes
with unknown content, whose internal policies are off-limits to UNHCR and
which may only be mentioned (briefly) in the context of refugee repatriation.
UNHCR’s emphasis on being non-political in the strictest sense of the word
also precludes any reference to matters regarding national or international
security. For instance, in a discussion of the agency’s activities in the Great
Lakes region of Africa, situations are described that would almost certainly
have been depicted as security issues in the 1990s. A long discussion of the
agency’s work on behalf of Rwandan refugees in Burundi, Congo, Tanzania,
and Uganda mentions ‘a certain instability in some of the areas of settlement’
(UNHCR, 1966: para. 78). There is no mention of security threats, to refugees
or to humanitarian staff, even though a senior UNHCR official was killed in
one of the Rwandan refugee camps in Congo during the time covered by this
Report. The report does not mention the murder of this staff member, and
there are only hints at dangerous working conditions, in statements such as
‘the airlift which was interrupted at the end of 1964 has been recently resumed’.
National security is not mentioned in the Notes, and hardly mentioned
in the Reports, from this period. The rare references to national security are
exclusively in connection with descriptions of national regulations concern-
ing the admission of refugees. In accord with the Convention, many of these
national regulations refer to reasons of ‘national security or public order’ as the
only reason to expel a refugee from their territory. UNHCR’s only comment
on this practice is to remind states that this exclusion clause should only be
evoked in exceptional circumstances.
The 1970s: Avidly non-political
UNHCR’s official discourse in the 1970s is based on the core concepts of

non-political and non-operational. The former concept is used both to describe
refugee problems and the refugee agency’s role in dealing with them. The
latter only refers to UNHCR’s self-presentation. This ‘entirely non-political’
discourse is the closest one can find to what Chimni (1998b) refers to as a
‘humanitarian paradigm’ on refugee issues. However, the lack of a strong ele-
ment of human rights language means that UNHCR’s 1970s discourse does
not fit comfortably within this paradigm.
Widening the Mandate
The analysis of UNHCR’s official discourse in the 1970s shows that no major
changes take place in the refugee agency’s self-understanding, core concepts,
or the norms it promotes during this period. The Statute’s non-political pre-
scription remains the chart and compass for its navigation towards becom-
ing an agency with a truly global, rather than European, scope. Nevertheless,
some core concepts become less prominent: The Statute is often substituted by
the General Assembly as the authority on when and where UNHCR should
intervene. Many of its major operations in the 1970s are embarked upon after
a request from the General Assembly that the High Commissioner use his
‘good offices’ on behalf of refugees or displaced persons that do not fall within
the refugee definition of the Statute.9 Reviewing its first twenty years as a refu-
gee agency, UNHCR (1973b: para. 8) describes the development of the good
offices concept as ‘the most significant, no doubt’ development in the interna-
tional community’s response to new refugee problems, ‘enabling new groups
of refugees, which are recognized as prima facio [sic] eligible, to benefit from
UNHCR assistance’.
The flexibility of the good offices concept is seen not only to allow UNHCR
to extend its assistance activities to include non-Convention refugees, but also
to widen its protection activities: ‘the international protection function of
the High Commissioner’s Office is essentially dynamic, calling constantly for
new efforts and initiatives and the exploration of fresh avenues of approach’
(UNHCR, 1974: para. 8). This understanding of protection as a dynamic con-
cept contrasts with a previously rigid definition of protection activities as the
advocacy and supervision of states’ accession to international refugee treaties.
While the Reports and Notes throughout the 1970s remain mainly focused on
this traditional concern with international treaties, an important development
9
UNHCR involvement in the Bengali refugee crisis in 1970–71; the Sudanese refugee repa-
triation operation in 1974; the Cyprus humanitarian emergency in 1975; and the Indochinese
displacement starting in 1975, were all categorized as ‘special programmes’ embarked on under
the High Commissioner’s ‘good offices’.
takes place in UNHCR’s protection discourse in the latter half of the 1970s. In
this period, providing protection to refugees becomes a moral and legal duty
towards individual human beings (UNHCR, 1975b: chapter 1). The language,
particularly of the Notes, becomes increasingly emotive and personal, empha-
sizing the great suffering and tragedy caused when refugees do not receive
adequate protection (e.g. UNHCR, 1974b, 1975c). International protection is
no longer only an abstract legal contract between states.
One aspect of this development is the expansion (albeit slow) in the use of
the language of human rights. The use of this language is cautious and usually
limited to the right to seek asylum. The human rights conditions in the refu-
gee’s state of origin are, with a few exceptions, ignored.10 This contrasts with
UNHCR’s post-Cold War discourse, where human rights are not only viewed
as crucial to the refugee’s life in exile, but also to the solution and prevention
of refugee problems. Early, and rare, traces of this wider concern with human
rights can be found in the 1970s:
It is hoped that the humanitarian ideal of all these donors will be matched
throughout the world by the respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms
which is essential in achieving solutions to refugee problems and in averting their
occurrence. (UNHCR, 1973b: para. 11)
This quotation also shows that the theme of prevention becomes introduced
to UNHCR’s official discourse in the 1970s. The good offices function is seen
to allow the agency to become more involved as an intermediary to bring
about not only solutions to existing refugee problems, but also the prevention
of new ones (UNHCR, 1973b: para. 10). Prevention remains, however, a rare
topic throughout the decade.
Remaining True to the Spirit of the Statute
Despite these departures from the words of the Convention and the Statute,
UNHCR remains faithful to the spirit of both legal documents. The agency
emphasizes the non-political character of refugee problems—and its own
non-political and non-operational role in dealing with them—if possible even
more than in the 1950s and 1960s. Wherever you look, the agency diligently
describes its many ‘good offices’ operations in the 1970s as non-political,
10
High Commissioner Aga Khan did, for instance, in the 1970s criticize the Argentinian
regime for ‘disappearing’ opponents. This fact was pointed out to the author by Gil Loescher as
an early example of UNHCR making bold statements on human rights violations perpetrated
by states.
humanitarian and social in their nature, and UNHCR’s own role as that of a
non-operational planner, supervisor and fund-raiser. Even though the good
offices operations account for a significant part of UNHCR’s budget,11 all the
Notes and Reports from this decade underline that they are additional activi-
ties that can never substitute for the agency’s primary and statutory task of
international protection. UNHCR widens the category of ‘persons of concern’
while retaining a traditional understanding of how it can be of assistance to
this wider group. Its role is still seen as that of a standard-bearer, upholding
legal standards for the protection of refugees and humanitarian standards for
the assistance of all ‘persons of concern’.
In short, the thrust of UNHCR’s official discourse in the 1970s is twofold. It
seeks to advocate the extension of the refugee agency’s activities on behalf of
more groups of displaced and into new fields such as mediation and (to a lim-
ited extent) human rights advocacy. It also seeks to placate any misgivings that
states may have by rooting this extension in the Statute’s ‘entirely non-political’
and non-operational prescriptions. UNHCR’s ‘entirely non-political’ stance
ensures that the agency only acts with the consent of the states affected by
its activities and that it does not contribute to inter-state tension by allocat-
ing blame for refugee problems. The non-operational tenet reassures donors
that UNHCR will not embark on costly activities without their consent.
Despite the widening of its activities, the refugee agency does its utmost to
retain the image of a cautious, timid and limited agency. For instance, in 1972,
High Commissioner Aga Khan continuously plays down the significance of
UNHCR’s role as ‘focal point’ for the enormous humanitarian operation on
behalf of ten million East Bengali refugees. UNHCR is, he says, nothing more
than a channel through which the efforts and resources of the international
community can be directed (Khan, 1972). Similarly, in 1973, when a tentative
peace agreement had just been signed between North and South Vietnam, the
High Commissioner declined to offer his assistance to the two Vietnamese
governments, deciding that UNHCR should remain passive unless and
until the two governments ask for his help and the General Assembly or
Secretary-General encourages his engagement (Khan, 1973).
Non-Operational: The Virtue of Delegation

UNHCR does not employ the actual term ‘non-operational’ very often in its
Reports and Notes from the 1970s. However, there is usually a reference to the
11
For instance, of $111 million expended in 1977, UNHCR spent $41.4 million in Cyprus,
where it was the Co-ordinator of United Nations Humanitarian Assistance for c. 200,000 dis-
placed Cypriots. This was one of the agency’s ‘good offices’ projects (UNHCR, 1979: para. 76).
agency’s non-operational mandate in the introduction to the Reports and sev-

eral references to its operational or implementing partners in the sections of
the Reports describing the agency’s programmes. UNHCR is clearer about its
non-operational status in its information leaflets to the general public, which
make clear that, due to limited funds and mandate, ‘[a]‌s a rule, UNHCR is not
operational. It assists in drawing up plans, helps to finance and co-ordinates
activities which are then carried out by operational partners’ (UNHCR,
1973: 9; see also UNHCR, 1971b: 16).
The reference to implementing partners—governments, NGOs or other UN
agencies—is a recurring theme in all Reports. UNHCR particularly praises the
work of NGOs (e.g. UNHCR, 1972: para. 225). The Reports also repeatedly
underline the ‘catalytic’ nature of UNHCR’s material assistance programmes
(UNHCR, 1973b: para. 6), which are there (implemented by others) to fill a
gap only (UNHCR, 1972: para. 61). Part of UNHCR’s non-operational doctrine
is that its material assistance operations should be a short-lived jump-start
mechanism for the economic and social self-sufficiency and integration of the
refugee: ‘UNHCR action has been designed to help refugees to help them-
selves, with a view to their becoming self-supporting, rather than merely to
hand out relief, which only perpetuates their situation’ (UNHCR, 1973b: para.
3). The High Commissioner’s work is certainly ‘not related to operational
activities for development’ (UNHCR, 1979: para. 8).
Entirely Non-Political: Non-Judgmental and Non-Controversial

All the Notes and Reports of the 1970s assert that UNHCR is entirely
non-political and humanitarian. They urge states to treat refugee problems in a
non-political and humanitarian way. But what meaning does the agency attach
to the terms ‘non-political’ and ‘humanitarian’? While it is easier to ascertain
UNHCR’s use of the term ‘humanitarian’, there seems to be two main compo-
nents of the term ‘non-political’.
To be ‘humanitarian’ means, for UNHCR in the 1970s, simply to ‘act
humanely’, that is to base actions solely on considerations of the welfare and
needs of refugees, not on the interest of any of the (state) actors affected by the
refugee influx (see e.g. UNHCR, 1976: para. 205). UNHCR never defines the
meaning of ‘humanitarian’ explicitly, but the agency’s use of the term seems
to follow the common definition which, drawing on the tale of the Good
Samaritan, understands humanitarianism to be the special responsibility that
individuals and communities have to come to the aid of foreigners arriving at
their door in great need (Gibney, 1999: 177–80).
Both ‘humanitarian’ and ‘non-political’ are seen as opposed to ‘political’.
However, unlike ‘non-political’, ‘humanitarian’ is also often used as an opposite
to ‘legal’, especially in the first half of the decade. In the latter half of the dec-
ade, UNHCR sometimes describes itself as a ‘humanitarian agency’, including
both its material assistance and legal protection work within the term ‘human-
itarian’. More often, however, a clear distinction is made between the refu-
gee agency’s humanitarian activities—mainly providing material assistance to
refugees and displaced persons—and its legal activities—mainly the provision
of international protection to refugees. The latter are described as firmer, and
more serious, than humanitarian activities. Providing international protection
for recognized Convention refugees is a non-negotiable duty for states. Only
in the cases where asylum seekers are detained or expelled for reasons falling
within the letter of the Convention, such as ‘national security or public order’,
does UNHCR appeal to the humanitarian instincts of states. For instance, con-
cerned with the fate of refugees who are considered to be illegal residents by
their host state, UNHCR argues that ‘[s]‌uch persons have an urgent need to
have their situation regularized in their country of asylum—if only on humani-
tarian grounds—until such time as they are able to gain lawful admission to
another country’ (UNHCR, 1974b, emphasis added). The distinction made
between the legal and the humanitarian in UNHCR’s 1970s discourse, is that
between state obligations and state benevolence, or between a state’s legal and
moral duty.
To be non-political seems to imply two things in UNHCR’s 1970s discourse.
The first meaning is not to be politically controversial. This interpretation is
clearly expressed when UNHCR (1975b) measures its own achievements in
terms of the unanimity of its support among states:
Ours is a kind of permanent balancing act, to avoid becoming politically contro-
versial again. Once more UNHCR succeeded in getting the unanimous support
of the Third Committee and this for the fourth year. . . . Governments knew that
UNHCR was worthy of confidence and that they could trust UNHCR as an objec-
tive Focal point [for the assistance to Bengali refugees in India]. (Khan, 1972)
UNHCR’s official discourse in the 1970s seeks not to be politically contro-
versial in two ways: first, by being re-active and responsive to states’ wishes,
and, second, by being (at least outwardly) non-partisan and non-judgmental.
The former aim dictates that UNHCR never act without the permission, and
usually the co-operation, of the affected state.12
12
See e.g. UNHCR (1976: para. 205), which sets out in painstaking detail the level of con-
sent and consulation entered into with relevant governments before UNHCR decided to provide
assistance to displaced persons in Vietnam and Laos in 1975 ‘purely on humanitarian grounds, in
accordance with the non-political character of the action of UNHCR, as defined by the General
Assembly’.
Another part of UNHCR’s non-controversial stance is not to distribute

blame for the causes of refugee flight. This was formulated starkly by High
Commissioner Sadruddin Aga Khan (1970): ‘Since UNHCR is strictly a human-
itarian and non-political organization, it is not for us to comment on the cause
[of refugee flight]—which is debated in many other forums of this Organization
[the UN]—but only to find rapid and durable solutions to the effect’.
There is one blatant exception to UNHCR’s non-judgmental and non-partisan
attitude in the late 1970s: the agency’s denunciation of colonial governments
and, particularly, South Africa’s Apartheid regime. South Africa is the only
state singled out for criticism by UNHCR (e.g. Khan, 1977). In other cases,
the agency hedges criticisms in diplomatic and general terms, not mentioning
names. Unlike other armed refugee groups, the anti-Apartheid refugee warrior
communities in Southern Africa are referred to as ‘freedom fighters’ in UNHCR
Reports. However, this blatant exception to the agency’s non-judgmental rule
only strengthens the argument that UNHCR’s ‘non-political’ stance is less about
banning political opinions than banning politically controversial opinions.
By the late 1970s, opposition to colonial and racist regimes was a sentiment
endorsed by most members of the international community, and particularly
endorsed by UNHCR’s founding organ, the General Assembly. Earlier in the
decade, when this international consensus was less pronounced, the agency
would bury its sentiments concerning armed anti-colonial refugees in more
woolly language (see e.g. UNHCR, 1973b: para. 31).
The second meaning of ‘non-political’ is part of a more complex and less
explicit dichotomy. According to this use of the term, to label an action or
a motive as ‘political’ is to denounce it as a selfish impulse. Actions that
contravene the legal and humanitarian principles of refugee protection and
assistance are labelled as ‘politically motivated’ (or motivated by ‘political or
security considerations’). In this sense of the term, any consideration other
than that of the rights and needs of refugees is a political—and as such a selfish
and extraneous—consideration:
It may be tempting for governments to give priority to preoccupations of a politi-
cal or security nature, with the result that refugees are unjustly victimized by an
inflexible application of domestic law, particularly with regard to admission for
residence and access to employment. On many occasions the letter and the spirit
of the 1951 Convention are ignored or, what is worse, broken deliberately or oth-
erwise. (UNHCR, 1974b: para. 20)
Sadruddin Aga Khan’s speeches provide ample evidence of UNHCR’s distaste

for the political. He calls the agency’s work ‘an infallible indicator of the world’s
political fever—a fever that UNHCR cannot cure, but the consequences of which
determine, each year, the actions and concerns of this non-political Office’ (Khan,
1977). In other words, the sphere of the political is that which creates human
misery, and the sphere of the non-political is that which treats its consequences.
The narrow-minded and selfish connotations attached to being political
are also extended to the few references made to national security concerns.
Security is never mentioned without pairing it with politics in UNHCR’s
1970s discourse, and both concepts are considered as negative, alien ele-
ments in the refugee discourse (UNHCR, 1979: paras. 25 and 56). Political,
economic and security considerations are dismissed as ‘extraneous’ to asy-
lum decisions (UNHCR, 1971c: para. 12). In short, state security interests
are generally dubious and should not be allowed to trump legal obligations.
The Impossibility of Being Non-Political

Although UNHCR is diligently ‘non-political’ in the two senses of the word
described above, this does not mean that the agency escapes being political
in every sense of the word. The agency exhibits many political opinions in the
documents studied, for instance on the value of inter-state co-operation and
international law, refugee rights, generous immigration policies, and other
such aims belonging to the Western liberal internationalist political agenda
of the time. The crux of the matter is that these political opinions are widely
endorsed, and that UNHCR never imposes them on others but only acts when
expressly asked to by the state concerned.
Furthermore, UNHCR acknowledges at times that there are political
dimensions of refugee problems: they have political causes and it usually takes
some sort of political agreement to resolve them. However, the refugee agency
chooses to tone down not only its own political agenda, but also the political
dimension of refugee problems. This does not mean that the refugee agency
is necessarily naive and ignorant. Instead, UNHCR’s description of itself and
the refugee problem as entirely non-political must be understood not only as
an honestly held belief, but also as a rhetorical tool, a way in which to create
an environment in which states choose to deal benevolently and liberally with
refugee problems despite the economic, social, political, or even security, prob-
lems refugee influxes can cause.
The refugee agency is sometimes candid about this rhetorical device. High
Commissioner Sadruddin Aga Khan admits that it would be naive not to rec-
ognize that the problem of refugees arises from ‘the most strenuous tensions’,
but the aim must be to overcome these tensions: ‘We must attempt to reduce
complex political questions in the minds of nations into simple moral and
humanitarian components for the heart to answer’ (Khan, 1974).
Sadruddin Aga Khan’s 1972 speech to his staff gives us a glimpse of the dif-
ference in UNHCR’s conceptualization of ‘the political’ in the 1970s compared
to the Post-Cold War period. The High Commissioner praises the efforts of all
his staff during the refugee exodus from East Pakistan, and particularly com-
mends the head of UNHCR’s Dacca office in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh):
Mr. Kelly went through highly critical days, facing great personal risk before and
during the war, and yet remaining steadfastly in Dacca dealing with a great many
problems that no UNHCR representative has ever had to cope with and generally
contributing in a tremendously spectacular way to the humanitarian tradition of
this office. He stayed away from politics, always managing to stay on good terms
with everyone. (Khan, 1972)
Mr. Kelly is also praised in The State of the World’s Refugees 2000, but this time
for being politically active in brokering a cease-fire and thereby helping to achieve
an end to the war (UNHCR, 2000: 76). Neither account acknowledges the flawed
international response, including of the UN, to a conflict where one side, the
Pakistani military, had presided over the mass slaughter of civilian East Bengalis
(Bass, 2013). But the choice of words indicate that in 2000 the term ‘political’ has
much more positive connotations in UNHCR’s discourse than it has in the 1970s.
The new High Commissioner, Poul Hartling, assuming office in 1978, con-
tinued to carry the non-political mantle. In his speeches, he is candid about
defining non-political as non-controversial, to uphold values generally held
in the international community. However, some of his statements also fore-
shadow the discursive changes towards a more positive understanding of the
role of political action (as long as it is not ‘narrowly political’):
We are the United Nations because our concerns, by definition, stem from our
shared humanity, our shared predicament and hopes. This is why UNHCR’s work
must always transcend the narrowly political and, instead, be guided by interna-
tionally accepted humanitarian principles and considerations. To say that we are
non-political, is not in the least to say that we are politically insensitive. I am well
aware that we must balance national and regional perceptions and concerns with
ideals and actions that are universally valid. (Hartling, 1978)
Hartling also suggests that finding solutions to refugee problems does

indeed require political action, but by states, not UNHCR. However, it was
not until the second half of the 1980s that the agency began to adopt a more
broadly positive understanding of the term ‘political’.
References to securit y in the 1970s
I will conclude this chapter with a discussion of the almost non-existence

of security language in the first three decades of UNHCR’s existence. The
occasional references to security in the 1970s are always placed within a con-
ceptual framework constructed around the norms of being non-political and
humanitarian. In fact, UNHCR suggests that it is because of its non-political
status that it can contribute to international peace and security. Sadruddin Aga
Khan often argued that successful humanitarian operations for refugees and
displaced people could be ‘a factor on the side of peace and humanity’ (Khan,
1974). And a 1973 UNHCR information leaflet suggests how the agency’s
work, by virtue of being entirely non-political, may contribute to create peace
and security:
UNHCR protects and assists refugees on a purely humanitarian and non-political
basis. Its action not only alleviates human suffering, but also serves to reduce polit-
ical tensions and may thereby contribute to stability and peace. (UNHCR, 1973)
As we shall see later, this claim is quite different from the argument UNHCR
makes in the 1990s. Like other references to security in the 1970s, the text
from which the above quotation is taken does not imply that refugee groups
themselves may constitute security problems. Instead, the security and stabil-
ity problems referred to are those that may be created by states when one state
offers asylum to the fleeing citizens of another. Several international agree-
ments have been signed in order to defuse the inter-state tensions that may
arise from the act of granting asylum. Most notably, the preamble to the 1967
Declaration on Territorial Asylum, asserts that ‘the grant of asylum by a State
to [a person seeking protection from persecution] is a peaceful and humani-
tarian act and that, as such, it cannot be regarded as unfriendly by another
State’ (United Nations, 1967). By virtue of being ‘non-political’, UNHCR can
function as a guarantor that refugee populations will not be taken advantage
of by any state to undermine the security of another state’s borders or regime.
In this context, being ‘non-political’ means that UNHCR is a neutral party
whose actions on behalf of refugees cannot be construed as hostile by any
state involved. UNHCR does not try to place refugee issues on the interna-
tional security agenda. On the contrary, it is fiercely trying to keep them off
this agenda. As we shall see, a similar argument (albeit in less statist terms)
begins to be made by the refugee agency in the 2000s.
In the 1970s, UNHCR’s main ‘security concern’ is that states exaggerate the
national security threats arising from refugee influxes, and that they victim-
ize refugees because of ‘extraneous’ political or security concerns (UNHCR,
1971c: para. 12; UNHCR, 1974b: para. 20). The agency hardly refers to the
potential national and regional security problems created when large refugee
groups, often belonging to one particular ethnic group or political faction, are
settled just across the border of their home state. One exception occurs in a dis-
cussion of emergency relief operations in Africa, where UNHCR (1972: para.
6) states that the ‘supreme concern is the need to save human lives while pro-
tecting the internal and external security of the countries of reception’. This
statement indicates that the refugee agency is not oblivious to the fact that
refugee influxes could be perceived by states as security threats. However, the
Report continues by declaring that, in general, the current rural settlement of
refugees in Africa satisfies the agency’s concern in this regard. Again, UNHCR
wants to deflate, not encourage, a security debate: it recognizes that states
often worry, or pretend to worry, about the security implications of refugee
influxes, but suggests that these worries do not reflect the reality of present
refugee situations.
UNHCR’s lack of concern over the national security of host states is clearly
shown in its booklet Refugees in Africa (1981). Africa was at the time the
scene of numerous wars where refugee warrior groups played central roles,
often supported by host states, regional powers or superpowers. The UNHCR
booklet emphasizes the humanitarian crisis created by war and violence on
the African continent, and is concerned over the rapid rise in refugee num-
bers.13 But it makes no reference to security problems—neither the security of
refugees, nor of humanitarian staff, local communities, states or regions. The
closest the booklet comes to what UNHCR today would have labelled ‘security
concerns’, is when it discusses the impact of large refugee influxes on the small,
impoverished state of Djibouti:
Their presence weighs heavily upon the economy of the country, particularly in
view of the low living standards and high unemployment rate (as high as 50%).
Intensified efforts have therefore been made by UNHCR to promote counselling
services. (UNHCR, 1981: 8)
The last sentence is startling for someone used to the refugee discourse of
the post-Cold War period: UNHCR suggests counselling services as a rem-
edy for Djibouti’s severe economic and social problems. This is a telling sign
of how alien to UNHCR thinking it would have been in the 1970s and the
early 1980s to describe the problems created by refugee influxes as security
threats. Contrast this with the 1997 issue of The State of the World’s Refugees,
where UNHCR also discusses the impact of large-scale refugee influxes on
poor countries: ‘The growing reluctance of low-income states and societies
to accommodate large numbers of refugees is based in part on a percep-
tion that exiled populations constitute a serious threat to social stability and
political security’ (UNHCR, 1997: 73). Unlike UNHCR’s 1970s discourse, the
1997 statement is not followed by a refutation of the legitimacy of such threat
perceptions.
From 1.7 million in 1976 to 4.1 million African refugees in 1980 (UNHCR, 2000: 310).

13
Conclusion
There is a strong continuity in UNHCR’s language from 1951 to 1980.

UNHCR’s discourse broadens in the 1970s as the agency takes on a wider vari-
ety of tasks, but the Statute and Convention still constitute the main inspira-
tion for the agency’s communications both to state policy makers (through its
Reports and Notes) and the general public (through leaflets and booklets for
general distribution). The reliance on the Convention and Statute leads to a
cautious and legalistic official discourse. UNHCR’s self-representation is that
of a bearer of legal standards: it is UNHCR’s job to advocate and supervise
adherence to international refugee legislation and ensure that certain stand-
ards are kept, both in refugee protection and in material assistance work. It
is not UNHCR’s job to perform these tasks itself. Since the standards which
UNHCR was created to advocate and supervise are set down and agreed to
in inter-state treaties, and since UNHCR never acts without the consent of
the state affected, the agency’s activities cannot be construed as politically
controversial. In short, the refugee agency’s early discourse primarily revolves
around the concepts of being non-political and non-operational. Although
security concerns are sometimes mentioned, they are marginal to the refu-
gee agency’s discourse. References to the security of refugee sending states
are non-existent. References to the security of host states are usually made in
order to reassure these states that their fears are unfounded.
6
The 1980s: A Political Turn
On the face of things, there does not seem to be a lot of change in UNHCR’s dis-
course in the first half of the 1980s. A closer look shows that many of the agen-
cy’s traditional core concepts, such as the importance of being ‘non-political’
and ‘humanitarian’, begin to take on new connotations and meanings. Then,
from the mid-1980s onwards, the agency begins to venture explicitly, albeit
hesitantly, into the world of refugee politics. In the period between 1951 and
1986, it is fair to say that UNHCR dealt with the problem of reconciling states’
political and security concerns with the rights and needs of refugees by denying
the legitimacy of the former. From the late 1980s onwards, UNHCR acknowl-
edges the legitimacy of the needs of both states and refugees, and attempts to
strike a balance between the two in its discourse. This new balance is a conse-
quence of changes in the environment in which the agency operates, but such
discursive shifts also—as Part Three shows—contribute to changes in how the
refugee agency operates in this environment and attempts to influence it.
Not until the latter half of the 1980s can there be said to have been a clear
change in UNHCR’s self-representation, away from a formulaic reiteration of
the claim that it is ‘entirely non-political’ and non-operational. In this period, the
language of human rights becomes more central and new concepts, such as ‘root
causes’ and ‘prevention’, appear. These new additions are linked to the increased
frequency in the use of the concept of security from 1987 onwards. This chapter
analyses UNHCR’s discursive move into the realm of politics and human rights,
which gradually leads on to the emergence of a security discourse.
Editorial themes in ‘Refugees’
In order to provide an overview of the main trends in UNHCR thinking and

discourse over the course of the decade, I start the analysis with a comparison
The 1980s: A Political Turn 113
of the editorials of UNHCR’s monthly Refugees Magazine from the sample

years of 1983, 1986 and 1989. The editorials are a good starting point, as they
are aimed at a broad audience and reflect the refugee agency’s main concerns
of the day. The review shows that although some themes and ideas recur year
after year, several of the editorials from 1986 and 1989 address topics that are
absent in 1983 and that were also missing in the 1970s.
In 1983, the monthly editorials were mostly concerned with promoting
interstate co-operation to further refugee rights and the provision of inter-
national protection. Funding matters and the question of asylum were also
frequently discussed.1 However, some of the themes that would later dominate
the post-Cold War debate are also addressed. One editorial mentions the dis-
turbing trend of military attacks on refugee camps, calling such attacks ‘cruel
and inhumane’ and asking host governments to ‘ensure that refugees them-
selves do not become involved in activities likely to bring about such attacks’
(Refugees Magazine, 1983f). Another advocates an expanded role for UNHCR
in countries of origin/repatriation, as an impartial ‘catalyst’ and negotiator
between refugee groups, host states and refugee-producing states to facilitate
voluntary repatriation (Refugees Magazine, 1983d). The most interesting of
the 1983 editorials, for the purpose of this investigation, is concerned with
the increasing scale and complexity of refugee movements—a theme much
discussed by UNHCR in the 1990s. It warns that the refugee agency’s humani-
tarian, non-political mandate is under threat, because ‘in these times of world
crisis’ the countries affected by refugee movements tend to look at them
‘from the political, rather than from the humanitarian angle’. It argues that
dealing with the ‘root causes’ of refugee movements is important. However,
because ‘root causes’ is an inherently political issue, the task of dealing with
them should not fall on UNHCR: ‘UNHCR may thus act upon events in much
the same way as firemen extinguishing a blaze or doctors working to control
an epidemic: limiting the extent of a catastrophe and mitigating its impact’
(Refugees Magazine, 1983a). Thus, although the refugee agency begins to
discuss in more systematic terms the ‘politicization’ of refugee problems, its
answer to this trend remained to be as non-political as before.
The majority of the 1986 editorials echo the 1983 ones. A quarter of the
editorials are concerned with state negotiations and accession to international
or regional refugee treaties (Refugees Magazine, 1986c, 1986d,1986h). A third
discusses the recent growth in, and globalization of, refugee and asylum seeker
movements. The problems of boat people from Indochina, Haiti and Cuba; asy-
lum seekers from the developing world turning up on the doorsteps of Western
1
Refugees Magazine (1983e, 1983g, 1983i, 1983j, 1983k, 1983l).
Europe and North America; and so-called ‘irregular movements’ of asylum

seekers (later often described as ‘asylum-shopping)’, have led to increased hos-
tility and repressive measures in asylum states. These reactions are wrong and
futile, the editorials argue. The only way these new problems can be dealt with
is through greater international co-operation and burden sharing—‘concerted
and humane action’ (Refugees Magazine, 1986a, 1986b, 1986e, 1986l). Other
editorial themes include the need for states, in co-operation with UNHCR,
to concentrate on finding durable solutions to refugee problems, an effort
that involves, several of the editorials underline, addressing the root causes
of refugee movements. It is UNHCR’s task constantly to remind states of their
obligation to find political solutions to the causes of flight. Although security
concerns are not mentioned in any form, many themes that were absent from
UNHCR’s traditional discourse, and that later become common elements of
the agency’s post-Cold War security discourse, are brought up in the 1986
editorials. These include dealing with ‘root causes’, ‘finding political solutions
to the causes of flight’, and avoiding the danger that the asylum systems of
Western states become clogged by unjustified applications.
In the 1990s, UNHCR would explain its concern with these topics in terms
of security. In 1986, however, the need to deal with the causes of flight is not
justified in terms of security, but in terms of what is best for the individual ref-
ugee. As the November editorial ‘The Humanitarian Need Must Be Addressed
before All Others’ states categorically, the interests of asylum seekers and refu-
gees as human beings must always override the potential conflicting interests
of states: ‘In so doing, States will discover that it is in this way that they can
also safeguard their true political interests’ (Refugees Magazine, 1986k).2 In
many of the 1986 editorials, the professed interests of states are often, albeit
in subtle terms, portrayed as dubious at worst and myopic at best. As in 1983,
several editorials reiterate that the work of the UNHCR is, and must be, purely
humanitarian and non-political—based on the needs of refugees, not the
interests of states.
The 1989 editorials stand out from the two years previously studied in four
ways. First, the task of promoting accession to international refugee treaties
is mentioned only once (Refugees Magazine, 1989h), while it was the most
discussed topic in both 1983 and 1986. Second, a holistic approach to refu-
gee questions is promoted (Refugees Magazine, 1989, 1989b, 1989c, 1989d).
Third, UNHCR’s managerial and financial crisis is of great concern (Refugees
Magazine, 1989i, 1989j, 1989k, 1989l). And fourth, allusions to security con-
cerns occur for the first time.
2
This opinion is copied from High Commissioner Hocké’s speech a month earlier
(Hocké, 1986).
The first and second points indicate that the refugee agency is in the pro-
cess of searching for new approaches to understanding and dealing with
refugee problems. The editorials underline the need to deal with all aspects
of refugee flows, from protection and assistance, to solutions and preven-
tion. It is particularly with respect to the latter two of these tasks that the
editorials take a new line. We are encouraged to ‘look at the whole pic-
ture’: repatriation is the preferred solution, but for repatriation to be dura-
ble, it is necessary to invest time and resources in peace and reconciliation
efforts and to reconstruction projects in refugee producing countries. The
prevention of new refugee exoduses becomes part of finding durable solu-
tions to existing ones. Peace-making, as a way of dealing with ‘root causes’, is
described as a great opportunity for the UN now that superpower rivalry has
receded. Although it is asserted that UNHCR must work in a non-political
way, the editorials argue forcefully for states and the political organs of the
UN to throw themselves wholeheartedly into peace-making efforts across
the world. Some of the editorials also describe a role for UNHCR in this
effort, especially in Central America, but are careful to assert that this role
will be an entirely non-political and humanitarian one (Refugees Magazine,
1989c, 1989d, 1989i). Another of the editorials’ holistic arguments holds
that UNHCR must take into consideration the needs and fears, not only of
refugees, but the local population in refugee hosting areas, if refugee pro-
tection and assistance are to be successful. Development initiatives are fre-
quently mentioned as integral components of durable solutions to refugee
problems.
The year 1989 was one of unprecedented crisis within UNHCR. High
Commissioner Hocké is increasingly unpopular with EXCOM and finally
forced to resign, and funds for the agency’s ambitious holistic repatriation
operations are not readily forthcoming. Some of 1989’s editorials contain a
moral plea for more funding, while two are in their entirety concerned with
the resignation of Hocké and the appointment of the new High Commissioner,
Thorvald Stoltenberg, respectively (Refugees Magazine, 1989k, 1989l). One of
the arguments provided for why UNHCR should be given more resources is
that peace processes will suffer if those displaced from the conflicts are not
given sufficient attention.
Early signs of the emergence of a security discourse can be found in the
1989 editorials. The February editorial urges that the fears of ‘ordinary peo-
ple who find themselves in a situation of economic, political or cultural
insecurity’ because of large refugee influxes, must be placated through
information and education (Refugees Magazine, 1989b). The May editorial
mentions ‘the very real burdens’ that refugees can be for their hosts, and the
July editorial worries about public opinion perceiving refugees as threats
(Refugees Magazine, 1989e, 1989g). More generally, the editorials show that
UNHCR is beginning to perceive its own work in terms of contributing
to regional and international peace and security, as illustrated by the fre-
quent editorial references to the links between solving refugee problems,
on the one hand, and finding opportunities for peace and reconciliation,
on the other.
Operational presence, political

engagement, human rights activism
Having provided this overview, it is time to turn to a more detailed analysis of

UNHCR’s discursive evolution—especially regarding the redefinition of core
concepts. The analysis focuses particularly on UNHCR’s Reports and Notes.
Revealing the same trend as in the Refugees editorials, these documents show
how the emergence of a security discourse in the late 1980s is linked, in partic-
ular, with the decline of the agency’s non-political and non-operational credos,
and, to some extent, to the emergence of a human rights language. This section
will discuss these three discursive developments.
Becoming Operational
UNHCR does not completely abandon its non-operational credo in the 1980s.
Throughout the decade its Reports frequently refer to the agency’s numer-
ous operational and implementing partners among the national and inter-
national NGOs, state authorities and ‘operational’ UN agencies such as the
United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). However, some signifi-
cant changes take place. First, at the end of the decade, UNHCR describes
for the first time in explicit terms its own participation in operational activi-
ties—in the sphere of refugee assistance, not only protection. In the Reports
from the first half of the decade the agency either refers to the operational side
of its programmes in neutral terms, merely describing the project as having
become operational at a certain date, or it explicitly describes the delegation of
the job to an implementing agency in phrases such as ‘UNHCR acts through
its operational partner’ (UNHCR, 1980: para. 269) or ‘the project was imple-
mented by’ a named NGO, local authority or UN agency. The 1989 Report,
however, describes for the first time a group of assistance projects as ‘imple-
mented by UNHCR field offices and/or UNHCR implementing partners’
(UNHCR, 1989: para. 96). As a matter of fact, UNHCR has been involved in
the practical implementation of its projects since the 1950s, and increasingly
so in connection with the enormous growth in the agency’s material assistance
programmes in the 1970s. The interesting point here is that the agency, in the
late 1980s, abandons the pretence of being non-operational, a tenet that was so
important to the self-image conveyed by the refugee agency in its traditional
discourse.
A second departure from UNHCR’s non-operational credo can be found
in the Reports’ description of the agency’s operational partners. In the latter
half of the decade, the agency not only describes a more active role for its own
staff, it also describes the implementing work of NGOs in less glowing terms.
The emphasis now is on training the implementing partners3 and control-
ling and evaluating their work (UNHCR, 1989: para. 105). The NGO eulogies
often found in UNHCR discourse in the 1970s and the early 1980s4 become
less prominent, although the agency still emphasizes the importance of close
co-operation with NGOs. This development is closely connected to UNHCR’s
financial and managerial difficulties in the 1980s and the criticism the agency
receives from donor states and EXCOM for poor evaluation and control of its
operations. The trend in the late 1980s, then, is for UNHCR both to attempt to
strengthen its own role in the practical management of the operations it funds
and to give donors the impression that it is in control, by placing more empha-
sis on its own activities, rather than those of its partners.
Human Rights: A Holistic Approach to the Refugee

Problem
There is a clear increase in UNHCR’s mentions of human rights over the course
of the 1980s. The agency begins to describe its protection functions as ensuring
that the basic human rights of refugees are respected. Previously the core task
of protection had been to promote and monitor the development of interna-
tional refugee law. This task now comes second (UNHCR, 1989b: paras. 2–3).
Furthermore, the context in which human rights are mentioned changes: the
increase in UNHCR’s references to human rights is part of the more holistic
understanding of the refugee problem displayed by the agency in the latter
half of the 1980s. UNHCR now shows an interest in all aspects of the problem
of displacement, including preventing refugee outflows from happening and
finding solutions to the political problems that create conditions for flight.
3
This function is first mentioned in UNHCR (1984: para. 176).
4
For instance in UNHCR (1984: para. 168).
References to human rights are used both as a way of explaining the ‘root causes’
of flight (also a new term) and to legitimize UNHCR’s ventures outside its tradi-
tional mandate. As we have seen, the agency had previously interpreted its mandate
to prohibit involvement in operations within refugees’ countries of origin. Events
taking place before and after a refugee is formally a refugee (and not a persecuted or
war-affected citizen who may become a refugee, or a repatriated or resettled indi-
vidual who once was a refugee) had been considered outside UNHCR’s mandate.
By the late 1980s, the refugee agency no longer champions this view, and human
rights are used to legitimize its new interest in countries of origin.
The language of human rights is a useful tool with which UNHCR can jus-
tify the widening of its mandate to include operations within countries of ori-
gin. This language belongs, like the language of the Statute and Convention, still
within the realm of international law. The main human rights norms are uni-
versally accepted by states, at least in theory. They therefore provide the refugee
agency with a relatively uncontroversial medium through which it can address
the political situations within the sovereign borders of refugee producing states.
In effect, by beginning to discuss the human rights situation in countries of ori-
gin, UNHCR moves into the previously taboo domain of apportioning blame to
particular states for causing refugee flight. The agency also makes the unprec-
edented move of placing the main moral and political responsibility for solving
refugee problems, through repatriation, onto the shoulders of the refugee’s state
of origin. This is particularly clear in the 1988 Note, which argues that protection
is about respecting rights. It continues: ‘[t]‌he Office believes that the best solution
to refugee problems lies in removing the causes of refugee movements so that
people do not feel compelled to leave and those who have fled are able safely to
return’ (UNHCR, 1988b: paras. 5–6).
Finally, the increase in references to human rights is linked to an increased
preoccupation with security. In the late 1970s, UNHCR talks for the first time
about the personal security of the refugee, especially in situations of mass influx
or when host states refuse to provide asylum (UNHCR, 1978: para. 11). In the
late 1980s, references to refugee security, especially the refugee’s right to secu-
rity, increases significantly. This link between UNHCR’s new reliance on human
rights and its emerging security discourse will be discussed later in this chapter.
A Political Turn
From the latter half of the 1980s, in addition to its new-found attention to
human rights, UNHCR shows an increasing interest in development issues,
particularly in order to make refugee communities more self-sufficient. In this
period, the agency becomes more outspoken, and not only on violations of
human rights and refugee law: it also adds its voice to the growing debate on
whether humanitarian assistance can or should be non-political’.5
The Reports from the 1980s increasingly discuss the political context sur-
rounding refugee flight. For instance, in 1988, UNHCR writes that ‘the fate of
refugees is inextricably linked to political events and the international com-
munity’s willingness to tackle the problems relating to refugees within the
larger framework of global or regional political accords’ (UNHCR, 1988: para.
1). A year earlier it stated that ‘refugee situations are an integral part of politi-
cal, social and economic changes and of upheavals and divisions within the
international community. As a result, humanitarian action for the benefit of
refugees can never be fully successful without, at the same time, treating the
underlying causes of refugee movements’ (UNHCR, 1987: para. 13).
This concern with the political causes of flight as well as with the politi-
cal context in which a solution to refugee problems must be found, has the
welcome effect of making the agency’s official discourse in the latter half of
the 1980s less formulaic and repetitive than in the 1970s. More importantly, it
constitutes a significant reinterpretation (and later almost complete abandon-
ment) of UNHCR’s ‘entirely non-political’ credo. How, then, does the agency
understand the term ‘political’ in the 1980s?
During the course of the decade, UNHCR’s non-political stance softens. Its
official discourse becomes less non-judgmental and less prone to use the term
‘political’ only to describe purely detrimental phenomena. In the late 1980s,
its understanding of the political becomes more nuanced. The agency begins
to draw a distinction between, on the one hand, the ‘negative’ politicization of
refugee issues that sacrifices the rights of refugees to the narrowly self-serving
interests of states, and, on the other, the ‘positive’ politicization which leads
states to try to solve the ‘root causes’ of refugee flight. One example of such a
positive understanding of the political is found in the 1988 Report:
Only by removing the conditions that led to the original flight can larger numbers
of refugees return voluntarily to their respective countries of origin in safety and
dignity. This task, which is largely political, must be pursued more vigorously by
States. (UNHCR, 1988: para. 48)
UNHCR’s understanding of ‘the political’ is ambivalent when it comes to its
own role in dealing with ‘root causes’. Most of the time the agency repeats that
its non-political mandate bars it from becoming involved in addressing the
political causes of flight. However, at other times, the agency proudly displays
its roles in highly political processes, such as in the peace negotiations and
reconciliation efforts taking place in Central America.6
5
See editorial in Refugees no. 34, October 1986.
6
Editorial in Refugees no. 63, April 1989.
It would be wrong to claim that the core concept of being ‘non-political’

becomes marginalized in UNHCR’s official discourse by the end of the
1980s. Instead it is reinterpreted so that it no longer involves a strong
notion of non-judgmental neutrality. This is done in order to suit the
agency’s greater interest in ‘root causes’ and human rights. While the
concept of being ‘non-political’ can be stretched to incorporate a con-
cern with the causes of flight, the same is not the case with the concept of
‘non-judgmental’. To be able to solve root causes involves first to identify
these causes—that is, to point an accusing finger at the factors that lead to
refugee flight. UNHCR used to maintain that this was incompatible with
being non-political.
While UNHCR puts aside its non-judgmental norm in the late 1980s, it
retains to a stronger degree the aim of being politically uncontroversial. When
criticizing refugee-sending states and refugee host states alike, the agency
ensures that the language it uses is that of universally accepted human rights.
However, the stronger calls for states to deal with ‘the root causes’ of flight
brings the agency into a more politically controversial field. UNHCR calls
for solutions to ‘root causes’ begs the question of how these solutions can be
found without touching on the sensitive political issues of the sovereignty of
refugee-producing states. This tension between root causes and sovereignty
becomes increasingly obvious in the post-Cold War period.
Finally, a substantial transformation takes place in the late 1980s in the way
in which UNHCR chooses to place the refugee problem on the global agenda.
In the 1970s, the agency did its utmost to remove the problem of refugees from
the arena of political processes and tensions (e.g. Khan, 1974). In the latter
half of the 1980s, the aim instead became to highlight the political dimension
of refugee movements. High Commissioner Hocké delivered a very different
message than his predecessor Aga Khan, when he described the global politi-
cal and security challenges of the late 1980s in broad strokes. He painted a
grim picture of population explosion leading to scarcity of resources, unprec-
edented economic and social strain, unemployment and underdevelopment in
the developing world. These factors, he argued, lead to social unrest, internal
conflict and repression, which again lead to refugee exoduses. He concluded
by apparently banishing UNHCR’s long-cherished narrowly legal discourse to
the dustbin of history:
The refugee problem can no longer be treated in isolation but must be addressed
in the context of an international strategy which addresses all the decisive factors.
It would therefore serve no useful purpose to continue to look at today’s refugee
movements solely in the context of the existing legal framework which may not
cover the entire spectrum. (Hocké, 1986)
The emergence of a securit y discourse
In the 1980s, UNHCR displayed an increasing interest in the relationship

between states’ perceptions of security and its own ability to protect refugees
and find solutions to their plight. For the first time in its history, the agency
began to discuss this relationship at length, rather than categorically dismiss
the security concerns voiced by states. Early examples can be found in the
1984 Note and Report, both of which acknowledge that refugees may act in
ways that are detrimental to national security and that states are justified in
withholding or withdrawing asylum from such refugees.7 However, as a coun-
terweight, the Report continued with a longer section on the insecurity of refu-
gees and asylum-seekers caused by states’ policies of detention and rejection
at the border. It pointed out that refugees are the victims of physical attacks,
robbery or extortion by local police or security forces. Furthermore, it argued
that restrictive entry policies leave refugees vulnerable to pirate attacks and
prevent them from being rescued at sea. The Note also concludes along tradi-
tional lines:
Nevertheless, given the serious consequences for refugees of a withdrawal of asy-
lum and the limited range of alternative solutions available, the question whether
refugees are to be considered as endangering security should be approached by
States with special care. (UNHCR, 1984b)
A new development in the Reports and Notes from the mid-1980s is the
increased concern with the security of refugee camps against attacks by secu-
rity forces from the refugees’ home state or from their host state’s police or
military forces. Both the 1985 and 1986 Notes and the 1986, 1988 and 1989
Reports consider this theme. However, it is only in 1989 that UNHCR incorpo-
rates this concern into a more general security discourse. The 1989 Note claims
(in a slightly muddled way) that the security of refugee camps is not only a
question of the security of the refugees who live in them, but of international
peace and security:
The problem of military or armed attacks on refugee camps and settlements is
a humanitarian problem which requires a humanitarian approach. Apart from
jeopardizing the safety and security of refugees, it also threatens international sta-
bility, peace and security among nations. That humanitarian approach, however,
requires a political will by those, States and others, who more directly influence
events. (UNHCR, 1989b: para. 45)
7
These are the first examples the author has been able to find. UNHCR (1984: paras. 33–4;
and 1984b).
Another new addition to UNHCR’s discourse in the mid-1980s was the

references to the general ‘security situation’ in areas of UNHCR operations.8
References to the ‘security situation’ and similar expressions increased in the
last years of the 1980s. These references, particularly when used liberally in the
post-Cold War period, helped to give the refugee agency’s official discourse a
new atmosphere of threat, danger and urgency.
UNHCR’s emerging preoccupation with security in the late 1980s consti-
tutes a significant departure from the agency’s traditional language, although
there are also lines of continuity. The emergence of a security discourse is
closely linked to its new concern with human rights and its development of
a broader, more holistic, understanding of the refugee problem. I will look at
each in turn, before discussing the fate of one of UNHCR’s traditional core
concepts, ‘international protection’.
The Right to Security
UNHCR’s security discourse was to start with mostly limited to concern with
refugees’ right to security. In the 1987 Note, 21 of 24 mentions of ‘security’
refer to the protection of the personal security of the refugee, in numerous
statements such as:
The security of refugees has increasingly been at issue, be it during flight,
in countries of refuge or in connection with return to their country of ori-
gin. It is now one of the foremost issues of refugee protection. (UNHCR,
1987b: para. 35)
This sudden concern with the security of refugees derived from a mixture
of reasons. First, the 1980s was a period of increasing violence against refu-
gees, from the widespread pirate attacks on Indochinese boat refugees to the
military attacks on refugee camps in southern Africa. Second, the language of
‘rights to security’ and ‘the security of person’, used so frequently in the Notes
of the late 1980s, must be seen in connection with UNHCR’s greater emphasis
on human rights in that period. Most of the times the term ‘security’ occurs
in these Notes, it is not as a result of a stronger preoccupation with security
in the traditional International Relations meaning of the word, but as part
of the agency’s effort to reinterpret its refugee protection mandate in human
rights terms.
8
E.g.: ‘ . . . the consolidation of the Ugandan refugee settlements has been proceeding satis-
factorily despite difficulties due to security conditions’ (UNHCR, 1986: para. 108). A similar
expression was used only once in the 1970s (UNHCR, 1977: para. 204).
However, the third reason for UNHCR’s increased insistence on the refu-
gee’s ‘right to security’ points towards its post-Cold War security discourse.
As we have seen, refugee host states and UNHCR donor states became, in
the course of the 1980s, increasingly restrictive and hostile in their attitude
to refugees. It became difficult for the refugee agency to ignore the subject
of national security, since it was frequently brought up by donor, host and
EXCOM states. UNHCR’s increased use of the concept of security to describe
the plight of refugees should therefore also be seen as a linguistic counter-
measure against states’ preoccupation with national security. By juxtaposing
the security of states with that of refugees, the agency attempted to co-opt the
concept of security to the cause of refugee protection.
This attempt to redefine the referent object of security from the state to
the individual became a central aspect of UNHCR’s security discourse in the
1990s. In the 1990s, as we shall see, UNHCR would draw attention to the
security threats raised by forced migration to both states and individuals, in
an endeavour to reconcile the security concerns of states with those of refu-
gees. In the late 1980s the refugee agency merely attempted to switch focus
from the concerns of states to those of refugees. UNHCR’s use of the concept
of security in the late 1980s must thus be understood primarily as a defensive
measure with which to bolster the agency’s traditional protection mandate.
Security, ‘Root Causes’ and Holistic Approaches
Despite being primarily a defensive reaction, UNHCR’s increased use of

the concept of security heralded the introduction of new themes and ideas.
UNHCR’s use of the term ‘security’ in the late 1980s, even within the con-
text of the language of rights, was part of a wider trend where the problems
of refugee protection, assistance and solutions were increasingly understood
to be intrinsically political and—from the early 1990s onwards—security
problems. The Notes and Reports of the late 1980s discuss more frankly than
before the problems that refugee movements can cause local populations or
host states: The (coerced) recruitment of refugees as fighters, the militariza-
tion of refugee camps, the general ‘politicization of a particular refugee situ-
ation’, all leading to instability in the area where refugees settle. Although
these problems are mostly discussed as threats to the security of the refugee,
UNHCR began in this period to show concern about the political repercus-
sions of refugee settlements: Hocké (1986) warned that ‘refugees themselves
[could] become part and parcel of the overall political problem’ and that if
such ‘human problems are not solved, there exist real dangers for political
tensions to be exacerbated’.
UNHCR noted already in 1987 states’ concern over refugees as security

threats. But, following its stance in the 1970s, it continued to deny the legiti-
macy of such attempts:
There is indeed a growing tendency by some States to assimilate the problem of
refugees and asylum-seekers with that of terrorism, narcotics trading or violence.
There is no evidence of any link between one set of problems and the other, and
it is to be regretted that a sense of insecurity among States is contributing to an
erosion of minimum standards for the treatment of refugees and asylum-seekers.
(UNHCR, 1987b)
However, only two years later, the agency concurred—after almost 40 years
of strenuous denial—that state security, when faced with population influxes,
could be a ‘valid need’ rather than a sinister ploy through which refugees could
be denied their rights. In 1989, UNHCR reported that it faced a real problem
of reconciling the legitimate interests of states with those of refugees:
Measures which may have been taken in light of valid political, economic or
security needs in the context of more general migratory flows, occurring for eco-
nomic reasons have, nevertheless, adversely affected the plight of asylum-seekers
and refugees and threatened the humanitarian principles and practices univer-
sally recognized as essential for their protection. (UNHCR, 1989: para. 6)
This new concern with the political, economic and security repercussions
of population movements (although UNHCR blamed these repercussions
on ‘economic migrants’ rather than refugees) spurred the agency to adopt a
broader approach to the problems of forced displacement. The emergence of
both the language of human rights and that of security was part and parcel
of UNHCR’s new determination in the late 1980s that all aspects of the refu-
gee problem, including the ‘root causes’ of flight, must be addressed for com-
prehensive solutions to be found. This was what the agency called a ‘holistic
approach’ (UNHCR, 1988: paras. 1–3 and 13).
UNHCR began to advocate a ‘holistic approach’ at the same time as the
agency became deeply involved in promoting and organizing voluntary repa-
triation. This is no coincidence. Dealing with the causes of flight and the
human rights situation in countries of origin would not be as urgent to the ref-
ugee agency if it continued to regard resettlement and local integration as the
main solutions to refugee problems. By the late 1980s, there were strong pres-
sures on UNHCR to concentrate its focus on repatriation (see e.g. Loescher,
2001: 251). The 1985, 1987, 1988 and 1989 Notes have long separate sections
dedicated to the question of repatriation, while local integration and resettle-
ment receive no such attention.9 As states became less hospitable to refugee
9
Except the 1989 Note, which has a section on resettlement.
groups crossing their borders, large-scale resettlement and local integration

were no longer considered viable.
The conviction that repatriation was by far the most feasible durable solution
led the High Commissioner to the unprecedented step of drawing attention to the
human rights conditions in countries of origin. Making clear that human rights
abuses are among the main causes of refugee flight, he argued that ‘[r]‌estoration
of acceptable human rights standards in countries of origin is, therefore, in
many refugee situations, the key to any successful resolution of the problem’
(Hocké, 1988).
To restore ‘acceptable standards of human rights’ to countries of ori-
gin would in practice usually mean getting rid of authoritarian and abu-
sive regimes, or putting an end to violent internal or international conflicts.
Although High Commissioner Hocké was too steeped in the non-political
language cherished both by his previous employer, the ICRC, and by UNHCR,
to argue for the inclusion of refugee problems on the UN’s agenda for inter-
national peace and security, his successor, the Norwegian politician Thorvald
Stoltenberg, was quick to see the link. Stoltenberg proclaimed his aim as a
High Commissioner to be:
. . . to have the refugee and migrant issues placed on the international political
agenda. It is only when the problems of poverty, oppression, conflict and the
consequent refugee and migratory movements, are seen as important factors
in the search of peace and security, that we can effectively begin to solve them.
(Stoltenberg, 1990b)
The link between UNHCR’s work on behalf of refugees and interna-
tional peace and security had never before been identified so explicitly. For
Stoltenberg to place this link at the top of UNHCR’s agenda was unprecedented
in the agency’s history. However, as the analysis conducted so far has shown,
this change in discourse cannot merely be attributed to the appointment of a
new High Commissioner. UNHCR’s discursive change in the 1980s, towards
emphasizing root causes, holistic approaches and the security of refugees, pro-
vided a foundation for Stoltenberg’s conclusions.
Redefining International Protection as Security
If a security discourse emerged around the time of the end of the Cold War,
what happened to the concepts that had been at the centre of UNHCR’s dis-
course since its inception in 1951? It is important to keep in mind that, even
though references to security increased dramatically from the late 1980s
onwards, many more direct references were made by the agency to concepts
such as international protection, asylum and human and refugee rights—not

only in the late 1980s, but also in the decades since. Despite this, it can be
argued that a security discourse did evolve within UNHCR. There are two main
reasons for this.
First, the existence of a security discourse is not only a matter of how fre-
quently the term ‘security’ is in use. Other concepts and terms contribute to
creating a general security language, such as ‘threat’, ‘in/stability’, ‘de/stabilize’,
‘safety’, ‘unsafe’, ‘violence’, ‘conflict’, ‘war’. These terms began to occur more fre-
quently in the UNHCR discourse in the late 1980s. In the 1990s, UNHCR
established a much closer relationship with regional and international secu-
rity organizations, such as the Organization for Security and Co-operation in
Europe (OSCE) and, especially, the Security Council, to encourage these to
deal with refugee problems. The refugee agency’s language also came closer to
that of the Security Council in the same period.
Second, although UNHCR’s traditional core concepts retained a central
place in the agency’s official discourse, the content and context of these con-
cepts changed in a way that made them consistent with a security-oriented
discursive framework. Thus, in the late 1980s, the concept of security began to
be used as a framework within which to reinterpret other core concepts. This
can be seen clearly with the concept of ‘international protection’. Departing
from its earlier legalistic understanding of international protection, UNHCR
began in the latter half of the 1980s to explain protection in terms of providing
security. The trend in the Notes from the 1980s is clear. Most Notes from early
in the decade followed the precedent of the 1970s and discussed international
protection first and foremost as a matter of furthering agreement among states
in the area of refugee law. International protection was usually not explicitly
defined. Instead a host of issues concerning asylum and non-refoulement,
detention of asylum-seekers and piracy attacks on refugee boats were listed
and discussed. The 1983 Note came close to a definition, along traditional
lines, when it described UNHCR protection functions as follows:
[T]‌he High Commissioner’s fundamental role in extending international protec-
tion is to promote the implementation of the legal and humanitarian standards
established by the world community for the benefit of refugees. In so doing the
High Commissioner can only act through Governments, whose goodwill and
co-operation are of paramount importance. (UNHCR, 1983b: para. 2)
However, a new understanding of ‘protection’ was emerging already in the
1982 Note. In addition to traditional concerns, this Note discussed at length
the need for states to deal with the root causes of flight in order for UNHCR
to be able to provide effective protection. The Note also brought up the physi-
cal safety of refugees, faced by pirates or armed attacks on their camps. This
theme continued and was strengthened in the ensuing years. The Notes from
1983 and 1984 struck a balance between the traditional, legalistic interpreta-
tion of protection and UNHCR’s new concern with physical protection. The
emphasis, though, was still on legal instruments and refugee definitions. Then,
in 1985, the balance tipped. The Note from 1985 listed, for the first time, physi-
cal protection as the foremost protection challenge:
It cannot be overlooked, when reviewing the evolution of refugee situations since
the establishment of UNHCR, that the emphasis of protection problems in the
1980s has increasingly shifted to such fundamental issues as the physical safety of
refugees and even their very survival. . . . They represent one of the most serious
challenges confronting the international community at the present time in the
area of international protection. (UNHCR, 1985b: para. 8)
Thus the redefinition of international protection as survival preceded and
facilitated UNHCR’s general adoption of a security discourse. The personal
security of the refugee was not mentioned until the 1986 Note, while the right
to security did not appear until 1987. But by 1988, refugees’ safety and security
had become protection priority number one:
Persons flee their country and seek protection as refugees in order to survive. The
main objective of international protection of refugees is to ensure their physical
safety and security. Over the last two decades, however, the security of refugees
has been seriously endangered through physical attacks against their persons,
deliberate military and armed attacks on their camps and settlements, milita-
rization of their camps and their forcible recruitment into regular or irregular
armed forces. Guaranteeing the physical protection of refugees remains one of
the most difficult protection problems for the High Commissioner. (UNHCR,
1988b: para. 24)
Conclusion
UNHCR’s reinterpretations of the concepts of ‘international protection’ and

‘non-political’ in the 1980s preceded the adoption of a security discourse.
These reinterpretations were a reaction to the deteriorating protection climate
of the 1980s, where states showed an increasing reluctance to provide asy-
lum and adequate protection to ever-larger groups of refugees. This forced
UNHCR to seek out new ways of fulfilling its mandate. In particular, the
agency began to discuss the need to solve the root causes of refugee flows and
to resolve the international disputes that rendered the lives of refugees in bor-
der camps so precarious. To take an interest in these issues was impossible
without becoming immersed in the world of state sovereignty, inter-state

conflict, and international intervention—in short, the arena of international
security politics. Thus, the 1980s saw first a redirection of the agency’s focus,
to physical protection of refugees living in war-like situations and to the con-
ditions in refugees’ countries of origin. What UNHCR saw as a result of this
shift led it to redirect its understanding of the refugee problem, from that of a
legal and humanitarian problem to that of a political and, later, security one.
This shift was gradual. The agency’s core concepts went through several stages
of reinterpretation until they were finally placed within a security context. This
was achieved in the early 1990s.
By 1989, UNHCR had moved towards framing the problems of displace-
ment within a discourse of security, emphasizing the security implications
of refugee problems and the political measures necessary to deal with them.
At the same time the agency continued to assert its own non-political status.
The uneasy conceptual compromise between, on the one hand, asserting the
importance of the political and security dimensions of refugee problems, and,
on the other, claiming that UNHCR can perform its tasks of refugee protec-
tion, assistance and solutions in an entirely non-political and humanitarian
way, is one that continued to trouble the refugee agency in the 1990s.
7
The 1990s: Adopting and Adapting

a Security Discourse
UNHCR’s official discourse went through a period of swift and substantial

change, beginning in the late 1980s and accelerating in the early 1990s. The
refugee agency adopted a new raison d’être, describing itself as part of the UN’s
international security mechanism, arguing that its activities would alleviate and
help resolve the political and security problems created by refugee movements.
Instead of staying clear of international politics, UNHCR advocated a proactive
international approach to deal with the root causes of displacement, even when
that meant being actively involved in humanitarian actions in the midst of war.
This chapter documents the evolution of UNHCR’s security discourse. It shows
how this discourse emerged and gained strength in the optimistic ‘New World
Order’ period after the first Gulf War; became redefined after several humanitar-
ian disasters in the middle of the 1990s; and then began to falter towards the end
of the decade.
The chapter is divided chronologically into two sections, whose start and
end points correspond with three major crossroads in UNHCR’s recent his-
tory. The first crossroad is, of course, the end of the Cold War. Connected to
this and of particular importance to UNHCR’s development, was the Kurdish
refugee crisis in northern Iraq in 1991. The second crossroad for UNHCR
was the violent repatriation of Rwandan Hutu refugees from Zaire in 1996,
which led to a great deal of soul-searching within the agency. Finally, the
implications for refugee protection of the terror attacks on the US on 11
September 2001 led to another crossroads for UNHCR, and thus constitute
a natural starting point for c hapter 8’s analysis of the decline of UNHCR’s
security discourse.
Establishing a securit y discourse,

1990–96
In a working paper from 1992, UNHCR stated that the agency’s main aim
was to bring ‘safety to people, not people to safety’ (UNHCR, 1992b). This
put the refugee agency’s role on its head: up until then it had consistently
argued that its task was to wait until refugees reached the safety of an asylum
country before it could act to protect and assist them. In 1992 UNHCR was
the lead agency for the humanitarian operation on behalf of war-affected
people in the former Yugoslavia in an attempt to prevent ethnic cleansing
and contain refugee outflows. During the Cold War, the agency would have
considered this an inappropriate task. It was a far cry from the 1970s, when
it focused on resettling refugees (from Communist countries), giving legal
advice, and encouraging states to fulfil their obligations according to the
Refugee Convention.
The period from 1990 to 1996 saw the full development of a security dis-
course in UNHCR official documents and publications. This was particularly
the case for the High Commissioner’s speeches and the important new pub-
lication, The State of the World’s Refugees, first published in 1993. The Notes
and Reports also showed a clear trend towards emphasizing security in all its
aspects.
UNHCR’s security discourse had two main functions. The first was to pro-
vide a framework for explaining the causes and effects of refugee flows, as
well as determining the appropriate solutions to refugee problems. In the early
1990s, UNHCR employed its security discourse to provide an overall explan-
atory and legitimizing framework for the agency’s advocacy of a ‘holistic
approach’ to the refugee problem. The agency had proposed ‘comprehensive
solutions’ and ‘holistic approaches’ since the mid-1980s. But it was first in the
1990s that personal, national, regional and international security constituted
the main arguments why UNHCR and the international community should
pursue such solutions and approaches.
Second, security in all its aspects became UNHCR’s main justification for
its own survival and prosperity. Security became the agency’s most impor-
tant tool with which to solicit financial and political support. Its contribution
to international peace and security constituted its main argument why states
should increase their funding of UNHCR programmes. I will first discuss
these two functions, before turning to the specifics of how old core concepts
were reinterpreted, and new core concepts introduced, into UNHCR’s official
discourse in the first half of the 1990s.
The 1990s: Adopting and Adapting a Security Discourse 131
A new world order and a new

beginning for UNHCR
UNHCR saw the end of the Cold War as a watershed not only in global politics,
but for its own work. The agency was ready to grasp any new opportunity for
solutions to refugee problems that the new situation might provide, and looked
forward to the post-Cold War period as one of new beginnings. The momen-
tous shifts in global politics came at an opportune moment for the agency, ena-
bling it to haul itself out of the financial and confidence crises under which it
had suffered in the late 1980s. This was the time, as High Commissioner Ogata
often repeated, for UNHCR to become relevant again in international refu-
gee affairs. The preoccupation with ‘remaining relevant’ was something Ogata
inherited from her predecessor, Stoltenberg, who warned his staff:
If UNHCR is static and unresponsive to the political realities surrounding us, we
become meaningless both to the refugees and to the internal [sic] community
which have [sic] established us. If on the other hand, we are dynamic in analys-
ing, understanding and responding to the very same political realities, we would
be in a position not only to serve those who need us directly, but we will also be
occupying an important and meaningful place on the world stage as the last act of
the decade is being played out. (Stoltenberg, 1990c)
Stoltenberg, during his short tenure, and Ogata, who developed his ideas fur-
ther, inaugurated a period in UNHCR’s intellectual history when the principles
of the Statute became secondary to responding in a ‘relevant’ manner to politi-
cal realities. ‘Security’ in particular became UNHCR’s new buzzword, as the
refugee agency joined the campaign after the end of the Cold War to broaden
the narrow and militaristic Cold War international security agenda. The refu-
gee agency’s new message combined an appeal to states’ self-interests with lofty
UN ambitions for a safer, more peaceful post-Cold War world. Thus states were
asked to support UNHCR no longer only because of their moral and legal obli-
gations towards refugee individuals, but because it benefited their own, their
region’s and the world’s peace and security. By helping UNHCR protect and
find solutions for refugees, the agency argued, states also protected themselves.
A Global Security Actor
If one were to pinpoint a watershed, a moment when security terminology

seized centre stage in UNHCR discourse, it would be High Commissioner
Stoltenberg’s speech in October 1990, where he virtually described UNHCR
as a global security organization. In the speech, he outlined three ambitions

for the agency and related all three to the goal of furthering global security.
The first ambition was to promote voluntary repatriation, since this is ‘a con-
crete contribution to peace and security’. The second was to safeguard asylum,
which must be done through containing economic migration through the alle-
viation of poverty, a task which is both ‘a moral issue and . . . a problem of our
collective security’. The third ambition was ‘to have the international commu-
nity recognize the importance of the issues of refugees and migration and to
place them firmly on the international political agenda’. The reason for this, he
explained, was that the security thinking of the Cold War was no longer valid:
Indeed, the changing superpower relationship can be seen as symptomatic of a
broader change. It can be seen as a progressive and important evolution, which
no longer defines foreign policy merely as a defence of narrowly defined national
interests, but rather recognizes the interdependence of states and the need to
confront together the common problems and challenges to our global security.
(Stoltenberg, 1990d)
High Commissioner Ogata agreed fully with her predecessor’s views and
began early in her tenure to redefine UNHCR’s purpose from the narrower
goal of protecting the rights of refugees to the broader purpose of furthering
international peace and security. She aimed to place the refugee agency at the
centre of attempts to create a post-Cold War ‘new world order’ of peace and
stability, since, she argued, in order ‘to reach a new order, the problem of dis-
placement must be addressed effectively and humanely’ (Ogata, 1992).
Peace and security would routinely be a core topic of Ogata’s speeches. In
1992, the High Commissioner suggested that UNHCR had gone through four
stages in its history. She described the 1950s as a legal regime, the 1970s as a
humanitarian regime, the 1980s as a ‘complex humanitarian regime’, while in
the post-Cold War period, UNHCR had entered a fourth phase: ‘The humani-
tarian regime of which I spoke earlier has entered a new phase of complexity in
which refugees have become a part of the global agenda for security and peace’
(Ogata, 1992b). This motif recurred frequently in Ogata’s speeches. The secu-
rity dimensions of refugee flows, she claimed, were not only serious but also
unprecedented: ‘the refugee issue has gone beyond the humanitarian domain
to become a major political and security issue, affecting regional and global
stability’ (Ogata, 1993). This made it only natural for UNHCR to change as
well: in the early 1990s, the agency’s new raison d’être, its reason for protecting
refugees and finding solutions to their plight, became to further global secu-
rity. It was becoming, at least in its own eyes, a global security actor.
Eighteen years earlier, High Commissioner Sadruddin Aga Khan had
stressed that UNHCR’s aim was to keep refugee issues out of the sphere of
international politics and security, arguing that ‘[w]‌e must attempt to reduce

complex political questions in the minds of nations into simple moral and
humanitarian components for the heart to answer’ (Khan, 1974). Commenting
on Europe’s response to the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, Ogata stressed the
opposite: Population movements could no longer ‘be dealt with through char-
ity’. There ‘must now be a clear realization that movements of people are likely
to become both a major political and security issue in the near future’ (Ogata,
1992c). By the early 1990s, then, UNHCR had firmly established the view that
the refugee problem belonged on the international security agenda and that its
own value rested on its contributions to promoting peace and security.
UNHCR’s new self-image was accompanied by a reinterpretation of the
agency’s place within the UN family. Traditionally, it tended to characterize
itself as a unique agency with a specific mandate that set it apart from the rest
of the UN, particularly from the UN’s political bodies such as the Security
Council. In the early 1990s, however, UNHCR portrayed itself as an integral
part of a concerted UN effort to create a ‘new world order’. This theme was a
frequent favourite in the High Commissioner’s speeches and a feature of the
more conservative Reports:
The ultimate success of the High Commissioner’s . . . strategy will depend on the
ability of the United Nations to develop a comprehensive and integrated response,
linking humanitarian action and protection of human rights with peacemaking,
peace-keeping and peace-building, in the context of strengthened partnership of
all concerned actors: governmental, intergovernmental and non-governmental.
Improving horizontal co-ordination within the United Nations by recognizing
and addressing the link between humanitarian, economic, political and the secu-
rity dimensions of crises is crucial in this regard. (UNHCR, 1994: para. 8)
From the early 1990s, UNHCR often avoided making a clear distinction
between its own work and that of other members of the UN family. From its
traditional concern with boundaries and legal limitations, the agency found a
new enthusiasm for links, complexity and blurred boundaries. UNHCR also
switched from describing itself as a refugee-specific agency to a humanitarian
organization. It argued that its work to protect and find solutions for people ‘of
concern’ was indispensable to conflict resolution. Consequently, its achieve-
ments should be gauged not only by the standards of refugee law, but by how
the agency’s humanitarian work contributed to a concerted international effort
to build and keep the peace.
One of the results of UNHCR’s new self-image as an invaluable contributor
to international peace and security was that the agency lost its distaste for state
security concerns. Dropping its long-standing dogma that the security con-
cerns of states were generally narrow-minded and illegitimate, UNHCR began
to routinely list every possible security threat posed by refugee movements to

their host countries. This excerpt from the 1990 Note (and the Notes, we should
remember, are specifically about refugee protection) is an early example:
In framing their new approaches, States must respond to the legitimate concerns
of all affected States. These concerns include the protracted nature of refugee
problems in many developing countries with their own very troubled economies,
their limited ability to provide for the substantial refugee populations they are
hosting without concerted international assistance, their concerns about the wan-
ing international solidarity in sharing the burden and the political and security
difficulties accompanying influxes. (UNHCR, 1990b: para. 26)
Another result of this new self-image was to make UNHCR more outspoken
on a range of political and security issues outside the realm of specific refugee
crises. The 1991 Report offered UNHCR’s take on the ills of the post-Cold War
world, exemplified by this extract from a discussion of the African continent:
The fact remains that whether individually or collectively, African countries
continue to grapple with social as well as political problems. Border differences,
refugees, economic stagnation, problems of structural adjustment, heavy debt
servicing, abuse of human rights, lack of political accountability and democracy,
environmental degradation and a host of other problems have combined to under-
mine the confidence and security of the continent. (UNHCR, 1992g: para. 90)
These ills, UNHCR repeatedly asserted, were both the results and the causes
of forced migration, making displacement one of the most serious and com-
plex humanitarian, human rights, political and security conundrums of the
post-Cold War world.
Although UNHCR had advocated comprehensive approaches and warned
about the complexities of refugee problems since the mid-1980s, what was new
in the early 1990s was that this description became steeped in the language of
security. Three new trends could be seen in UNHCR’s ‘root causes’ debate. The
first trend is related to the agency’s changing self-image. In the 1980s, the refugee
agency was careful to place the responsibility for dealing with the ‘root causes’
of flight at the doorstep of states. According to High Commissioner Hocké,
dealing with refugee situations involved two types of action by the international
community: ‘One is humanitarian, addressed primarily to alleviating human
suffering and providing protection. The other is political, addressed primarily
to attenuating the root causes and providing solutions’ (Hocké, 1986). Only the
former task belonged rightfully with UNHCR, he argued.
In the 1990s, UNHCR ceased to make a clear distinction between the political
tasks of states and the non-political, humanitarian tasks of the refugee agency.
Similar to the blurring of the distinction between UNHCR and other UN organi-
zations taking place at the same time, the agency began to blur the lines between
its own responsibilities and those of states. This can be illustrated by a look at
the Notes from the first half of the decade. They all advocate comprehensive
approaches to the refugee problem,1 sometimes referring to these approaches as
the High Commissioner’s, but more often merely calling for ‘concerted action
of the international community’, without delineating where UNHCR’s mandate
begins and ends. At the same time, the agency dropped its old principle proscrib-
ing the agency from getting involved in dealing with the political causes of flight,
a principle High Commissioner Hocké still espoused vigorously at the end of the
1980s. His reservations were abandoned in the 1991 Note, which explained that
UNHCR’s protection function includes ‘embrac(ing) effective measures for facili-
tating the elimination of root causes’ (UNHCR, 1991b: para. 48).
UNHCR never argued that it could achieve comprehensive solutions on
its own. The agency would still warn about its own limitations, but it now
characterized these limitations as practical, not legal or statutory: ‘The com-
prehensive strategies required obviously far exceed the capacity of humanitar-
ian agencies, but UNHCR will continue to do its part’, the agency explained
(UNHCR, 1994b: para. 68). Thus whether, or the degree to which, the refugee
agency should be involved in the political task of dealing with ‘root causes’
changed from a principled to a practical question.
Second, the content of UNHCR’s understanding of ‘comprehensive
approaches’ changed. In the 1980s, its focus was narrow, emphasizing
the need to address the human rights situation in refugee-sending coun-
tries to facilitate voluntary repatriation (UNHCR, 1987b: para. 61). In the
1990s the focus broadened dramatically. The concern with human rights
remained prominent, but as part of a long list including humanitarian assis-
tance, economic development, political conflict resolution, reconciliation,
nation-building, the ‘security situation’, and so on. In one commonly used
description, UNHCR endorsed ‘a comprehensive and integrated response,
linking humanitarian action and protection of human rights with peace-
making, peace-keeping and peace building’ (UNHCR, 1994: paras. 8 and
18). This approach was as much concerned with prevention as with repatria-
tion, leading UNHCR routinely to herald the advent of a new ‘prevention
and solutions-oriented strategy’ (UNHCR, 1994: para 19). This strategy was
explained in the 1993 Note:
Convinced that there will be no end to refugee emergencies until the international
community has found ways to deal effectively with the root causes of coerced dis-
placement, the High Commissioner has placed prevention alongside solutions as
1
The first couple of Notes from the decade talk mostly about root causes, while from 1993
onwards, ‘root causes’ goes out of fashion and the terminology switches to ‘comprehensive
approaches/solutions’.
an integral part of her strategy and has increasingly oriented the Office towards
the promotion and support of efforts by the international community to alleviate
situations in countries of origin that threaten to create internal displacement and
new refugees or that prevent those who have already fled from returning home.
(UNHCR, 1993c: para. 4)
Third, the reasons given for the need to adopt comprehensive approaches,
changed. In the 1980s, root causes had to be addressed so that refugees could
exercise their human right to return home (Hocké, 1989). Thus, adequate
standards of treatment of refugee individuals were the focus of UNHCR’s
comprehensive strategies in the 1980s. Although UNHCR was, of course, still
concerned with the rights and needs of refugees in the 1990s, it shifted its
emphasis to the wider economic, environmental, political, and security prob-
lems of host states and regions. It was in order to overcome these problems, the
refugee agency argued, that comprehensive and concerted action to solve the
causes of refugee flight had become vital:
Among the greatest lessons of this period is the importance of political initia-
tives in resolving the causes of refugee problems and the link between refugees
and international peace and stability. While humanitarian assistance can make
an important contribution to reducing tensions and promoting reconciliation, it
cannot be a substitute for political solutions. (UNHCR, 1994: para. 2)
Statements such as this, spelling out the political necessity of dealing with
the causes of flight, became commonplace in UNHCR’s official discourse in
the early 1990s.
Remaining relevant: Pragmatism versus

the Statute
Having set out the general themes of UNHCR’s security discourse in the first
half of the 1990s, I will now turn to some more specific trends in the agency’s
language. First among these is the disappearance of what once was at the core
of the refugee agency’s official discourse: faithful adherence to the Statute.
UNHCR was never as dogmatically principled as it liked to proclaim. The his-
tory of the agency’s practical policies is one of adaptation and change. But
in the early 1990s, it also abandoned the discourse of the Statute and began
instead to justify its policies in terms of broader human rights, humanitar-
ian, political and security goals. This change is not only notable in the more
politically bold speeches of the High Commissioner, but also in the conserva-
tive Notes. For instance, in the 1990 Note, UNHCR claimed that the refugee
situation had ‘fundamentally altered in character’, and promised that if donor
states would provide the funds it needed to overcome its financial crisis, the
agency would ensure that its activities would become more ‘timely’ and reflect
this fundamental change. The Note continued:
From UNHCR’s perspective, what is required is an overall and global approach
which will develop asylum and refugee policy so that humanitarian and human
rights concerns are well integrated and properly balanced in relation to devel-
opment, foreign policy and immigration control considerations. The intensified
search for solutions needs to be pragmatic, imaginative and pursued without
undue rigidity, but always within the humanitarian parameters which the inter-
national community has carefully elaborated over the past four decades. Basic
protection principles and international solidarity must remain the starting point.
(UNHCR, 1990b: para. 24)2
The above quotation illustrates some important developments in UNHCR’s
discourse. First, the once dominant concern with inter-state conventions and
treaties had receded into the background. ‘Basic protection principles’ had
now become ‘the starting point’ from which pragmatic and imaginative poli-
cies could be developed, rather than borders that delineated UNHCR’s per-
missible range of activities. Instead of the refugee agency’s exclusive domain
of international refugee law, ‘humanitarian and human rights concerns’, or
‘humanitarian parameters’, became its guidelines for what constituted sound
refugee policies. Thus, from the early 1990s onwards, UNHCR could no longer
be described as a legalistic agency. Its legal duties of refugee protection, as set
out in the Statute, were only a starting point for the agency’s activities. On the
occasions when UNHCR reminded states of their legal obligations, as it still
did in the Notes, it pointed as much to international humanitarian law as to
international refugee law.
This shift from a legalistic to a ‘humanitarian’ approach was a necessary rhe-
torical realignment that enabled UNHCR to justify its recourse to ‘pragmatic
and imaginative’ policies. If the rules for what the agency—or the international
community, for that matter—could do to solve refugee problems were rigidly
set down in non-negotiable bodies of law, then its attempt to regain ‘relevance’
in the eyes of donor and host states through pragmatically adapting to their
needs would be seriously circumscribed.
Traditionally, UNHCR had interpreted its Statute to heavily circumscribe its
work. In the 1990s, the agency did not cease to mention its statutory tasks, nor
did it belittle its Statute. However, the agency came to the conclusion that its
Statute was not as limiting as it had first thought. For instance, the 1994 Note
2
This phrase was repeated in the 1991 Note (UNHCR, 1991b: para. 41).
repeatedly pointed to the prescriptions of the Statute and mandate, but only
to explain how wide these prescriptions in fact were. The newly discovered
‘broad scope of the overall objective of international protection’ (UNHCR,
1994b: para. 12) allowed UNHCR’s mandate to become inherently dynamic:
The evolution of UNHCR’s role over the last forty years has demonstrated that the
mandate is resilient enough to allow, or indeed require, adaptation by UNHCR to
new, unprecedented challenges through new approaches, including in the areas of
prevention and in-country protection. (1992h: para. 14)
UNHCR’s move from a legalistic to a pragmatic understanding of its
Statute and mandate is closely linked to its security discourse. Being prag-
matic is linked to being politically deft, rather than being a principled, but
often unpopular, fighter for the inalienable rights of refugees. In the 1990s,
UNHCR often presented its task as that of finding reasonable compromises,
or, in the agency’s own words: ‘how best the Office could preserve the princi-
ples and values fundamental to international protection, while forging new
responses which are innovative and practical, balancing humanitarian con-
cerns with political realism, and States’ interests with the rights and needs of
refugees’ (UNHCR, 1992h: para. 11). This balancing act meant that UNHCR
had to lose its political innocence: ‘The High Commissioner’s non-political
mandate requires neutrality; but it was felt that this neutrality must be cou-
pled with a thorough understanding of prevailing political and other realities’
(UNHCR, 1992h: para.14). Dominant among these realities were, according
to the agency’s new discourse, the complex security dimensions of refugee
movements in the post-Cold War period.
The appointment of Ogata was an important factor in transforming UNHCR’s
self-image from that of a legal refugee agency to that of a pragmatic humani-
tarian organization. Ogata showed less regard for legal principles than all her
predecessors, except, perhaps, Stoltenberg. Regretfully concluding that ‘refugee
law (was) of limited use’ in areas such as northern Iraq and Yugoslavia, she
went on to suggest that UNHCR in such situations had to act beyond the law
and without a strict legal mandate. It was through ‘negotiation, improvisation
and innovation that humanitarian access can be achieved . . . ’ (Ogata, 1992d).
Prevention, containment and

in-country protection
UNHCR would not have been able to introduce a new vocabulary of ‘preven-
tion’, ‘containment’ and ‘in-country protection’ if it had not first re-evaluated
the role its Statute played in determining the agency’s actions. By reinterpret-
ing its Statute from a document that set the legal limits for the refugee agen-
cy’s competence to one that merely demarcated the minimal core of what the
agency should be doing, UNHCR could make internally displaced persons
(IDPs) and others at risk of becoming refugees its new focus of attention. Its
reasons for doing so were a combination of human rights, humanitarian and
security arguments.
UNHCR had by now re-labelled itself as a humanitarian organization, rather
than a refugee agency. Similarly, it now talked more often about humanitarian
emergencies than about refugee emergencies, thus implicitly suggesting that it
was natural for UNHCR to provide assistance and protection to the victims of
all types of man-made disasters. This was an important linguistic step, since it
made it easier for the agency to contend as a matter of fact that IDPs and other
war-affected persons were of concern to the agency.
UNHCR had of course been asked to assist IDPs earlier, but had on those
occasions been careful to stress that this was a non-core activity. In the early
1990s, however, IDPs became a central part not only of UNHCR operations,
but also of the agency’s discourse. In 1992 Ogata discussed ‘the need today for
international humanitarian action on behalf of nationals in their own coun-
tries’ and explained that the traditional view that refugees only were of inter-
national concern once they crossed a border was no longer ‘entirely correct’.
UNHCR, she said, was now ‘confronted with the major challenge of develop-
ing principles and strategies to meet the protection and assistance needs of
uprooted people in their own country, despite the constraints of sovereignty’
(Ogata, 1992d). Ogata brought up the IDP issue in almost all her speeches.
She argued that ‘[r]‌esponses to complex movements of people which focus
primarily on the entry into and the conditions of stay in the receiving country
are far from adequate’ (Ogata, 1994). Instead:
Refugee problems can neither be prevented nor resolved unless the issue of the
internally displaced is also tackled. . . . Population displacement, whether internal
or international has gone beyond the humanitarian domain to become a major
political, security and socio-economic issue, affecting regional and global stabil-
ity, as the crises in former Yugoslavia, Somalia and Rwanda have clearly shown.
(Ogata, 1994b)
The arrival of IDPs at the centre of UNHCR’s discourse was part and par-
cel of the agency’s growing faith in prevention and containment strategies. To
protect and assist IDPs was also to prevent and contain refugee flows. The 1991
Note was the first to have a separate section on ‘prevention’:
To begin with, there is a need for preventive activity. Prevention in this con-
text means the elimination of causes of departure—so that people will not feel
compelled to leave—rather than the erection of barriers which leave causes intact,
but make departure impossible. Prevention also means the early containment of
a situation of exodus so that threats to the security and well-being of the persons
concerned are not aggravated and the situation remains manageable from both
the humanitarian and political standpoint. (UNHCR, 1991b: para. 43)
UNHCR did not immediately link prevention directly to state, regional and
global security. In the very early 1990s, the agency emphasized instead the
security of the would-be refugee and was cautious of the dangers involved in
in-country protection. In-country protection, it warned, must be ‘accompa-
nied by necessary guarantees fully consonant with international human rights
standards’ and the sovereignty of the country of origin must be respected.
‘In addition’, the agency concluded, ‘there is the issue for UNHCR of present
mandate limitations’ (UNHCR, 1991b: para. 47). Although prevention soon
became a cornerstone in UNHCR discourse, the agency continued to warn
about the potential threats prevention strategies could pose to the institution
of asylum. In contrast, the agency soon lost its reservations over mandate limi-
tations. Again, it employed a ‘blurring strategy’: circumventing the question of
its mandate by describing its work as part of that of ‘the international commu-
nity’, without revealing where its own tasks ended and those of others began:
[T]‌he High Commissioner has placed prevention alongside solutions as an integral
part of her strategy and has increasingly oriented the Office towards the promotion
and support of efforts by the international community to alleviate situations in coun-
tries of origin that threaten to create internal displacement and new refugees or that
prevent those who have already fled from returning home. (UNHCR, 1993c: para. 4)
Soon UNHCR began to link prevention not only to the security of indi-
viduals, but also to state, regional and global security. First, security became
the rationale behind prevention and containment. UNHCR argued that refu-
gee exoduses must be avoided because they constitute threats to host state,
regional or global security: ‘The links between stability, security, respect for
human rights and the prevention of refugee flows are obvious’ (Ogata, 1995).
The adoption of this strategy can thus be seen as a result of UNHCR’s convic-
tion that the security dimensions of displacement had become so serious after
the end of the Cold War that the world could no longer afford to merely allevi-
ate the consequences of forced displacement.
Second, security concerns, especially staff security, became a result of
the strategy of prevention.3 UNHCR acknowledged that ‘the pursuit of a
3
While the security of staff and humanitarian operations occurs three times in all of the 1980s
Reports, it appears fifty times in the 1990s Reports. The trend is particularly strong at the end of
the decade.
prevention and solution-oriented strategy has meant more direct engagement

of UNHCR in situations of acute crisis or open conflict, with attendant risks
to its staff and implementing partners’ (UNHCR, 1994: para.7). The security
situation for humanitarian staff, as well as for refugees, became an important
factor shaping UNHCR’s security discourse in the latter half of the 1990s.
Summing up the early 1990s: A new

paradigm
The State of the World’s Refugees 1995 summed up the changes that had taken
place in UNHCR’s thinking in the early 1990s. It stated that the agency had
shifted from a ‘reactive, exile-oriented and refugee-specific’ paradigm to
a ‘proactive, homeland-oriented and holistic’ one (UNHCR, 1995: 43). It
emphasized the prevention and containment of refugee flows and advocated
conflict resolution, post-conflict reconstruction and refugee repatriation as
the best solution to refugee crises. UNHCR’s security discourse helped pro-
vide the legitimization for this new paradigm, by explaining that refugee flows
must be prevented, contained and reversed due to the security threats such
flows create for the social cohesion, political integrity and economic welfare of
host states; for regional and international stability; for humanitarian workers;
and for the refugees themselves.
Two years later, The State of the World’s Refugees 1997 gave the concept of
security an even more prominent role: The first chapter set out UNHCR’s under-
standing of ‘security’ and the term was subsequently employed as a guiding con-
cept throughout the survey (UNHCR, 1997). However, the 1997 edition not only
shows the consolidation of the concept of security at the core of the agency’s dis-
course, but also how the agency redefined security into a more refugee-friendly
concept in the latter half of the decade. Ogata proclaimed already in 1995 that a
‘major test for the coming decades . . . will be to develop a humanitarian perspec-
tive of security’ (Ogata, 1995b). The next section analyses the consolidation and
redefinition of UNHCR’s security discourse in the second half of the 1990s.
Constructing a refugee-friendly
concept of securit y, 1996–2000
The second half of the 1990s were characterized by both the consolidation
and the redefinition of the concept of security at the core of UNHCR’s official
discourse. Two trends are particularly visible: First, the language of security

was consolidated across a range of UNHCR documents, including the High
Commissioner’s speeches, The State of the World’s Refugees, the Notes and
Reports, as well as in a number of ‘security manuals’4 and strategy documents.
Second, doubts started to show within the refugee agency over its reliance on
the concept of security. As a consequence it began to redefine security into a
softer, more humanitarian concept. I analyse the results of this combined strat-
egy of emphasizing and redefining the security dimensions of forced migra-
tion: a concept of ‘human security’ which covers the spectrum from the human
rights and humanitarian needs of displaced and war-affected persons to the
political, economic, environmental, social and strategic interests of states and
the international community. The next sections will set out the many aspects
of security brought up by UNHCR in this period, beginning with the security
role of the agency itself and ending with the physical security of refugees and
humanitarian workers.
The Security Role of UNHCR
UNHCR had by the mid-1990s reinterpreted its mandate into a wider, more
adaptable one, in order to accommodate new policies of prevention, contain-
ment and repatriation. Despite this discursive transformation the agency was
eager to present its history as one of continuity. While redefining its mandate
substantially, UNHCR reassured its audience at the same time that no redefi-
nition had taken place. For instance, the 1996 document, UNHCR Strategy
Towards 2000, held that:
UNHCR’s objective—upholding human rights of people who actually or poten-
tially lack national protection, and whose right to remain safely in their homes
has therefore been threatened—has remained constant since the organization was
established in 1951. But the international environment confronting UNHCR has
changed significantly, particularly in the past five or six years. (UNHCR, 1996)
As chapter 5 showed, the objective set out in the quotation above is quite dif-
ferent from the one espoused by UNHCR at its inception. The focus on human
rights did not become central in the agency’s interpretation of its mandate
4
The first Guidelines on Security (UNHCR, 1992i) came out in 1992, followed by a guide
for UNHCR staff working with the military (UNHCR, 1995d) and a guide for military actors
working with humanitarian agencies (UNHCR, 1996e). Refugee Survey Quarterly, published by
UNHCR, also shows a strong interest in the security dimensions of refugee movements in this
period. For instance, vol. 19, no. 1, 2000, is wholly dedicated to ‘Security in Refugee Populated
Areas’.
until the 1980s. Moreover, the equal emphasis on actual and potential lack
of national protection, that is, the erasure of the distinction between actual
and potential refugees, is entirely a post-Cold War phenomenon. However, to
claim that it was the circumstances of UNHCR’s work that had changed, rather
than the agency’s mandate, made it easier to legitimate the new direction the
agency was taking.
The new direction was to present UNHCR as an integral part of the UN’s
global security efforts. UNHCR Strategy Towards 2000 first set out UNHCR’s
tasks as protecting ‘the safety and welfare of people who have been uprooted
or threatened by persecution, armed conflict and human rights violations’ and
finding lasting solutions to the plight of refugees and displaced persons. The
second paragraph explained why the agency must perform these tasks, placing
security first:
By means of all these activities, UNHCR endeavours to promote the principles
of the UN Charter: maintaining international peace and security; developing
friendly relations among nations; achieving cooperation in solving international
problems; and encouraging respect for human rights and fundamental free-
doms . . . . (UNHCR, 1996: para. 2)
UNHCR never claimed that the agency itself could broker peace, a task it still
left to states, but it held that the humanitarian work it performed on behalf of
refugees and others ‘of concern’ was a vital component in the search for lasting
solutions to a conflict. UNHCR documents from this period routinely under-
line the link between the agency’s operations and the goals of conflict resolution
and peace building. This was particularly the case when the agency described
those of its operations that fell outside its traditional mandate, that is, operations
concerned mainly with non-refugees. A good example is the agency’s humani-
tarian operations in the former Soviet Union, an area where IDPs, migrants and
stateless persons were the main subjects of UNHCR concern.5 Descriptions of
these operations almost unfailingly aligned them with the political efforts to
obtain peace and stability in the region (see e.g. UNHCR, 1999c: para. 132).
Possibly, the lack of a statutory responsibility for non-refugee groups made
it more important for UNHCR to give other convincing reasons for its inter-
ventions on behalf of these groups. But the agency also promoted itself as
an international security organization when speaking generally of the chal-
lenges posed by forced migration. For instance, in 1999, when UNHCR had
embraced the idea of human security or ‘the security of peoples’, the High
Commissioner argued that military measures were not enough to provide
security in troubled regions. Instead she stressed that ‘to ensure international
5
The latter category, statelessness, falling under UNHCR’s mandate.
presence—including humanitarian agencies—was the best way to provide

security to people and build their confidence in situations of internal conflict
and weak state authority’ (Ogata, 1999b).
Refugees as Security Threats
A new—and previously shunned—aspect of UNHCR’s security discourse in

this period was its labelling of refugees themselves as security threats. The
agency raised concern with increasing frequency over the security threats
refugees may pose to the national security of host states or countries of ori-
gin, to regional security, or to international peace and security. Sometimes
such references to refugees as threats were vaguely phrased so as not to blame
refugees directly. But in many cases UNHCR abandoned its previous fear of
branding refugees as security threats. Even the protection and rights-oriented
Notes warned of refugees as potential security burdens who could exacerbate
conflicts back home or even ignite new violence in their host state (UNHCR,
1997e). The 1998 Note warned that:
Mass influxes impose particular burdens on receiving countries, who are often
those least able, for economic and development reasons, to shoulder these burdens.
Arrangements which recognize the unquantifiable social, political, environmental,
security and other costs to host countries should be elaborated and implemented,
in order to ensure a balanced sharing of responsibilities, so that the burden on any
one country does not become too onerous. (UNHCR, 1998d: para. 17)
This frankness stands in stark contrast to the agency’s discursive his-
tory: throughout most of its existence UNHCR refuted all claims that refugees
constituted security threats. In contrast, the Reports from the latter half of the
1990s routinely warned about ‘the importance for refugees and asylum-seekers
to conform to the laws and regulations of the host country and refrain from
actions that would undermine local security’ (UNHCR, 1999c: para. 10).
Ogata frequently pursued this theme on a broader note, arguing that:
Refugee problems invariably affect key state interests. They are related to matters
of national, regional and even international peace and security. Humanitarian
crises in our times increasingly are strategic crises, although they are infrequently
dealt with as such. (Ogata, 1997: 4, emphasis in original)
This less benign view of refugee populations stemmed in particular from
experiences in the Great Lakes region of Africa, where civilians and armed
perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide were mixed together in refugee camps.
But UNHCR also highlighted the security costs of coping with mass influxes
in general terms. The High Commissioner often argued that refugees, apart
from being victims of insecurity, had ‘also become a major source of instability
and conflict’ (Ogata, 1999c). Statements like this show that by the mid-1990s
UNHCR no longer followed the UN Refugee Convention in using the term
‘refugee’ solely to describe civilian non-combatants. UNHCR advocated the
demilitarization of refugee camps, but neither its discourse nor actions in the
1990s signalled that militarized exile populations such as the Rwandan Hutus
were considered to be outside the agency’s competence.
By the late 1990s, UNHCR no longer cultivated a self-image as watchdog of
refugee rights in a world where selfish states grasp any opportunity to sacrifice
their legal and humanitarian obligations on the altar of dubious ‘national security
concerns’. Instead, the agency’s self-image became that of a mediator, whose task
was to strike a balance between the interests of refugees and those of states. Not
only must the safety of refugees be protected from the violations of states, but in
return, the security of states must be protected against the danger of refugees.
The Security Threat of Refugee-Sending Countries
Not only (some) refugees but also their home countries were branded security
threats by UNHCR in the late 1990s. The agency had long abandoned its dis-
taste, in the name of political neutrality, for discussing conditions within coun-
tries of origin. Instead it argued ‘that sovereignty can no longer be invoked
against international scrutiny’ when a state fails to protect its own citizens. It
welcomed ‘the trend that has developed since 1991 . . . of establishing a direct
causal link between the causes of mass human rights violations, consequent
forced displacements and the threat to international or regional peace and
security’ (UNHCR, 1996: para. 36).
UNHCR frequently returned to the issue of state responsibility in the latter
half of the 1990s. State responsibility became closely linked in the agency’s
discourse with its recently adapted strategy of ‘prevention and solution’—solu-
tions by now predominantly meaning repatriation:
Acceptance of State responsibility is an element in averting mass flows of refugees
generally and in facilitating durable solutions to their problems. This responsibil-
ity, in particular as it regards countries of origin, includes addressing the causes
of mass flows—inter alia, human rights violations, internal conflicts, external
aggression, internal and international social and economic injustices—in both a
preventive and curative manner, as well as facilitating the return and reintegra-
tion of nationals in safety and dignity. (UNHCR, 1996d: para. 28)
UNHCR’s description of refugee-sending countries became more steeped
in the language of security as the 1990s wore on. Two reasons for this should
be mentioned, emanating from UNHCR’s increased involvement in war zones.
First, the widespread concern that refugees import instability put strong pres-
sure on UNHCR to repatriate refugees as fast as possible. To facilitate repatria-
tion, intervention into refugee-sending countries to solve, or at least alleviate,
the causes of flight was necessary. This was a task for more powerful actors
than UNHCR. By emphasizing the responsibility of refugee sending states
and by labelling the production of refugees a threat to international peace and
security, the agency sought to induce and legitimize such interventions.
Second, many UNHCR operations, in line with the agency’s prevention and
containment strategy, were concerned not with refugees, but with IDPs and
war-affected people. While UNHCR’s Statute prescribed that the agency always
negotiate humanitarian access with the government of the affected state, the
situation on the ground could make this difficult. Sometimes there were no
clear state authorities to negotiate with, as in Somalia, or there were several
factions competing for state ownership, as in Bosnia. The language of security
could help UNHCR overcome this obstacle. If population displacement was
labelled a threat to international security, the refugee agency could circumvent
the contentious issue of seeking permission for its operations from more or
less palatable warring factions, by relying instead on the authorization of the
Security Council or the Secretary-General. In reality, the agency continued to
do its utmost to negotiate access with the parties to the conflict, but the formula
‘threat to international peace and security’ provided another layer of legitimacy
when state consent could not be obtained, or when political power in the state in
question was too fragmented and fluid for such consent to have much meaning.
Humanitarian Action as a Security Dilemma
A new phenomenon in the latter half of the decade was UNHCR’s public ques-
tioning of whether humanitarian action could sometimes worsen the secu-
rity situation in a region. The agency’s experience in the Great Lakes region
of Africa particularly spurred this introspection. In 1996, while urging states
to send troops to separate génocidaires from refugees in Zaire, the High
Commissioner stated that:
Probably never before has my Office found its humanitarian concerns in the midst
of such a lethal quagmire of political and security interests. While our humani-
tarian assistance and protection serve an innocent, silent majority of needy and
anxious refugees, they also serve the militants who have an interest in maintain-
ing the status quo. (Ogata, 1996)
Humanitarian action in such security quagmires as the former Yugoslavia
and eastern Zaire was a dangerous task. UNHCR staff had been attacked and
killed before, but not on this scale, and the agency had tended to keep quiet
about such incidents. However, a combination of high levels of violence and
‘security incidents’ against humanitarian workers, and strong media focus
on the humanitarian operations in which they worked, led ‘staff security’ to
become a major UNHCR preoccupation in the latter half of the 1990s. The
agency argued that threats to staff were a relatively new phenomenon, caused
by the ‘increased operationality (sic) by humanitarian agencies in conflict
situations’ (UNHCR, 1997e), and therefore warranting new levels of security
concerns. The agency argued that the killing of humanitarian workers ‘can no
longer be considered as isolated incidents but as part of a deeply disturbing
trend. Humanitarian agencies, by filling a political vacuum . . . are themselves
becoming part of the battle’ (UNHCR, 1997c: para. 1).
Thus, while the personal security of refugees had entered UNHCR’s security
discourse already in the late 1980s, they were now joined by the staff who were
there to protect them. Refugees Magazine (1997a, 1997c, 1998) began to print
lists honouring the memory of staff members killed in the line of duty, ‘security
manuals’ were issued to field staff, security officers deployed, reports on staff
security were sent to EXCOM (UNHCR, 1999e), and the High Commissioner
repeatedly implored the international community to provide the means with
which to protect humanitarian operations:
Staff security must be addressed comprehensively—through political, legal, oper-
ational and even psychological means. It cannot be dealt with, however, without
tackling the issue of security comprehensively. Today’s refugee crises in fact con-
cern all dimensions of security. (Ogata, 1999c)
This reference to all dimensions of security points towards a new trend in
UNHCR’s security discourse at the end of the 1990s: an attempt to find one
concept, founded on a sound humanitarian basis, that could incorporate all
the dimensions of security with which the agency was concerned—from the
security of refugees and humanitarian staff to that of states and regions. The
result of this attempt was the arrival of the concept of ‘human security’ at the
core of UNHCR’s official discourse.
D oubt and redefinition: The

introduction of ‘human securit y’
By the end of the 1990s, UNHCR had imbued its conception of security with
such a wide range of meanings it seemed to burst at the seams. The agency con-
tinued to promote a security understanding of the refugee problem in order
to instil in its audience a sense of urgency and to prompt rapid and substantial
responses to displacement crises. At the same time it began to reconsider how
prudent its invocations of security were:
The sheer magnitude of the post-Cold War problems, the levels of national
and regional insecurity they generate and State reluctance to continue to meet
what are seen as the rising financial, political, environmental and social costs of
maintaining large refugee populations, or receiving a continuous flow has had a
marked and negative impact on the willingness of countries to provide asylum.
(UNHCR, 1999d: para. 1)
UNHCR admitted that this unwillingness of states, based on their security
concerns, directly impacted on the agency’s own ability to provide protection:
Refugee movements have also become a major source of instability and con-
flict: hence a demand for rapid solutions, sometimes at the expense of humanitarian
and refugee protection principles, and sometimes requiring UNHCR and its partners
to work rapidly and simultaneously in countries of asylum and of return. Both our
mandate and our traditional operational responses are thus affected. (Ogata, 1999)
It was to overcome this contradiction that UNHCR introduced ‘human secu-

rity’ into its discourse. The term had been popular in humanitarian circles since
it was first employed in UNDP’s Human Development Report in 1994. UNHCR
began to employ the concept around the same time as a means with which to
achieve what Ogata had throughout her term in office stressed was her most
important challenge: ‘how to strike a balance between the principles of refu-
gee protection, which are at the core of my Office’s mandate, and the legitimate
concerns of states’ (Ogata, 1997b). It was clear that this could not be done solely
through appealing to the security interests of states. As Part Three will discuss,
the Rwandan refugee crisis showed UNHCR that security interests may some-
times spur states to take no action at all, or, even worse, to take actions that are
detrimental to refugee protection. From this experience, the High Commissioner
concluded: ‘I am concerned that if we do not attempt to resolve the apparent con-
tradictions between humanitarian principles and state interest, countless more
innocent persons will suffer’ (Ogata, 1997c). UNHCR worried that ‘[w]‌here
States approach the problem from a State security rather than a humanitarian
protection point of view, they risk losing sight of their obligation to provide pro-
tection to those who are deserving of it’ (UNHCR, 2000f: para. 41).
The concern with the negative effects of states’ security interests, did not lead
UNHCR to abandon its security discourse (at least not yet). Instead, the agency
sought to abandon a state-centric and short-term understanding of security
and substitute it with the refugee-friendly concept of human security. Instead of
adding up the many security dimensions of refugee movements to a frightening

sum of threats and dangers that risked putting states off becoming involved in
resolving refugee problems, UNHCR now endeavoured to show how the ‘real’
and enduring security of states and the international community could only
be achieved by providing ‘security for people’. In Ogata’s (1995c) words: ‘unless
people feel secure in their own homes, the security of states will continue to be
threatened by internal tensions and refugee flows’. She proposed that protecting
displaced persons and finding solutions to their plight was both a humanitarian
imperative and a matter of long-term security policy: ‘Without assuring human
security, peace and prosperity cannot endure very long’ (Ogata, 1997d).
UNHCR became an ardent international campaigner for the universal
acceptance of the concept of ‘human security’ (see e.g. UNHCR, 1998: xi)—to
the degree that the agency endorsed ‘human insecurity’ as a new version of
‘threats to international peace and security’ to invoke coercive action under
Chapter VII of the UN Charter Ogata (1997d) stressed:
. . . the need for further re-thinking of the concept of threats to international peace
and security as a basis for collective action. If the calamities in former Yugoslavia
and the African Great Lakes region have demonstrated one thing, it is the fre-
quent indivisibility of peace between and within states, but also between interna-
tional and human security’.
This point of view was repeated in numerous UNHCR documents, speeches and
publications. The State of the World’s Refugees 1997 employed ‘human security’ as
a guide to all the themes covered by the book. Ogata herself brought the issue of
human security up in most of her speeches, and was invited to be keynote speaker
at an intergovernmental conference on the subject. There she argued that the UN
Charter’s aim of maintaining ‘international peace and security’ was a goal of human
security and that ‘there is a growing awareness that states cannot and will not be
secure unless people feel secure, too’ (Ogata, 1999b). UNHCR policy and research
documents kept returning to the topic (see e.g. UNHCR, 1998b). Even the conserv-
ative Notes embraced the new concept. In some cases they went as far as to redefine
protection as human security, asserting that ‘[t]‌he principles of asylum and protec-
tion reflect a centuries-old, respected and widely-held value that places primacy on
human security and dignity’ (UNHCR, 1999d: paras. 62–4). As the decade came to
a close, ‘human security’ was at the heart of UNHCR’s discourse.
Conclusion
This chapter has described UNHCR’s discursive journey from adopting

the language of security in the early 1990s to the endorsement of ‘human
security’ as a new, humanitarian and superior notion of security at the end

of the decade. The journey took the agency away from what it called its old
‘refugee-specific’ and ‘reactive’ policies to its new ‘holistic’ and ‘pro-active’
approach of refugee prevention, containment and repatriation. By the end
of the 1990s, UNHCR advocacy of holistic approaches to the refugee prob-
lem led the agency also to advocate a holistic notion of security—a concept
of human security which claimed to incorporate all aspects of security from
the individual to states and the international community. UNHCR, in com-
mon with most advocates of ‘human security’, did not go into detail about
how this could be achieved. The message was simply that by focusing on
human rights and dignity, ‘food security’ and other aspects of bettering the
life of individuals, the security of states and the international community
will follow.
In the early 1990s, UNHCR did not endorse a holistic notion of security.
The agency would seldom explicitly link the security of refugees or humani-
tarian staff to its goals of furthering state, regional and international peace
and security. The two themes were kept apart as two different reasons why the
international community should find urgent and comprehensive solutions to
problems of displacement. On the one hand, dealing with displacement was a
humanitarian act benefiting the security of displaced individuals. On the other
hand, the destabilizing effects of forced displacement on countries and regions
warranted that refugee flight must be reversed in the name of international
peace and security.
The introduction of the concept of human security into UNHCR’s official
vocabulary made away with this dualism between the security of states and
that of individuals. Now, instead, the security of individuals, states and the
international community became inextricably—and purportedly harmoni-
ously—linked. Matching UNHCR’s post-Cold War mantra of comprehensive
and holistic approaches to solving the refugee problem, then, was its new com-
prehensive and holistic concept of security. The agency had travelled a long
way from the 1970s.
8
The 2000s and Beyond: Return

of a Protection Discourse
The 1990s saw a sharp rise in UNHCR’s security discourse. Its language of
security was many-faceted, but generally interpreting the challenges posed
by displacement in terms of human and comprehensive security. This chap-
ter documents UNHCR’s retreat from this discourse. This retreat is not com-
plete: security retains a place in the agency’s discourse, but its use became
restricted to discrete areas of the agency’s concern, especially staff and refugee
safety in the absence of ‘humanitarian space’. The concept no longer provided
an overarching discursive logic for UNHCR and was seldom used in sweep-
ing statements regarding the nature of displacement challenges or the refugee
agency’s own raison d’être. Towards the end of the 2000s, the retreat from the
language of security was not only a question of UNHCR mentioning security
less; it became a conscious discursive campaign to take security considerations
out of displacement and humanitarian politics.
As in earlier decades, UNHCR’s discursive shifts in the 2000s are closely
related to developments in the environment in which the agency operates.
While this will be covered in more detail in Part Three, it is worth highlight-
ing some particularly salient moments and trends. Not because changes in
ideas, beliefs and discourse are determined by outside events or influences,
but because conceptual innovation is often triggered by the arrival of new
challenges or challengers. In the case of UNHCR in the 2000s, a combination
of internal, inter-agency (within the humanitarian community) and global
factors affected its security discourse: Changes in UNHCR’s leadership; the
politics and processes of UN reform; and the continuing deterioration in the
asylum and protection climate. The latter trend worsened with the ‘war on ter-
ror’, the global economic downturn, and the rise of an environmental security
agenda wherein ‘climate change displacement’ was posited as a major future
threat to national and international security. All contributed to induce the
refugee agency to rethink the discursive tools at its disposal. They did not dic-
tate discursive changes, but in the same way as the rise of UNHCR’s security
discourse in the early 1990s was an answer (but not the only possible answer)
to the challenge of ‘remaining relevant’ in the last decade of the twentieth cen-
tury, the agency’s abandonment of security language reflects the same quest
for relevance, but interpreted differently, in a changing and, for UNHCR, more
restrictive political and organizational environment in the first decade of the
twenty-first century.
The chapter is broadly divided into the reigns of Ruud Lubbers (2000 to
2005) and Antonio Guterres (who took office in June 2005 and was re-elected
for a second term in 2010). The chapter maps the evolution of UNHCR’s offi-
cial discourse from the height of its security discourse in 2000 to the gradual
return to a more cautious, protection-centred and less ambitious discourse by
2012. By then, the aim had become to remove forced displacement from the
high politics of threats, survival and urgency and into the arena of ordinary
politics. While not full circle, UNHCR’s discourse returned to many of the
components of the humanitarian and human rights focused language during
High Commissioner Hocké’s reign in the 1980s, as well as to the non-political
and neutral affirmations of Sadruddin Aga Khan’s UNHCR in the 1970s.
2000–05: A global securit y actor?
In many ways the first half of the 2000s was business as usual for UNHCR,
but at a reduced level of ambition. Sadako Ogata’s reign had been controver-
sial, especially among the more traditionalist and legal-minded of UNHCR
staff. She was nevertheless widely respected, especially for her ability to keep
the agency at the centre of refugee and humanitarian politics; ensuring its
high profile as well as record funding for the refugee cause, as reflected in
the rapid growth of UNHCR budget and staff levels in the 1990s. Although
she met increasing resistance and criticism towards the end of her tenure, she
had lived up to her ambition of ensuring that UNHCR ‘remained relevant’ in
the post-Cold War international environment. Since Ogata had been a driving
force behind the refugee agency’s security discourse, it comes as no surprise
that her departure contributed to the gradual withdrawal of the use of security
language in UNHCR statements and publications. But Ogata’s departure was
only one of several blows to UNHCR’s security discourse, which continued a
seemingly healthy existence for several years after she left.
Ogata left behind a transformed but troubled agency in 2000. UNHCR had
been strongly criticized for its response to the Kosovo crisis the year before.
The 2000s and Beyond: Return of a Protection Discourse 153
As a result of this, together with the flourishing of bilateral aid where an

increasing number of NGOs work closely and directly with donor countries
rather than under UNHCR as its ‘implementing agents’, the refugee agency’s
role as a natural ‘lead agency’ in humanitarian operations was increasingly
questioned by donors (Loescher, Betts and Milner, 2008: 59). The reform
process within the UN system also undermined UNHCR’s lead role, as the
agency became increasingly bound into broader coordination frameworks
where it was just one of many members of the UN family working together
and soliciting funds together in consolidated appeals. Finally, a relative lull
in displacement disasters in the first couple of years of the twenty-first cen-
tury, coupled with an increased concern over so-called mixed flows of asy-
lum seekers and economic migrants entering the Western world through
illegal channels (the ‘asylum-migration nexus’), led to a slump in donor
interest in UNHCR. This was compounded by donors’ sense that UNHCR
bureaucracy had become too big, unwieldy, and top-heavy. As a result of
such trends, the agency downsized and reduced its ambitions under the
helm of its new High Commissioner, former Dutch prime minister Ruud
Lubbers.
Lubbers was a surprise candidate for the job, arriving late in the negotiation
process and supplanting candidates with stronger humanitarian credentials—
including Sergio Vieira De Mello, who died tragically in the 2003 bombing
of the UN headquarters in Baghdad. Lubbers was the choice of the European
Union, and it was widely perceived that he was selected as the man who could
trim down the size and remit of UNHCR, and at the same time nudge the refu-
gee agency’s priorities closer to those of European states. Indeed, his first public
speech as High Commissioner confirmed a strong focus on Europe (Lubbers,
2001). The speech to the European Union’s ministers for Justice and Home
Affairs came close on the heels of meetings between the High Commissioner
and the European Commission and the British government, and covered the
topic of a common European asylum policy. The speech affirmed the right
to asylum, but also suggested to EU ministers that they could help UNHCR
‘explore the possibilities of meaningful preventive action in countries of ori-
gin and for a serious commitment to building the capacity of refugee-hosting
countries’ (Lubbers, 2001).
This focus on preventing secondary movements from refugee host states
in the South to asylum destinations in the North was an ongoing theme of
Lubbers’ leadership. It became a cornerstone of the Convention Plus initia-
tive he launched soon after taking the helm—an initiative aimed at reviv-
ing and updating the Refugee Convention to make it ‘fit for purpose’ for the
twenty-first century. UNHCR’s discourse during Lubbers’s reign is heavily
infused with the ideas and initiatives launched under the Convention Plus
heading. This section looks first at continuities in UNHCR discourse in the

first half of the 2000s, then turns to the heavy emphasis on the Western-led
agenda of Convention Plus: ‘mixed flows’, ‘secondary movements’, repatriation
and local integration. Finally, it assesses the impact on UNHCR’s discourse of
9/11 and its aftermath.
The Stall of a Global Security Actor
The question at the forefront of the minds of UNHCR strategic thinkers in the
first decade of the twenty-first century remained how to succeed in the peren-
nial quest to remain relevant to states’ needs (and thus popular and well-funded)
while also staying true to the agency’s mandate as the world’s protector of refu-
gees. UNHCR’s answer to this question differed dramatically from that of the
1990s. In the 2000s, the agency became increasingly concerned about losing
its identity and niche in international humanitarian politics. Such concerns
had not been particularly prominent during Ogata’s reign. Since UNHCR was
routinely declared the lead agency during major humanitarian operations in
the 1990s, it enjoyed a high profile. In fact, to emphasize UNHCR’s uniqueness
as a refugee protection agency could have undermined efforts to turn it into a
global security actor. The agency instead justified its activities by referring to
its membership of the larger UN family. Rather than limiting itself to its own
Statute, UNHCR pointed to the UN Charter and presented its work as part of
the UN’s overarching quest for global peace and security.
This trend continued for a while into the twenty-first century and remained
common during Ruud Lubbers’s tenure. For instance, a 2003 report on how
UNHCR can best carry out its mandate explained the refugee agency’s raison
d’être in terms of its contribution to promoting stability, peace and security.
It is worth quoting the report at some length, since it reveals the depth of
UNHCR’s security discourse and how this discourse helped dictate priorities
and policies:
The Secretary-General has called for the mobilization of political, military and
humanitarian aid assets in a coherent manner to build peace and security. It is
widely accepted that refugee emergencies pose security concerns, and that finding
solutions promotes stability. UNHCR needs to link up with the United Nations’
peace and security pillar, notably with the Departments of Political Affairs and
Peacekeeping Operations. Being present in many unstable parts of the world,
UNHCR is in a good position to contribute to peace and security, for instance, by
providing early warning and contributing to the formulation of preventive poli-
cies. UNHCR’s own staff security concerns also necessitate close contacts with
the Office of the United Nations Security Coordinator (UNSECOORD). Wider
security issues, such as human smuggling and trafficking, the recruitment ele-
ments from refugee populations, and countering terrorism also warrant closer
cooperation between UNHCR and the relevant New York-based United Nations
agencies and organizations. (UNHCR, 2003)
The use of security language continued to be widespread in this period, both
in the Reports and in the High Commissioner’s speeches. But there were some
qualitative shifts. First, ‘human security’ almost disappears from the agency’s
discourse, perhaps because the concept was too closely related to Ogata for her
successor to be comfortable using it. Instead UNHCR returned to the practice
of the early 1990s of discussing security in all its facets: the security of refugees
and humanitarian staff; the ‘security situation’ during a particular emergency;
national or state security; and international peace and security. These various
security threats and challenges were presented as interconnected, but not nec-
essarily in a harmonious manner. UNHCR also continued to link its emphasis
on security to its wish to remain relevant:
It is undeniable that the contemporary world has brought new challenges to the
work of the Office. Pressures on the asylum system through mixed and uncon-
trolled migration flows are one such example, and States face legitimate con-
cerns over security issues. UNHCR, to be effective in fulfilling the mandate it has
received from the international community, must also maintain its relevance for
Governments. (UNHCR, 2003c: para. 6)
However, it should also be noted that the same Report goes on to describe
a few paragraphs later the worrying development of xenophobia and ‘unfair
suspicion and prejudice’ against refugees, both in the developing and the
developed world. Security became an increasingly troubling term in the refu-
gee agency’s vocabulary, which may explain the gradual reduction in the reli-
ance on the concept of security in this period, especially from 2003 onwards.
Security in all its aspects continued to be mentioned frequently, but with less
evidence of a pervasive and overarching security discourse. Security became
an infrequent topic in High Commissioner Lubbers’s speeches in the last two
years of his (abruptly ended) term in office, with the exception of regular refer-
ences to the security worries of industrialized states, especially Europe.
Convention Plus: Regional Solutions as Protection
‘Protection is not protection if there are no solutions’, UNHCR reported to

UNGA in 2002 (UNHCR, 2002: para. 7). While such a statement would rile
international refugee lawyers and UNHCR protection officers, this empha-
sis on solutions became something of a mantra in the early 2000s. And the
preferred type of solution was repatriation. UNHCR were upbeat in the early
2000s regarding mass return movements, especially from Afghanistan after
the US and its allies overthrew the Taleban government in late 2001, but
also in other parts of the world, such as Angola and Sierra Leone (see e.g.
UNHCR, 2003c: para. 1). In its narratives in this period the agency placed
strong emphasis on its successes in repatriating refugees. While repatriation
(when sustainable) is generally something for the agency to celebrate, it was
particularly welcome in that it relieved the pressure from Western, especially
European, asylum host-states on the agency to contribute to stemming flows
of so-called secondary movements of refugees leaving their region of origin to
seek asylum in the developed world.
Lubbers’s main intellectual focus was the Convention Plus initiatives. They
were called Convention Plus because they were meant to ‘top up’ existing pro-
tection and solution tools set out in the 1951 Convention. They followed the
logic above of pronouncing solutions as the best—possibly only—form of pro-
tection. In an environment of increasing hostility to refugees and asylum seek-
ers in the Western world, a clear incentive behind the development of these
initiatives was to find durable solutions that would curb asylum flows to the
West and contain the displaced in their regions of origin.
Convention Plus created a Framework for Durable Solutions aimed at adapt-
ing the 1951 Refugee Convention’s three tools for solutions—local integration,
resettlement and repatriation—to the conditions of the twenty-first century.
The aim was to create new norms on burden sharing between North and South
in three areas not adequately covered by the 1951 Convention: the strategic use
of resettlement; ‘irregular’ secondary movements from South to North; and
targeted development assistance in refugee- and returnee-hosting regions. In
practice, the process mostly ignored resettlement and concentrated on repa-
triation and, controversially, local integration (Betts and Durieux, 2007: 512).
The development assistance strand of Convention Plus was par-
ticularly concerned with bridging the relief-development divide in
refugee- and returnee-hosting regions. The framework had three compo-
nents: 1) Development Assistance for Refugees (DAR); 2) Development
through Local Integration (DLI); and Repatriation, Reintegration,
Rehabilitation and Reconstruction (4Rs) (UNHCR, 2003b). They had in com-
mon the aim of ‘redoubling the search for durable solutions’ through sharing
burdens and building capacity between countries and between humanitarian
actors (UNHCR, 2004).
Convention Plus remained within an overall security discourse, in that,
unlike the 1951 Convention, it posited an explicit relationship between dis-
placement, development, and conflict. DAR and DLI, for instance, were nec-
essary because: ‘Hosting refugee populations for protracted periods have
long-term economic and social impact that, if not adequately addressed, can
create conflictual situations and insecurity’ (UNHCR, 2003b: 4). The 4Rs ini-
tiative acknowledged the importance of post-conflict reconstruction as a pre-
condition for lasting peace and thus durable repatriation, and recognized the
challenges in this regard of the relief-development gap. It warned that the par-
ticular needs of returnees were not properly incorporated into the transition
and recovery plans of governments and humanitarian agencies, thus heighten-
ing the risk of ‘back flows’ of recently returned refugees.
As part of Convention Plus, Lubbers created a bi-annual ‘High
Commissioner’s Forum’, a high-level multilateral bargaining process, taking
place parallel to EXCOM, where Convention Plus could be discussed and
‘soft law’ agreements fleshed out. In between each forum, discussion took
place in sub-groups led by interested states. However, the Forum soon polar-
ized opinions, due to mutual suspicion between Southern host states and
Northern donors. From the South’s point of view, why should local integra-
tion of refugees into some of the world’s poorest regions be a priority when
the richest countries in the world were placing increasingly harsh restrictions
on asylum? And if asylum seekers were viewed as potential security risks in
these richest and most capable of countries, would not the about eighty per-
cent of refugees who remain in their region be an even more serious threat?
The High Commissioner’s Forum became a mini-stage reflecting the increas-
ingly refugee-hostile and distrustful international environment in which
UNHCR operated (Loescher, Betts and Milner, 2008: 64). The perceived close-
ness of Lubbers to European interests tainted, in the eyes of Southern states,
Convention Plus’ advocacy of burden-sharing. Convention Plus was almost
immediately—but diplomatically—wound down on the arrival of the new
High Commissioner, Antonio Guterres in June 2005, with the final Forum
taking place in November 2005. No ‘soft law’ or substantive agreements were
reached.
Mixed Flows, Terrorism and Protection Failure
The Convention Plus experience illustrated that the protection climate, both in
the North and the South, gradually worsened during Lubbers’s tenure. While
Convention Plus was primarily a pragmatic programme for solutions, UNHCR
became increasingly convinced of the need to counteract the erosion of core
protection principles. One important measure was the creation of the post of
Assistant High Commissioner (Protection) in 2004. This post was taken up
by Erika Feller, a respected authority on protection and refugee law, and the
former Director of the Office’s Department for International Protection. The
document proposing the new Assistant High Commissioner for Protection

summed up UNHCR’s concerns:
The fulfilment of [UNHCR’s] protection responsibilities has become an ever
more difficult task in light of significant changes in the environment in which the
organization operates. Disillusionment on the part of many governments, and at
the highest levels, with the capacity of States to manage their asylum responsibil-
ities has resulted in curtailment of protection opportunities and in asylum being
offered on ever more unfavourable terms. Illegal migration, growth in people
smuggling syndicates, and the post-September 11 fallout have compounded the
problems by confusing refugees and asylum-seekers, in the public mind and the
policies of some States, with abusers of the system, criminals and terrorists. All
this is coupled with a strong sense on the part of major host States that there
is no good system of burden-sharing in place and that they are too often left
with a disproportionate share of responsibilities which, in light of the protracted
nature of many situations, they are less and less inclined to meet. (UNHCR,
2004b: para. 5)
The document hardly mentioned security, and its subplot was that the
proclaimed security interests of states were going too far in eroding refugee
rights. Lubbers (2004) formulated the state of affairs in more direct terms
when he argued: ‘Beyond today’s headlines of security fears and migrants
mixing with refugees lays a genuine danger to the institution of asylum.
Our response has been to refocus the Office on protection’. First of all, this
was a veiled admission that solutions, after all, were not the same as pro-
tection. But second, it also constituted a sharp turn in UNHCR’s discourse
away from security and back to its traditional language of international
protection.
In summing up the Office’s challenges at the end of its 2004 EXCOM meet-
ing, Lubbers introduced what were to become central elements of UNHCR’s
discourse in the second half of the 2000s:
This includes preserving humanitarian space in face of the challenges posed by
deteriorating security environments, for example in the Caucasus, and the mis-
characterization of international refugee instruments as providing a safe haven
for terrorists, rather than specifically providing for their exclusion from refugee
protection, as they actually do. Mixed flows came up during the debate too and
our response must be to ask how anyone can ever be certain there are no refugees
in a given group. (Lubbers, 2004b)
The fading of UNHCR’s security discourse thus began already in 2003/04,
but with a marked shift from 2005 onwards, away from a security justifica-
tion and back to a predominantly protection-based justification for the refugee
agency’s work.
2005–12: From global securit y actor to

international protection agency
After 15 years of presenting itself as a humanitarian and security actor as much

as a refugee agency, UNHCR returned from 2005 onwards to a more narrowly
defined self-image. Security justifications waned and international protection
returned to centre stage of its official discourse. This discursive shift served
two purposes: One normative and principled, urging states to value protection
as a good and right in itself rather than a strategy for achieving other goals; the
other practical and positional, using the concept of protection to set UNHCR
apart from other humanitarian actors in an increasingly crowded ‘humanitar-
ian market place’ and to safeguard its unique and central role in the interna-
tional community’s responses to humanitarian emergencies.
This thematic contraction into a narrower protection discourse was not
coupled with a similar contraction in UNHCR’s understanding of its opera-
tional scope. In contrast to its 1970s discourse, the agency’s emphasis on inter-
national protection was no longer refugee-specific. It was broadly defined,
applied to non-refugees as well as refugees, and fitted within the UN’s new
humanitarian co-ordination mechanism, the cluster approach, as well as the
UN’s new agenda of ‘a responsibility to protect’. Thus, UNHCR’s discursive
changes in the mid-2000s should be understood as an intricate exercise in
simultaneously expanding and contracting its mandate. The thematic contrac-
tion into an international protection discourse was coupled with the argu-
ment that UNHCR’s protection expertise could usefully be applied to various
non-refugee groups. The language of protection was used to justify the vast
expansion of its work with IDPs as well as the agency’s new-found interest in
people displaced by natural disasters, environmental stress or climate change.
Despite re-establishing itself as an international protection agency, UNHCR
continued to treat its own Statute as a mere starting point for its activities.
While in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s the refugee agency justified
its actions and inactions almost solely by referring to its Statute, the Reports
and Notes throughout the 2000s hardly mention them. Instead they invoke
a combination of refugee, human rights and humanitarian legislation within
which the agency grounds its mandate. A typical statement can be found in
the 2007 Note:
The legal framework for the protection of refugees and others of concern con-
tained in the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, its 1967 Protocol
and relevant international human rights and humanitarian law, continues to pro-
vide a solid foundation for more predictable responses to international protection
needs. (UNHCR, 2007d: para. 8)
High Commissioner Antonio Guterres’ first speech to the UN General

Assembly is noteworthy both in how it describes protection, rather than secu-
rity, as UNHCR’s raison d’être, and how it avoids the term ‘refugee’ in this
description:
I want to take this opportunity to reassert that UNHCR is, above all, a protection
agency. Protection must inform all our actions and be the starting point for the
solutions we seek for the people in our care. It must be our direction and our
guide. (Guterres, 2005)
A year later, Guterres confirmed UNHCR’s unique role as a protection

agency in stronger terms. Listing his Office’s commitments, he began:
First commitment. To strengthen UNHCR’s identity as a protection agency. . . . That
identity, as I said last year, should inform everything we do. At a time of rising
intolerance, fuelled by security concerns and confusion in public opinion between
migrants and refugees, we are bound first to preserve asylum and rebuild trust in
asylum systems. (Guterres, 2006b)
Why did this discursive withdrawal into a narrower protection focus take
place, after the apparent success of the broader, security-focused, approach in
attracting funding and support from states in the 1990s? Three factors are par-
ticularly important for understanding this discursive change. First, and least
important, the arrival of a new high commissioner, Antonio Guterres, with a
distinctly different agenda and style to his predecessors. Second, UNHCR’s
perception of a gradual but considerable worsening of asylum and protection
conditions caused by state concerns over so-called ‘mixed flows’—concerns
that were heightened by the atmosphere of the ‘war on terror’ and the global
economic downturn. And, third, a reinterpretation of what it should mean
for UNHCR to ‘remain relevant’ in the new millennium, in light of broader
changes and reforms taking place within the UN family. This includes espe-
cially the adoption of the cluster approach to humanitarian emergencies and
the introduction of the concept of ‘responsibility to protect’ as the UN’s guid-
ing principle at the 2005 World Summit.
The Arrival of a New High Commissioner
Lubbers was widely perceived as Euro-centric in his outlook. He made few

major speeches outside of Europe and the US during his tenure, which may
have contributed to refugee host countries in the South becoming suspicious
of UNHCR priorities. This became particularly apparent in the EXCOM
debates on Convention Plus, where Southern states portrayed the initiative as
part of an agenda by Northern donor/asylum states of burden-shifting rather

than burden-sharing, by containing the asylum and displacement problem in
the developing world (Loescher, Betts and Milner, 2008: 64).
In comparison, Lubbers’s successor Antonio Guterres made his first major
trip, only days after taking office, to Uganda, followed by his first speech out-
side Geneva to ECOSOC’s meeting ‘Voices against poverty’ on how to achieve
the Millennium Development Goals (Guterres, 2005b). His frequent visits to
UNHCR field offices, combined with a strengthening of the latter vis-à-vis
the Geneva headquarters, also contributed to UNHCR’s visible reorientation
towards the global South. A consistent feature of Guterres’ speeches has been
his concern with the relationship between poverty, conflict, intolerance and
the lack of solutions to refugee problems (Guterres, 2008c). Towards the end of
the decade, climate change also made its entry into the High Commissioner’s
vocabulary as both a cause and an effect of this poverty/conflict/displacement
nexus (see Guterres, 2008).
While Guterres did not completely abandon the language of security, it
did not play a central role in his speeches. There is also an interesting shift
in how Guterres employed the term security. In 2005, the two most com-
mon uses were human security and national or state security—although the
latter was almost always mentioned in the context of how state security
does not need to contradict human security or ‘the security of people of
all countries’. By 2008 references to human security almost disappeared
and national security became treated in a guarded and cautionary man-
ner. He continued to mention the link between UNHCR’s work and the
aim of furthering international peace and security, but drew a line between
where the tasks of UNHCR as a protection agency ends and those of other,
security-mandated, organizations start. When he explained that ‘[w]‌hen
we provide protection and solutions we facilitate the task of maintaining
international peace and security’ (Guterres, 2008b), the word facilitate is
crucial. In Guterres’ vocabulary, UNHCR is not a security actor, but its pro-
tection functions are beneficial to longer-term improvements in interna-
tional peace and security.
Instead of a global security actor, Guterres’ aimed to make UNHCR into
the UN’s ‘protection agency’. The distinction between refugee and IDP was no
longer depicted as particularly relevant—except, that is, when other organi-
zations attempt to encroach on UNHCR’s core turf of refugee protection.
Highlighted instead was UNHCR’s unique expertise in providing protection
for vulnerable individuals and groups when their own state is unwilling or
unable to do so. This fitted well with the UN General Assembly’s endorse-
ment of a Responsibility to Protect, and suited the refugee agency’s positioning
within the UN’s humanitarian co-ordination system.
Humanitarian Reform: Becoming the UN’s Protection

Champion
In recent years UNHCR has hardly ever justified its existence by reference
to its contributions to the greater UN family’s quest for peace and security.
This change coincided with the UN decision to implement the cluster approach
in 2005, a comprehensive reform of the UN’s humanitarian response system,
aimed to increase collaboration and coordination between major UN and
non-UN humanitarian actors. It also coincided with the UN’s adoption of a
new motto, ‘Responsibility to Protect’, an attempt at reconsidering the sov-
ereign rights and responsibilities of states in light of the rise of human rights
and humanitarian norms. This section will look at the impact of these two
aspects of UN humanitarian reform (one operational, the other normative) on
UNHCR’s official discourse.
Threats, Challenges and Clusters

Since the mid-1990s, the UN has gone through several plans to reform its
institutions. The high point of this activity was the launch of the report on
UN reform by the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change (UN,
2004). While the High-level Panel’s focus was top-heavy, concentrating on
the Secretariat and Security Council, the humanitarian reform process taking
place in parallel had a more direct impact on the work and self-presentation
of UNHCR. This process culminated in the adoption of the cluster approach
in 2005, aimed at improving responses to complex humanitarian emergencies
through clarifying roles and responsibilities and strengthening collaboration
between the main humanitarian agencies.
In short, the cluster approach divides the humanitarian response to an
emergency into nine clusters of responsibility, with particular organizations
in charge of each cluster. The idea is to make responses to humanitarian emer-
gencies more predictable, by ensuring that each UN agency is allocated a
generic set of responsibilities that kick in once an emergency erupts. This, in
theory, ensures a clear and efficient division of labour between the agencies,
with less overlap and more accountability. The cluster approach is also meant
to increase co-operation and partnership with national and local governments
in host states.
As a major humanitarian actor, UNHCR was active in the process of devel-
oping the cluster approach, but it was nevertheless concerned about the out-
come. The cluster approach undermined UNHCR’s lead status established
under Ogata and reduced UNHCR to just one humanitarian actor among
many. Even more of concern to UNHCR during the negotiations was that its
unique refugee protection mandate risked being watered down and its ‘core
turf ’ impinged on by other UN agencies. Diluting its mandate was desirable
as long as it served the purpose of expanding UNHCR responsibilities and
influence, as the case was during most of the 1990s. It was far less accept-
able when the refugee agency looked in danger of losing both its lead status
and having other humanitarian actors encroach on its mandated activities of
providing protection, assistance and solutions for refugees. Furthermore, by
weakening the identity of individual UN agencies, the cluster approach made
it harder for the purely humanitarian and rights based UN agencies to distance
themselves from the political, and hence more controversial, UN actors such
as the Secretary-General’s office, UN peacekeeping contingents and, particu-
larly, the UN Security Council. As Part Three will show, this was particularly
problematic for UNHCR in the polarized post-9/11 political atmosphere,
where insurgents and terrorist groups branded the UN as part and parcel of
US interventionism.
Despite misgivings, UNHCR took an active role in developing the cluster
approach, and showed unfettered enthusiasm in its official communications. It
did not have much choice. As a member of the UN family, the refugee agency
could not opt out of UN reform, and it agreed with the need to improve coor-
dination between the multitudes of humanitarian actors. The strong criticisms
of its coordination role during the Kosovo crisis had undermined its ‘natu-
ral’ position as lead agency during humanitarian emergencies. The agency’s
detractors could easily portray UNHCR as haughty and difficult if it were
seen to work against humanitarian reform. Instead, by taking an active part
in shaping the cluster approach, the agency could defend its own interests.
Nevertheless, within the walls of the Geneva headquarters, there was consid-
erable unease about the consequences for international protection, refugee
and staff security, and for UNHCR’s own status and budgets.
Cluster Leads and Opt-outs

In the cluster approach, UNHCR is designated leader of two clusters: camp
management and protection. However this designation only applies in situ-
ations of internal, man-made displacement, or for so-called ‘conflict IDPs’. If
the emergency is the result of environmental strain or natural disaster and/
or has only a small displacement element, UNHCR involvement is not auto-
matic (thus somewhat defeating the cluster approach’s aim to provide more
predictable responses to emergencies). The agency has reserved its right to
step back from situations too far from its original mandate. Nevertheless,
the introduction of the cluster approach in 2005 led to the doubling of the
number of IDPs of concern to UNHCR in the ensuing year, from 6.6 million

in 2005 to 12.8 million in 2006 (UNHCR, 2007b: supplement 12, paras. 1
and 10). By 2008, the agency provided protection or assistance for 14.4 mil-
lion IDPs (out of a global population of 26 million), compared to 10.5 mil-
lion (out of a global population of 15.2 million) refugees (UNHCR, 2009).
This trend remained relatively stable in subsequent years (see UNHCR,
2010b, 2011, 2012b).
The other significant exception insisted on by UNHCR was to leave refu-
gee situations, displacement across an international border, out of the clus-
ter approach altogether. Despite attempts at encroachment by other actors,
UNHCR managed to maintain the sole official responsibility for all aspects
of the humanitarian response in refugee situations. In the agency’s opinion,
it has a legal responsibility to lead and coordinate responses to refugee situ-
ations. Phrased in diplomatic terms: ‘The clusters complement a number of
pre existing [sic] “sectors” of humanitarian activity, such as food and refugees,
for which clear leadership and accountability already existed and thus did not
require a new coordination arrangement’ (UNHCR, 2007c: 36).
At a practical level, this distinction between IDP and refugee emergencies
can seem artificial—in an emergency, the needs of the displaced are similar
regardless of whether a border has been crossed. But UNHCR defended its
responsibility for refugees—emergencies or not—as a matter of high principle
and institutional survival. In its official discourse, it returned to highlighting
the distinction between refugee and IDP emergencies. Its 2007 Handbook for
Emergencies (UNHCR, 2007e: 102) states that ‘[w]‌ithin the UN system the
responsibility for refugees lies with UNHCR. Therefore, in refugee emergen-
cies UNHCR should take the lead to ensure effective coordination’. In contrast,
in the case of other complex emergencies, the Handbook merely states that
the agency ‘might be called upon’ to contribute to the relief effort (UNHCR,
2007e: 102).
A Responsibility to Protect
In strategic terms, UNHCR had been highly successful with the broadening
of its mandate in the 1990s. Whether aiding IDPs in Darfur or cyclone vic-
tims in Myanmar, the agency had become a natural central partner in UN
responses to humanitarian emergencies. Thanks in part to its adoption of a
security discourse, UNHCR’s fear in the early 1990s of losing relevance to
the international community’s needs had receded, but not evaporated. But
the reaction to 9/11 made it clear to the refugee agency that states’ security
concerns had acquired an increasingly anti-refugee hue. This led UNHCR
to distance itself from what it saw as the narrowing and increasingly intol-
erant national security concerns driving asylum and refugee policies. As a
result, the refugee agency needed to find a different rationale through which
it could present itself as useful and relevant to the needs of the international
community.
This rationale presented itself at the 2005 World Summit, which set out the
UN’s ‘responsibility to protect’ (or R2P) agenda. This was both a boon and a
possible problem for UNHCR. On the positive side, the refugee agency was
pleased that a core aspect of its own mandate—protection—was now at the
forefront of the agenda of the UN as a whole. On the negative side, if the whole
UN family were to be preoccupied with protection activities, this might under-
mine the unique identity of UNHCR. This latter problem was compounded by
the cluster approach. Nevertheless, UNHCR’s response to this challenge was
to embrace the idea of a responsibility to protect and to use it as a badge of dis-
tinction for the agency. Nobody, after all, had more experience in, or a clearer
mandate of, protection than the refugee agency.
UNHCR’s Note on International Protection in 2006 exemplifies the return of
protection to the core of the agency’s discourse, while security language is almost
non-existent. The Note’s first paragraphs invoke the UN Secretary-General’s
call on the world to ‘embrace the responsibility to protect, and when necessary
( . . . ) act on it’. It then goes on to set out how the displaced, whether IDPs or
refugees, are in particular need of the world’s protection and how UNHCR,
through its own Agenda for Protection, works to meet international protec-
tion needs where states fail to protect their own citizens (UNHCR, 2006e).
The 2006 Report (UNHCR, 2007b) displayed the same trend, depicting
UNHCR as the guardian of protection principles at a time when these were
threatened by a tide of security concerns over migration, ‘mixed flows’ and ter-
rorism. As in the 1970s, the Report presents UNHCR’s task as that of providing
an authoritative and principled reminder to states of their protection obliga-
tions, especially in safeguarding the right to seek asylum and non-refoulement.
In High Commissioner Guterres’ words, displacement should not be ‘confused
with issues like migration, terrorism and insecurity’ (Guterres, 2005c).
The fading promise of securit y

after 9/11
Such pronouncements on the responsibility to protect were not only spurred

by the opportunities to promote refugee protection (and thus UNHCR itself)
opened up by the R2P agenda. It was also brought on by a sense of necessity
in the face of unprecedented challenges to asylum and refuge. Many of

UNHCR’s hopes for what a more comprehensive and people-friendly con-
cept of security might achieve waned after 9/11. Pressures on the asylum
regime had already led to a backlash against asylum seekers in the rich
North in the early 1990s. After 9/11, concern with homeland security and
border controls spurred by the terror attacks on New York and Washington
meant that states retreated to a more traditional conception of national secu-
rity. Such a security conception was not easily compatible with UNHCR’s
refugee-friendly security discourse.
UNHCR recognized the danger that its security discourse could contribute
to legitimizing the use of security reasoning by states to limit the rights of
refugees and asylum seekers. While such fears had been voiced internally in
the refugee agency, and by external critics such as Chimni and Goodwin-Gill,
throughout the 1990s, the speed of events following 9/11 brought suspicion
of the language of security to the top of the UNHCR organization. High
Commissioner Lubbers’s first statement after the terror attacks warned that ‘[a]‌s
emotions run high and while Americans and the rest of the world grieve fol-
lowing last Tuesday’s terrorist attacks, we should refrain from pointing fingers
and inciting hatred against innocent groups such as refugees’ (UNHCR, 2001).
The Director for Protection, Erika Feller (later Assistant High Commissioner
for Protection) followed suit. She placed the post-9/11 security-based efforts
of states to restrict asylum within a broader context of the increasing crimi-
nalization of asylum seekers and refugees, and called for resolute leadership
‘to de-dramatise and de-politicise the essentially humanitarian challenge of
protecting refugees and to promote better understanding of refugees and their
right to seek asylum’ (UNHCR, 2001b).
Protection and Terror
While 9/11 led to an immediate reaction within UNHCR against what it saw as
an overwrought backlash by states against asylum seekers, the abandonment
of the agency’s own, more refugee-friendly, security discourse was a gradual
process. The discursive changes both facilitated and were in turn reinforced by
institutional changes within the agency, especially the creation of an Assistant
High Commissioner for Protection. The proposal to the UN General Assembly
to create this position displays UNHCR’s sophisticated understanding of the
power of discourse. It performed a discourse analysis of its own, arguing that
an unjust conflation of terrorists, criminals and asylum seekers has led to a
lack of political will among states in the North as well as the South to fulfil
their protection obligations:
The fulfilment of these protection responsibilities has become an ever more dif-
ficult task in light of significant changes in the environment in which the organi-
zation operates. Disillusionment on the part of many governments, and at the
highest levels, with the capacity of States to manage their asylum responsibili-
ties has resulted in curtailment of protection opportunities and in asylum being
offered on ever more unfavourable terms. Illegal migration, growth in people
smuggling syndicates, and the post-September 11 fallout have compounded the
problems by confusing refugees and asylum-seekers, in the public mind and the
policies of some States, with abusers of the system, criminals and terrorists. All
this is coupled with a strong sense on the part of major host States that there is no
good system of burden-sharing in place and that they are too often left with a dis-
proportionate share of responsibilities which, in light of the protracted nature of
many situations, they are less and less inclined to meet. (UNHCR, 2004b: para. 5)
From this period onwards, and especially after the departure of Lubbers,
UNHCR saw its task as taking security out of displacement politics rather than
promoting a refugee-friendly conception of security. Its discourse became
concerned with counteracting the impact of two combining and mutually
reinforcing trends in state discourses. The first is the criminalization of migra-
tion (Haas, 2005:13), with a focus on ‘bogus asylum seekers’, ‘irregular’ and
‘illegal’ migration, ‘mixed flows’ (of refugees and economic migrants), people
smuggling and trafficking. This trend leaves less space for asylum seekers and
refugees to be treated differently from ‘ordinary migrants’, and erodes inter-
nationally agreed standards of refugee protection. For this reason UNHCR
abandoned the use of the term ‘asylum and migration nexus’ in the late 2000s
(Crisp, 2008). The second trend is the tendency to subsume asylum policy
within the overall logic of counter-terror strategies—again to the detriment
of refugee protection. The agency’s concern is expressed in many of High
Commissioner Guterres’ speeches, complaining that ‘[u]‌nfortunately, public
opinion in many societies is increasingly led by fear and suspicion’ (Guterres,
2005d). His speeches are littered with laments over rising xenophobia, intoler-
ance, populism, tabloid scare-mongering, and injustices against refugees:
Intolerance for people from elsewhere, for strangers, for those who are different.
Intolerance is fed by some politicians in search of popularity and by several media
in search of increased market share. And the rise of populism has led to a system-
atic and wilful confusion in public opinion, making security problems, terrorism,
migrant flows and refugee and asylum issues altogether mixed. (Guterres, 2005)1
In such a climate of ‘wilful confusion’ the best UNHCR can do is to rein-
force the language of the sacred nature of legal rights and obligations:
1
See also Guterres (2005e, 2005f, 2005g, 2006c, 2012).
At a time of rising intolerance, fuelled by security concerns and confusion in pub-
lic opinion between migrants and refugees, protection also means firmly oppos-
ing all forms of refoulement and guaranteeing respect for international refugee
law—international refugee law that cannot be superseded by national legislation,
extradition treaties, or redefined by bilateral arrangements legislation, by extradi-
tion treaties. (Guterres, 2006)
This discourse is often phrased as that of returning to international pro-

tection principles, as when the High Commissioner speaks of the need for
‘more international solidarity, and a recommitment to the fundamental ten-
ets of protection’ (Guterres, 2012). UNHCR highlights the changing nature of
conflict and displacement patterns, but unlike in the 1990s, this emphasis on a
changing environment does not lead to a flurry of suggestions of how to adapt
international protection principles to a new era through concepts such as ‘the
right to remain’ or ‘in-country protection’, nor is refugee protection justified as
contributing to international peace and security. Instead it is a good in itself,
a moral and legal obligation, and a matter of international solidarity. UNHCR
describes refugee protection as ‘one of the most noble causes of mankind’
(Guterres, 2011) and urges states to act in the name of solidarity and through
their ‘strong commitment to basic protection principles’ (Guterres, 2012).
Expanding operational remit
From the perspective of organizational survival and growth, UNHCR’s return

to a protection discourse could seem risky. In the 1990s, UNHCR used its
security discourse to redefine and expand its mandate, allowing it to position
itself as the world’s leading humanitarian agency and a key contributor to the
international community’s response to violent conflict and war. This position-
ing had given the agency a voice in the deliberations of global political institu-
tions such as the Security Council, whose decisions impacted deeply on the
conflicts and displacement crises for which UNHCR sought solutions. As the
agency discarded its security discourse, the challenge became how to retain
its central position in the politics of forced migration while at the same time
promoting an image of itself as a neutral, non-political and principled protec-
tion agency.
The main way in which UNHCR approached this challenge was to make its
protection discourse broadly inclusive and rather vague. Protection became,
unlike in the 1970s, a tool for expanding UNHCR’s operational remit beyond
refugees. While jealously guarding its monopoly on refugee protection, it also
promoted its ‘unique expertise in the protection sphere’ (UNHCR, 2005d: 2).

The inclusion of conflict IDPs at the core of UNHCR protection activity was
formalized in 2005 with the cluster approach. In its official discourse, this
inclusion was coupled with a drive to establish UNHCR as the world’s author-
ity (shared with the ICRC) on the protection of vulnerable populations. The
agency has been careful to emphasize that its authority and expertise is founded
on 60 years of experience in international protection, rather than work with
IDPs (despite having been involved on a smaller scale in IDP operations since
the 1960s). But it argues that UNHCR is well placed to draw upon this experi-
ence to advocate and support regional and international agreements, norms
and procedures that bridge the ‘protection gap’ for IDPs (UNHCR, 2010: 1,
2012: 127–8).
UNHCR also used its protection expertise and experience to inject itself
into the recent discussion on how to respond to ‘environmental’ or ‘climate
change displacement’. While rejecting the term ‘climate refugees’, popular
with many NGOs, on the grounds that it could undermine the legal refugee
protection framework, UNHCR nevertheless added its voice to the many
organizations and governments expressing concern over the human impact
of climate change. Initially the agency followed the trend in the run-up to the
2009 Copenhagen Summit on climate change of presenting a highly alarmist
scenario of mass displacement, insecurity and conflict, adding legitimacy to
an agenda that had little grounding in solid research. For instance, a UNHCR
press release during the Copenhagen Summit (UNHCR, 2009f) quoted High
Commissioner Guterres as emphasizing ‘the growing link between climate
change and conflict’, arguing that ‘[c]‌limate change can enhance the compe-
tition for resources—water, food, grazing lands—and that competition can
trigger conflict’. UNHCR repeated in leaflets (UNHCR, 2009g), brochures
(UNHCR, 2009h) and press releases (UNHCR, 2008d) poorly grounded esti-
mates of up to a billion people becoming displaced by climate change, and
described as a ‘conservative estimate’ forecasts, based on dubious methodol-
ogy, of 250 million people displaced by 2050 due to climate change (Riera,
2008; UNHCR 2009h).
However, the alarmism soon made way for a more measured tone, where
a straight-forward causal link between climate change, displacement and
conflict was no longer asserted. Instead, UNHCR (2012: 169) argued that
‘[c]‌limate change will add to the scale and complexity of human displace-
ment’, including in some cases fuelling grievances and conflicts. Mirroring
the manner in which the agency included IDP protection and assistance as a
core concern in the mid-2000s, UNHCR suggested that its protection exper-
tise could be employed to benefit environmentally displaced populations. The
agency’s recent work on climate change and displacement has been in the area
of forging consensus on international guidelines for the protection of environ-

mentally displaced populations—hence bridging another protection gap.
The cases of IDPs and environmentally displaced populations both show
how UNHCR has continued to stake claims to being a central actor in the inter-
national community’s response to non-refugee populations in need despite
its retreat from a security discourse. Focusing on protection has not been a
damper on operational expansion, but it has limited the claims UNHCR can
make regarding its own usefulness to donor and host states. No longer seeking
to be a global security actor, the refugee agency focused its self-justification
on supporting the moral and legal obligations of states and non-state actors to
protect the rights of refugees in particular, and vulnerable people in general.
Shrinking humanitarian space
So far we have seen the withdrawal of UNHCR’s security discourse and a

retreat to a narrower protection-orientated language, presented in the spirit
of moral obligations and solidarity. However, security remains a significant (if
no longer overarching) concept in the discussion of certain aspects of the refu-
gee agency’s work. First and foremost, UNHCR is concerned with the security
situation in its operational areas. The trend of operating in the midst or out-
skirts of conflict zones has been reinforced by its formal commitment to the
protection of (some) conflict IDPs through the cluster approach, exacerbating
fears for the safety of the displaced and the humanitarian staff aiding them.
This has at times made it look as if UNHCR’s security discourse is still going
strong. For instance, a whole issue of Refugees Magazine in 2005 is dedicated
to security, entitled How secure do you feel? However, a closer look shows that
the issue employs a limited application of the concept of security, far removed
from the comprehensive security discourse in the 1990s. The issue’s editorial
is solely dedicated to the precarious security situation for conflict displaced
populations and humanitarian staff, while the main article states that ‘[f]‌or
millions of refugees and aid workers in volatile situations around the world,
security remains elusive’ (Refugees Magazine, 2005: 5). The article starts with
the refugee massacre in Burundi in 2004, and laments the disappearance of the
‘humanitarian space’ that used to allow humanitarian organizations to operate
in volatile areas. Inspired, it seems, by the New Wars literature (Kaldor, 2006),
it argues that this development is the result of proliferation of small arms and
a new form of internal conflict characterized by an array of militias and rebel
groups. ‘Conventional warfare increasingly was replaced by ethnic, economic
and religious civil conflicts’ (UNHCR, 2005: 8).
This issue of Refugees Magazine exemplifies, as do more recent publica-

tions such as The State of the World’s Refugees 2012 (UNHCR 2012), UNHCR’s
withdrawal from the state security debate, and the confinement of the security
concept to the topic of the security of staff and refugees during field opera-
tions. High Commissioner Guterres insists on the need to reclaim humani-
tarian space in numerous speeches (e.g. Guterres, 2007b, 2008, 2012). In
contrast to the late 1990s, when concerns over refugee and staff security were
pointers towards a more comprehensive security discourse, by the late 2000s
they contributed instead to UNHCR’s attempt to depoliticize displacement.
In order to safeguard staff, Guterres (2008d) stressed ‘the need to preserve
the autonomy of the humanitarian space and to safeguard the key humani-
tarian principles of neutrality, impartiality, and independence, particularly in
those countries where a durable peace settlement has not yet been reached’.
To reclaim humanitarian space, UNHCR had to reaffirm its non-political and
neutral role so that all warring parties would leave it alone to perform its social
and humanitarian tasks:
While reinforced security is a regrettable necessity, it is impossible to protect our
staff by means of barbed wire and barricades alone. We must work hard to ensure
that humanitarian action and humanitarian organizations are perceived to be
neutral and impartial. (Guterres, 2008d)
Thus, all trends—UNHCR’s positioning within the UN’s cluster structure,

its adoption of R2P, its fear over Western states’ muddling of asylum, crime
and terrorism, and its concern over staff security—contributed to the agency’s
abandonment of a security discourse.
Conclusion: A return to UNHCR’s ro ots?
Can the trends described above be understood as a return to UNHCR’s roots? In

the 1970s, High Commissioner Aga Khan (1974) reluctantly admitted that refu-
gee flows could lead to ‘the most strenuous tensions’, but argued that these ten-
sions should be overcome by attempting ‘to reduce complex political questions
in the minds of nations into simple moral and humanitarian components for the
heart to answer’. But unlike in the 1970s, when security was a non-topic, UNHCR
does not ignore or dismiss the security concerns voiced by states. It recognizes
that ‘the challenge of integrating the differing security interests and strategies of
the various parts of the international refugee regime has grown more complex’
(UNHCR, 2006: 64). Both the 2006 and 2012 volumes of The State of the World’s
Refugees include security, violence, and conflict as central topics.
This said, UNHCR’s answer to such security challenges is close to its 1970s
strategy. No longer depicting itself as a global security actor, the agency sees
its role as defusing threats and tensions, rather than adding urgency to refugee
matters through the use of security language. The State of the World’s Refugees
2006 argues that ‘the security concerns of states as well as refugees are best
met by ensuring that the multilateral and humanitarian character of refugee
protection is maintained’ (UNHCR, 2006: 64) and that ‘preventive and “soft”
measures integrated into refugee protection and assistance can help defuse
many of the security threats faced by refugees and their hosts alike’ (UNHCR,
2006: 63).
This discourse provides a new, and rather constructivist, rationale for
UNHCR’s usefulness to states. Security can be achieved not by urgent
action to defend against or repel threats, but through understanding that
these need not be threats at all if dealt with in the right manner. By affirm-
ing the neutral, non-political and humanitarian nature of asylum and ref-
ugee protection; by committing to the international refugee regime, and
through supporting UNHCR’s task of providing international, multilateral
and non-political refugee protection, displacement challenges can be taken
out of the security realm and into the realm of principled and norm-driven
humanitarian action. Multilateral protection practices as a solution to the
security concerns of states had the added benefit of asserting UNHCR’s
indispensable role as the main multilateral actor mandated to provide such
principled protection.
Ogata and Stoltenberg had argued that UNHCR had to become more, not
less, political. It had to engage with state and international security actors,
especially the UN Security Council, to find solutions to the root causes of
displacement. Returning to a stricter interpretation of its mandate, the mes-
sage to states in the 2000s was instead: respect our neutrality, support our
non-political protection mandate, and we will help ensure that refugee move-
ments can be taken out of your security equations. The conclusion UNHCR
had come to was that if a security discourse prevails in the debate on displace-
ment, then policy responses are likely to also be in a security mode—and such
responses are seldom conducive to the human rights and well-being of the
displaced themselves.
This does not mean that the refugee agency has come full circle and arrived
back at its (in some critics’ view) ‘golden age’ in the 1970s of a non-political,
humanitarian and neutral discourse, raised above the selfish and narrow politi-
cal interests of states. UNHCR remains frank about the dangers and challenges
posed by displacement: the picture it paints of the refugee problem is still col-
oured by images of violence, conflict and instability, as well as concerns about
the perceived impact on local, national, regional and international security.
However, security matters are now subsumed within a legal and normative
protection discourse and only discussed as far as they impact on UNHCR’s
protection and assistance activities.
UNHCR has returned to its earlier suspicion of security language.
Characterizing security concerns as perceptions rather than realities, and a
matter of choice of lens rather than necessity, the agency warns that such per-
ceptions can be exaggerated and destructive.
UNHCR’s ability to extend protection is challenged in many regions by the

absence of political will to support it and the disinclination to recognize that asy-
lum is a non-political and humanitarian act. Asylum is viewed through the secu-
rity prism in many parts of the world. (Feller, 2008)
In the 1990s UNHCR was at the forefront of efforts to place displacement

on the international security agenda. By the late 2000s the agency rejected
this effort: ‘At the centre of why UNHCR exists are people and their strug-
gles, each one as individual as the next. Protection is, at its most basic, the
protection of their rights, their security and their dignity of person’ (Feller,
2008). The security of other actors or institutions is, as far as UNHCR is
concerned, only relevant when impacting on the international protection
of the displaced.
Part Three
An Actor or Re-Actor in International
Refugee Politics?
From being a relatively anonymous and neglected agency, UNHCR’s profile

increased dramatically in the early 1990s. While UNHCR received many acco-
lades, the refugee agency’s higher profile also brought with it more and louder
criticism from academics, former and current employees, and the media. The
agency was accused of having lost its soul and of forgetting its core task of refu-
gee protection.1 When looking back at the 1990s, even writers whom this book
has put in the ‘pragmatist’ camp suggested that UNHCR’s post-Cold War strat-
egy had failed. For instance, Loescher (2001: 338–9) argued that, although the
ideas behind it were commendable, UNHCR’s holistic approach would only
have had a positive effect if it was accompanied by a greater will among states to
enforce effectively the maintenance of international peace and security, create
powerful human rights mechanisms, and promote sustainable development
in crisis regions. This will did not exist. As a consequence, he argues, UNHCR
became complicit in many protection failures. Among these were Turkey’s clo-
sure of its border with Iraq in 1991, the forced repatriation of Rohingyas from
Bangladesh to Burma, the signing in 1996 with Tanzania of a return agree-
ment for Rwandan refugees without proper safeguards, and several instances
of neglecting protection concerns in the Balkans and Great Lakes.
The analysis in Part Two of how UNHCR understood, used, and finally dis-
carded the concept of security provides the foundation for the attempts in this
Part Three to understand why this security discourse evolved as it did. Part
1
For one such debate, see Working Group on International Refugee Policy (1999). This con-
ference report lists a number of attacks from representatives of humanitarian and refugee rights
organizations on UNHCR’s record on refoulement, in-country protection, and other practices
considered to be eroding the institution of asylum.
Three consists of a series of analyses of major UNHCR operations over the past
two decades. The introduction of this book set out the measure of the refugee
agency’s independence as the degree to which it is able to pursue its primary
goal of providing protection and solutions for refugees and ‘others of concern’,
in accordance with its own (reasonable) interpretations of how this goal is best
achieved. With this measure in mind, the next chapters analyse the relation-
ship between interests, discourse, action and reaction in some of the major
conflict-induced humanitarian emergencies since the end of the Cold War. As
such, they should be read with the discourse analysis of Part Two in mind.
The analysis of UNHCR’s operational activities in humanitarian emergencies
has four aims. First, to align the rise and decline of a security discourse within
UNHCR with the agency’s actions and experiences in these operations, to gauge
the degree to which the new ideas promoted in this discourse were reflected
in practice. Second, to discern whether and how UNHCR’s approach to these
operations were aligned with the interests of major actors involved, especially
the main donor, refugee-host and refugee-sending states. Third, to investigate
the consequences of a security perspective on displacement for the provision
of protection and assistance in these emergencies. And, fourth, to trace links
between the lessons the refugee agency seemed to learn from its participation
in these emergencies and the further evolution of its official discourse.
The analysis shows that UNHCR’s security discourse has indeed had a sig-
nificant impact on the agency’s actions. However, the relationship between dis-
course and action is a dynamic one. While its discourse helps shape the agency’s
operational decisions, the lessons learnt from successes and failures in the field
again led to innovations in the agency’s discourse. The relationship between
UNHCR’s discourse and practice can be understood in terms of a hermeneuti-
cal spiral. The way we talk about a phenomenon helps shape how we react to it.
But our actions—and their consequences—in turn help shape how we discuss
the phenomenon. The image of an hermeneutical spiral is based on the work of
Gadamer (2004), who, simply put, asserted that our consciousness is ‘histori-
cally effected’ and that learning takes place in a hermeneutic circle between the
text we try to interpret and the existing prejudices (or pre-judgments) and expe-
riences found in our own horizon. Thus our understanding of the world is col-
oured by the historical, social and cultural practices in which we are embedded.
Structure of Part Three
Chapters 9 and 10 cover the first few years of the post-Cold War period, and
UNHCR’s sudden rise from a discreet refugee rights agency to a global security
The Rise and Decline of a Global Security Actor 177
actor through its involvement as the lead humanitarian actor in the conflicts in
northern Iraq (1991) and Bosnia (1992–95). It was a period of optimism and inno-
vation in terms of the role the refugee agency assumed humanitarian actors could
play in the quest for international peace and security. Chapters 11 and 12 turn to
the latter half of the 1990s, when UNHCR was not only witness to humanitarian
disasters, but became embroiled in the politics of conflicts while powerless to shape
this politics in a manner allowing principled humanitarian action. Chapter 11 looks
at the refugee aftermath of the Rwandan genocide leading to the first Congo War
(1994–97), while the Kosovo war (1999) is the subject of c hapter 12. Chapter 13
discusses UNHCR’s attempt at alleviating the detrimental environment for inter-
national protection and humanitarian assistance after 9/11, while c hapter 14 inves-
tigates the mass repatriation operation led by UNHCR of Afghan refugees from
Pakistan and Iran from 2001 to 2012, after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
The choice of emergencies
The purpose is not to provide a detailed account of particular displacement

crises. Instead, the aim is to explore the complex links and feedbacks between
ideas, beliefs and perceptions held by the refugee agency, its operational deci-
sions, and its experiences on the ground in major field operations. Full accounts
are not provided of the diverse and complex sets of interests, sometimes over-
lapping and sometimes conflicting, held by a wide range of actors in these cri-
ses. Instead, the chapter accounts for the interests of central actors only as far as
they—and the policies they result in—affected UNHCR’s choices and actions.
This means that, with some exceptions (such as in the case of Kosovo, where
NGO activism played an important role), the account centres on two groups
of actors only: UNHCR’s main donors and the political authorities in the areas
in which the agency operates. This latter group includes, in situations of civil
conflict, not only the government but all the major warring factions.
The humanitarian emergencies selected for study have in common that
they were particularly important for the agency’s intellectual and operational
development. First, in all cases there was strong pressure from other influen-
tial actors in refugee politics on UNHCR to become involved—and to become
involved in a certain manner. Second, they were all major crises, heavily taxing
UNHCR’s human and financial resources.2 Third, and most important from
2
For instance, of UNHCR’s Special Programmes expenditure of $776.1 million in 1994,
31.5 percent went to the former Yugoslavia, while 31 percent went to the Burundi/Rwanda oper-
ations (UNHCR, 1996b: para. 39).
the perspective of this book, the evidence from interviews and UNHCR docu-
ments suggest that these crises, and UNHCR’s thinking about them, played
an important role in shaping and reshaping the agency’s understanding of
the nature of the refugee problem and its own role in dealing with it. They
constitute milestones for UNHCR, providing opportunities for the agency to
reflect over what had happened and what could have been done differently.
Of course, other humanitarian crises in the same period were both big and
controversial. But they did not receive the same attention from UNHCR and
its observers, nor did they lead to the same level of reflection and intellectual
activity within the agency.
9
UNHCR’s Rise as a Global

Security Actor
Northern Iraq, 1991
There is a danger that humanitarian access, unsupported by politi-

cal action, can prolong conflict by anaesthetising human suffering.
Fortunately, many UN operations today promote a combination of politi-
cal solutions and humanitarian activities and thereby reduce this risk.
(Ogata, 1992d)
As the Cold War came to an end and the Soviet empire crumbled, UNHCR
was in a crisis of its own with failing support from core donors and low staff
morale. The aim of the new High Commissioner, Sadako Ogata, was for the
refugee agency to remain relevant—or more precisely to regain relevance—in
international refugee politics in the post-Cold War climate. Sooner than she
had expected, the High Commissioner was given a chance to achieve just
that, when only a month or so into the job she received a request from UN
Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar to take on the lead humanitarian
role in the fast-unfolding refugee crisis in the mountainous regions of Iraqi
Kurdistan. This chapter discusses UNHCR’s lead humanitarian agency role in
northern Iraq. This was a new role for UNHCR, providing humanitarian relief
and protection in the midst of war, and depending for humanitarian access
on a range of actors including international military intervention forces and
warring factions. As the quote introducing this chapter showed, the High
Commissioner was not unaware of the dangers such war-time ‘in-country
protection’ entailed, both for the displaced populations and for the refugee
agency’s mandate and credibility. Despite such concerns, what characterizes
the early 1990s is UNHCR’s optimistic belief that a new humanitarian regime
could be forged to combine ‘political solutions and humanitarian activities’.
In-Country Protection in
northern Iraq
In April 1991 the world experienced its first major post-Cold War refugee
crisis. In the aftermath of ‘Operation Desert Storm’, where the US-led coali-
tion defeated the Iraqi forces in Kuwait and southern Iraq, Iraqi troops still
retained enough strength to quell uprisings in the north and south of the
country. In the north, the brutal military crack-down against Iraq’s rebellious
Kurdish population, led to almost two million Kurds fleeing into the moun-
tainous border area with Turkey and Iran in an attempt to seek refuge in those
two countries. While over 1.3 million Kurds were accepted into Iran, 450,000
refugees who tried to reach safety in Turkey were denied asylum and became
stranded in the border zone.
Turkey’s troubled relationship with its own Kurdish minority meant that the
country was adamantly against accepting more Kurds. Furthermore, Turkey had
only signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, not the 1967 Protocol, and had thus
limited its treaty responsibilities to persons who had become refugees ‘as a result
of events occurring in Europe’. This spelt humanitarian disaster for the refugees
stranded in the harsh mountains of the Turkish-Iraqi border, and soon dramatic
pictures of their suffering were broadcast across the world by the international
media. The response, rapidly implemented by the US-led coalition forces, was to
create a safety zone for the Iraqi Kurds within the borders of Iraq, rather than to
attempt to compel their NATO partner Turkey to provide asylum.
Although it did not directly authorize humanitarian intervention, the UN
Security Council provided the justification for the creation of the safety zone
in northern Iraq with its path-breaking Resolution 688 of 5 April 1991. For the
first time in the Security Council’s history, the Resolution directly described a
refugee flow as a threat to international peace and security:
Gravely concerned by the repression of the Iraqi civilian population in many parts
of Iraq, including most recently in Kurdish-populated areas, which led to a mas-
sive flow of refugees towards and across international frontiers and to cross-border
incursions which threaten international peace and security in the region.1
Less than two weeks later, on 17 April, the US-led coalition launched
‘Operation Provide Comfort’ to create a safety zone for the Kurds, using
troops that were still in the region after ‘Operation Desert Storm’. But mili-
tary protection was not enough. Without humanitarian assistance, hundreds
of thousands of people stranded in the mountains would have died of hunger
1
Security Council Resolution 688 (S/Res 688, 5 April 1991).
UNHCR’s Rise as a Global Security Actor 181
and exposure. Resolution 688 insisted ‘that Iraq allow immediate access by
international humanitarian organizations to all those in need of assistance in
all parts of Iraq and make available all necessary facilities for their operations’.
Instead of putting pressure on Turkey to let refugees into its sovereign territory,
the international community compelled Iraq to open its sovereign borders to
international aid organizations. The creation of a safety zone in northern Iraq
was depicted as a purely humanitarian intervention to alleviate the suffering of
civilian Iraqi Kurds. Negotiations between the UN and the Iraqi government
led on 18 April to an agreement allowing humanitarian access to the Kurdish
population.
Although receiving a request from the UN Secretary-General, Javier Pérez
de Cuéllar, UNHCR did not immediately agree to take the lead humanitarian
role in northern Iraq. But by early May, Ogata advised her staff that ‘UNHCR
should assume overall responsibility for protection and assistance on the bor-
der and for voluntary repatriation from the border area’ (UNHCR, 2000: 216).
On 7 June the agency took formally over the relief responsibilities from the
coalition forces (Keen, 1993: viii). The allied forces pulled out, replaced by
500 UN guards more used to guarding the doors at UN buildings than pro-
tecting refugees and humanitarian personnel.2 However, the UN guards were
backed up by the threat of air attacks by the allied forces, or, the so-called
‘Operation Poised Hammer’ (Roberts, 1996: 41–2). The coalition soldiers were
also crucial to UNHCR’s winter preparations. Thus, northern Iraq became the
first humanitarian crisis in which UNHCR co-operated closely with, and was
dependent on the logistical capabilities of, military forces. It would not be the
last time.
The interests of central actors
Several characteristics of the northern Iraqi humanitarian crisis ensured that

the Kurdish refugees and IDPs received a lot of attention and assistance from
the international community in general, and from Western powers in particu-
lar. Some of these characteristics were peculiar to the northern Iraqi crisis,
while others would become commonplace features of humanitarian emergen-
cies in the 1990s. I will list the general features first, then those particular to
northern Iraq.
2
The UN police deployment in northern Iraq was ‘a joke’, argued an American military com-
mander in the safe haven, Major General Abizaid (in Helton, 2002: 33).
The media attention devoted to the Gulf War was unprecedented in his-
tory, with CNN bringing the fighting directly to living rooms across the world
twenty-four hours a day. The international TV crews were still in the region
when the Kurdish refugee crisis broke out. They immediately relocated to the
Turkish-Iraqi border to document the misery of the Kurdish refugees. Faced
with the mounting public outcry caused by these images, it became hard for
American and British politicians to maintain their argument that this was an
‘internal problem’ for the Iraqis themselves to solve (Wheeler, 2000: 148–9).
Another factor facilitating the international response was the undisputed
status as ‘worthy victims’ held by the Iraqi Kurds in the minds of the interna-
tional media and public. The Iraqi authorities had been widely condemned
for its human rights record for some time, and the Security Council added
its voice to the critics in numerous resolutions after Iraq invaded Kuwait on
2 August 1990. In 1988, Kurdish towns and villages had been attacked by
the Iraqi air force with chemical weapons. Some commentators claim that
as many as 100,000 Kurds may have been killed by Iraqi troops that year
(Wheeler, 2000: 139–40). At that point, the international community showed
little interest in rescuing Kurds. This changed after the invasion of Kuwait,
but one should not discard the impact of the recent images of whole villages
wiped out with nerve gas only three years earlier. In 1991, such images helped
cement the support for intervention among the public and policy makers in
the Western world.
The role of the media and the public sympathy and outrage their report-
ing generated were to be important in most, if not all, major humanitarian
operations since the end of the Cold War. In addition, the northern Iraqi crisis
had some peculiar characteristics that were seldom to be reproduced in subse-
quent humanitarian emergencies:
The international community’s capability to react was unusually high.
First, the humanitarian crisis came in the wake of a war waged by the world’s
remaining superpower, the US, and its allies, against Iraq. The coalition forces
were still in the region, ready to enforce a safe haven immediately. As these
forces had just defeated the Iraqi army, the credibility of the coalition’s defence
of the safe haven was high. Second, coalition soldiers were also at hand to
help UNHCR organize and implement the large-scale humanitarian opera-
tion to bring the refugees down from the mountains and create winter shel-
ters for them. Without this aid, it is unlikely that the refugee agency would
have coped with the momentous task of keeping hundreds of thousands of
displaced persons alive and healthy. UNHCR’s emergency response capacity
was poorly developed, and it had made contingency plans only for an outflow
of about 35,000 people to Iran and another 20,000 people to Turkey (UNHCR,
2000: 212). UNHCR could not have conducted any relief operation without
the coalition—indeed it was coalition troops who, at least in the early stages,
provided most of the aid, as recollected by one UNHCR staff member who
took part in the operation:
We didn’t have the right sort of vehicles. We couldn’t get up there. It was the first
time we had to work with the military. Refugees were scattered all over the moun-
tain; hard to find. We needed helicopters, and only the military had this capa-
bility. We travelled around in US helicopters. Also when it came to helping the
refugees, the only ones who could help were the military. But we placed ourselves
between the refugees and the military, explained to the military how to deal with
refugees, take care of women and children, health. We could organize the refu-
gees, find their leaders. The military provided the logistics; food, water, tents, etc.3
The international community’s will to act was also unusually strong: Apart
from the media attention and the public sympathy this created, there existed
a strong Western alliance against the regime of Saddam Hussein. When that
same regime ruthlessly quashed the Kurdish rebellion, there was a strong
incentive for the coalition countries to react. This incentive was reinforced by
a sense of guilt and responsibility, accompanied by mounting internal criti-
cism, since the Kurdish rebellion had been encouraged by the US (Wheeler,
2000: 147–8). In the words of one analyst: ‘Necessity, guilt and revenge can be
powerful motivations for a protective refugee policy’ (Helton, 2002: 175).
Thus the interest of key states in finding a solution to the plight of the Iraqi
Kurds, even if that solution was an innovative and ad hoc one, was strong.
More surprising, perhaps, was the fact that the US coalition, who also consti-
tuted some of UNHCR’s major donors, turned to the refugee agency to take
charge of the humanitarian operation in northern Iraq. The donor pressure
to assume responsibility for the 450,000 Kurdish refugees stranded in the
Turkish-Iraqi mountains, was strong. UNHCR admitted as much in a later
evaluation report of the humanitarian operations in the former Yugoslavia.
This report presented the northern Iraq operation as a precedent for UNHCR
involvement in IDP situations. Commenting on the UN Secretary-General’s
request that the refugee agency take lead responsibility for the humanitarian
operation in the former Yugoslavia, the report wrote that ‘[s]‌uch a request was
in line with past UNHCR interventions for internally displaced persons, not
least that of 1990 [sic] in northern Iraq, where donor states had insisted that
UNHCR assist some 400,000 internally displaced people massed at the border
between Turkey and Iraq’ (UNHCR and WFP, 1997: 5).
This insistence is at first glance surprising, considering the lack of confi-
dence donors had shown UNHCR in the late 1980s. However, from the point
3
Interview with UNHCR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008G.
of view of moral positioning, it was in the interest of the US-led coalition to

get the refugee agency involved. The fact that UNHCR provided assistance
and protection to the Iraqi Kurds was an indictment of the Iraqi authorities.
It signalled that the Kurds were persecuted individuals ‘voting with their feet’,
rather than political allies of one side in an armed conflict. Furthermore, the
fleeing Kurds had been stopped at the border, endangering their lives, by the
NATO-country Turkey, whose air bases were crucial for the campaign against
Iraq. The fact that the UN refugee agency agreed to assist and protect displaced
Iraqi Kurds within the borders of Iraq deflected to some degree the criticism
against Turkey for denying the Kurds their right to seek asylum.
UNHCR’s involvement created an extra layer of legitimacy for the humanitar-
ian action in northern Iraq which could not have been obtained if it had been car-
ried out by the coalition forces alone. In 1991, UNHCR still had a reputation as a
legalistic and non-political agency. Its procedure of negotiating with the authori-
ties of the countries in which it operated, a practice continued in Iraq, deflected
somewhat the concern among some members of the international community
that the safe haven would set a dangerous precedent for coerced humanitar-
ian intervention. It ensured that the rescue of the Kurds took on a somewhat
less politically controversial appearance as a UN consent-based humanitarian
operation. It was also a sign, after the success of the Gulf War, of the Western
powers’ renewed enthusiasm for the UN as a vehicle for international action to
uphold and create peace and security in the post-Cold War world.
UNHCR was badly prepared for conducting a large-scale humanitarian
emergency operation, leaving much of the logistical work to the allied forces
and over 200 NGO partners. However, the refugee agency was the official
leader, and it was the UNHCR name that became principally associated with
the operation.
The decision to go in: Relevance and

pragmatism prevail
After the Berlin Wall crumbled, and with it the rigidity of a bipolar interna-
tional system, population movement was widely perceived to become a more
significant and unpredictable force. But UNHCR, riddled by financial and
political crises and low staff morale, seemed particularly incapable of taking on
the new challenges posed by the end of the Cold War. It even admitted so itself.
In December 1990, a month after High Commissioner Stoltenberg resigned
and a month before High Commissioner Ogata took office, Refugees Magazine
delivered a particularly gloomy editorial. It described the international legal
structure put in place to protect refugees as confronted with ‘an unprecedented

crisis’, and doubted UNHCR’s ability to defend it. It continued:
In the Third World, there is now a discernible tendency to make asylum and pro-
tection conditional upon adequate levels of assistance. In the industrialized states,
both politicians and the public have reacted negatively to the growing number
of people seeking sanctuary on their territory, The principles of refugee protec-
tion, painstakingly developed over the course of the last 40 years, are increasingly
being challenged. UNHCR’s ability to reverse these dangerous trends has been
limited by managerial problems including the sudden resignation of the last two
UN High Commissioners for Refugees. (Refugees Magazine, 1990: 3)
When Ogata took office in January 1991, this pessimism receded quickly
from UNHCR’s official discourse. She was determined to seize the opportuni-
ties opening up with the end of the Cold War, rather than focus on the restric-
tive attitude by states to refugees and asylum-seekers. Although a long-serving
UN diplomat, Ogata had no direct experience with refugee issues. She planned
to start her term in office cautiously, consulting with her staff, learning about
the organization and working out new strategies (Loescher, 2001: 273), but
events soon caught up with her. When the Secretary-General requested
that UNHCR take responsibility for the humanitarian operation in aid of
the stranded Kurdish refugees, Ogata’s determination to ‘become relevant’,
combined with her keen interest in international security, ensured that the
refugee agency’s answer was affirmative. In the words of one staff member
working closely with the new High Commissioner, Ogata was ‘a doer and a
risk-taker’: ‘we’ll do it!’, was her attitude.4
But not without some fierce internal debate. According to the then Assistant
High Commissioner, Søren Jessen-Petersen, northern Iraq was a turning point
for UNHCR. Many staff members, including the then dominant Division of
International Protection, wanted the High Commissioner to implore the
international community to put pressure on Turkey to provide asylum for the
Kurds. They argued that by aiding the stranded Kurds, UNHCR abetted the
Turkish decision and flouted its own Statute and most sacred principles. They
also held that it would set a most dangerous precedent, undermining asylum
in the future. Jessen-Petersen did not agree:
If we had stuck to the mandate, we would have been sitting there now, together
with our critics, in an academic world—which is important but which is very
different from reality. At the beginning of the 1990s what we had to do was to
quickly analyse the situation, the new environment, see where it was going and
what UNHCR could do to remain relevant in this new environment. The new
4
Interview with Jean-François Durieux, Oxford, 1 June 2008.
environment required a UNHCR presence on the ground, providing physical
protection to people trapped in the midst of conflict. Legal protection—a piece of
paper—would not have done much good in these situations.5
According to Jessen-Petersen, Ogata’s personal preferences and understand-
ing of the refugee problem played a key role in UNHCR’s about-turn:
Ogata has been very important as a person. Being a political scientist was a very
important qualification when the international environment was changing so
quickly. Ogata understood much before others the dynamics of the post-Cold
War international environment and responded to it quickly.6
The actions of the coalition forces helped UNHCR overcome its initial hesi-
tation. To encourage the refugees in the border zone to return they distributed
leaflets announcing that it was safe to return now that UN guards were being
posted in the safe haven. With no prospect of asylum, the refugees soon began
to return. Within two weeks in May, 200,000 turned back into Iraq. UNHCR
believed that it had no choice but to follow them. After all, to protect and assist
returnees was an uncontroversial component of the refugee agency’s mandate
(UNHCR, 2000: 216).
The discussion so far of, first, the state interests in having UNHCR take
responsibility for the Iraqi Kurds and, second, of the refugee agency’s decision
to accept this responsibility, prompts an important question: Was the deci-
sion based on the agency’s own interpretation of how best to respond to this
particular refugee emergency? Or was it based purely on the pressure from its
most important donors?
There is no doubt that UNHCR’s decision was taken under heavy pressure
from its donors. It could even be argued that the agency hardly had a choice
at all. More powerful actors had already decided how to deal with the Kurdish
refugees, and UNHCR’s opinions would not have made a difference. However,
it was still left for the refugee agency to decide whether it wanted to be part of
this unorthodox operation. The internal debate, the initial hesitation and the
negotiations UNHCR conducted with the coalition forces before it took over
the responsibility for the humanitarian operation show that the agency could
not easily be pushed into this role.
Furthermore, the decision to go in was entirely in line with the security dis-
course that the agency had begun to develop before the northern Iraq crisis. It
was also in line with the personal convictions of the new High Commissioner.
UNHCR’s decision to become lead agency in northern Iraq was the fruition
5
Interview with Søren Jessen-Petersen, then Assistant High Commissioner for Refugees,
Geneva Headquarters, 17 January 2001.
6
Interview with Søren Jessen-Petersen, Geneva Headquarters, 17 January 2001.
of a process of re-evaluation of the agency’s ideas and goals. Only a few years
earlier such a decision would indeed have seemed contrary to the agency’s
convictions. But, as we saw in Part Two of this book, by 1991 the agency’s
discourse had changed substantially away from its previous non-political,
non-operational, refugee-specific credo. Stoltenberg (1990c) had warned
that UNHCR could not afford to be ‘static and unresponsive to the political
realities surrounding us’ if it wanted to serve refugees and displaced persons.
Likewise, the 1990 Report advocated an ‘alert, yet flexible’ post-Cold War atti-
tude (UNHCR, 1990: para. 1), while the 1990 Note suggested that the ‘search
for solutions needs to be pragmatic, imaginative and pursued without undue
rigidity . . . ’ (UNHCR, 1990b: para. 24). Stoltenberg’s first ambition had been
to promote repatriation as a ‘concrete contribution to peace and security’. He
had also argued that there need not be a conflict between the self-interest
of states and the protection, assistance and solutions mandate of UNHCR.
Instead, policies should be sought that accommodated the interests of both
states and the displaced (Stoltenberg, 1990d). These views were shared by
Ogata, and they prevailed in her decision to take on lead agency responsi-
bility in northern Iraq. Although parts of the refugee agency were unhappy
with the decision—notably the lawyers in the Division for International
Protection—it cannot be said that the leadership was forced to act in contra-
diction to their understanding of how to best fulfil UNHCR’s mandate and
statutory obligations. On the contrary, the experiences from northern Iraq
made the agency more optimistic regarding its role and its future than at any
time since the early 1970s.
Lessons learnt
The northern Iraq crisis heralded an era of innovative UNHCR policies.

The lessons the agency learnt were optimistic and pragmatic: that UNHCR
could achieve a lot in terms of refugee protection, assistance and solutions
if it reacted swiftly and imaginatively to humanitarian crises, and if it was
sensitive to the worries and needs of donor states and (potential) refugee host
states.
Primarily, the northern Iraq refugee emergency showed UNHCR the rewards
of remaining relevant in the eyes of the world’s major powers. In this sense,
the agency’s engagement in the safe haven was an immense success. Funding
streamed back to agency coffers, and only a year later the Secretary-General
asked UNHCR to become the lead agency in the former Yugoslavia. After
years of stagnation, expenditure increased from US$544 million in 1990 to

US$863 million in 1991.7 The sense of a sudden change in fortune is evident in
the High Commissioner’s speech to EXCOM:
You will appreciate, Mr. Chairman, the strains on a bureaucracy that in the
course of 15 months has had three High Commissioners and, within a period of
18 months, has gone through a retrenchment exercise followed by around 60 per
cent increase in activity. (Ogata, 1991)
The northern Iraq experience also taught UNHCR the value of pragma-
tism. The establishment of a safe haven in northern Iraq doubtlessly saved
thousands of lives. As a refugee agency, it could have insisted that it would
only provide protection and assistance to the Kurdish refugees as long as
Turkey opened its borders to let them in. This would have been more in
line with a legalistic interpretation of international protection principles,
but the likelihood of Turkey changing its response was remote, particularly
since its border closure had been tacitly accepted by the Western powers. If
UNHCR had refused to assume responsibility for the in-country operation
in Iraq, it would have been left by the wayside while other humanitarian
actors stepped in. Consequently, it calculated that it was better to save lives
and improve its public relations. The northern Iraq emergency was too big
and well-publicized for the agency to afford to stay on the sidelines while
clutching its principles.
UNHCR’s emerging security discourse aided its decision to assume the
role of lead agency in northern Iraq. In turn, the agency’s experience in
the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan strengthened its security discourse. Asked
why UNHCR’s new approach of in-country protection in conflict areas was
accompanied by a strong emphasis on security in all its dimensions from
the early 1990s on, the Assistant High Commissioner replied: ‘Because it
was obvious from the environment in which we were now operating: the
security of refugees, of our staff, of states, was at the forefront of these
operations’.8
The northern Iraq operation reinforced ‘security’ as a core concept in
UNHCR’s discourse. The lessons learnt in northern Iraq also ensured that
many of the tentative new ideas that had emerged within the agency’s dis-
course in the previous few years now became central elements of UNHCR
strategy. One of these was how to work with the military. UNHCR was not
completely unaccustomed to dealing with armed forces, but in the safe haven,
the soldiers had a humanitarian role as well as a combative or protective one.
7
Figures from UNHCR’s Donor Relations and Resource Mobilization.
8
Interview with Søren Jessen-Petersen, Geneva Headquarters, 17 January 2001.
This raised a host of new problems of co-ordination, clashing organizational

cultures, and conflicting priorities. Yet UNHCR could not have managed with-
out help from the coalition forces. As a result it adopted a guardedly positive
view on co-operation with the military.
The importance of emergency preparedness—a completely new concept
for UNHCR at the time9—was also brought home by the chaotic scenes of the
northern Iraqi refugee crisis. UNHCR was badly prepared and slow to deploy its
resources in the safe haven, leaving most of the work on the ground, especially
in the beginning, to the coalition forces and some 200 NGOs. Co-ordination
was a major problem due to the many humanitarian actors competing for
resources and duplicating each other’s work (UNHCR, 2000: 216). As a result,
UNHCR made the task of developing an efficient emergency response mecha-
nism a major priority. The ambition was to become, in the world’s eyes, a natu-
ral leader of international humanitarian emergency operations.10 Through the
creation of a well-functioning emergency preparedness rota and stockpiling of
goods in warehouses across the world, this was a status it managed to achieve
and maintain for several years—until other UN agencies and NGOs caught
up and began to challenge UNHCR’s lead role later in the decade. This was
quite a leap from what UNHCR used to consider as its core responsibilities.
However, the refugee agency had long departed from strict interpretations of
its Statute, and this leap from refugee agency to humanitarian actor suited the
agency’s new security discourse. It went in tandem with the increased preoccu-
pation with prevention and ‘root causes’ that had started in the late 1980s, and
it complemented the understanding of refugee problems as an international
security issue, a view that had become central in UNHCR’s discourse from
1990 onwards. Also, the experience as lead agency made clear the financial and
political gains that were to be made if UNHCR managed to become the world’s
leading humanitarian actor.
The Kurdish refugee crisis was also the first practical example of ‘contain-
ment’ and ‘in-country protection’, in the form of the creation of a safety zone
for internally displaced persons. While UNHCR had alluded to the need to be
innovative and flexible in finding ways of protecting refugees in the post-Cold
War World, in-country protection did not appear in the agency’s vocabu-
lary before the northern Iraqi emergency. Soon after the crisis, in the 1991
9
According to Janet Lim, then Director of UNHCR’s Asia Bureau. Interview, Geneva
Headquarters, 6 June 2008. Lim was one of the architects of UNHCR’s emergency preparedness
structures, and is currently Assistant High Commissioner for Operations.
10
A series of documents on emergency preparedness appeared in late 1991 and in 1992.
According to the 1996 edition of UNHCR’s ‘Catalogue of Emergency Response Resources’, they
were the ‘result of a strategy to enhance UNHCR’s capacity to respond to emergencies which was
instituted at the end of 1991’ (UNHCR, 1996f).
Note, in-country protection featured among UNHCR’s suggestions for new

approaches to protection:
New approaches must address causes both in terms of their elimination and pre-
vention. Furthermore, options to promote return, including offering protection
inside countries of origin, should be actively explored. (UNHCR, 1991b: para. 41)
The Note contained a substantial discussion of the strategy of prevention; a
strategy that included the containment of refugees as a central element:
Prevention also means the early containment of a situation of exodus so that
threats to the security and well-being of the persons concerned are not aggravated
and the situation remains manageable from both the humanitarian and political
standpoint. (UNHCR, 1991b: para. 43)
When winding down UNHCR commitments in northern Iraq in 1992,
Ogata thanked regional governments for their ‘excellent co-operation’. She
proclaimed that the ‘humanitarian efforts did prove fruitful and successful’
and set ‘a pattern for future operations to follow and refine’ (Ogata, 1992e).
Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the agency’s future direction,
UNHCR drew the lesson from northern Iraq that powerful states will react
decisively to refugee crises when they believe it is in their political and security
interest to do so. They may react in unconventional ways, such as creating safe
havens rather than provide asylum, but they will rescue refugees from conflicts
in which they have a stake, or which they perceive to affect their security inter-
ests. The Security Council declared the refugee situation in Iraqi Kurdistan to
be a threat to peace and security, and this led to a massive in-country humani-
tarian operation to save the Kurds without threatening regional stability. This
confirmed UNHCR’s belief in the importance of using the language of security.
To disregard state interests would render the agency irrelevant and broke, while
to pander to states’ selfish inclination to wash their hands of their obligations
to refugees would render the agency’s mandate meaningless. But to appeal to
a redefined notion of security, where assisting refugees and finding innovative
solutions to refugee crises would be perceived by states to be in their secu-
rity interest, appeared after the outcome of the northern Iraqi refugee crisis to
be the new way forward. How eagerly this lesson was embraced by UNHCR
becomes evident when we turn to its operations in the former Yugoslavia.
Conclusion: An unconventional success
Northern Iraq gave rise to great optimism within UNHCR: First, the
international intervention led to the protection of the Kurdish refugees,
thousands of whom would have perished without the creation of the safe
haven. Second, by assuming a lead role in the humanitarian operation
instead of staying on the sideline while criticizing Turkey and the interna-
tional community for flouting the principles of refugee law, UNHCR man-
aged to ‘become relevant’ again in the eyes of donors and powerful states.
The political and funding crises in which the agency had been immersed
were thereby overcome. Third, the Kurdish refugee crisis awoke UNHCR
to the opportunities, not only the challenges, of the post-Cold War world,
showing the agency that refugees could be aided and humanitarian catas-
trophes averted through concerted and innovative international action.
Although feelings within the agency were divided on the unconventional
response to the northern Iraqi crisis, and particularly on UNHCR’s decision
not to decry Turkey’s refusal to offer refuge on its territory, the result was a
much reinvigorated and optimistic UNHCR.
10
A Humanitarian Star
Lead Agency in Bosnia, 1991–95
UNHCR came out of its experiences with the northern Iraq operation rein-
vigorated and convinced that the post-Cold War environment offered unprec-
edented opportunities to find pragmatic solutions to refugee emergencies that
provided both adequate protection and assistance to the displaced and catered
to the interest of major powers and host states. The refugee agency continued
its journey into unmapped territory when, following on the heels of its north-
ern Iraq operation, it assumed lead agency responsibility for the humanitarian
operation in the former Yugoslavia as that country collapsed into civil war. This
chapter follows UNHCR’s operations in Bosnia1 (1992–95). It shows how the
agency rose in prominence to take on the role as the world’s foremost humani-
tarian organization. This role was intrinsically linked to UNHCR becoming,
both in its own view and in effect, a global security actor, deeply involved in
the international community’s response to Europe’s most destructive conflict
since World War Two.
The humanitarian disaster in former

Yugoslavia
The humanitarian operation in the former Yugoslavia began in late 1991,

and quickly assumed dramatic proportions as the war spread from Slovenia
and Croatia to multi-ethnic Bosnia and Herzegovina following that country’s
declaration of independence in March 1992. The government of Serbia, led
by Slobodan Milosevic, declared that it would fight to protect the interests
1
I focus on events in Bosnia only, since it was here UNHCR met its main challenges.
A Humanitarian Star 193
of the Serb minority in Bosnia (constituting around 31 percent of Bosnia’s

population). The war quickly became one of ethnic cleansing (Woodward,
1995: 242) when the former Yugoslav army and, especially, Serb paramilitaries,
set about creating ‘ethnically pure’ territories through threatening, expelling
and killing Muslims and Croats in Serb-majority areas in eastern Bosnia. By
June 1992, Serb forces controlled two thirds of Bosnian territory and around
one million people were already displaced (UNHCR, 2000: 218).
The Bosnian conflict became a two-front war when the alliance between
Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats broke up in early 1993. Croat forces
also pursued a policy of ethnic cleansing, a policy that had been repeated on
numerous occasions in Balkan history (Carmichael, 2002). This led to a new
wave of displacement, this time mostly of Muslims from Bosnian Croat terri-
tory in central Bosnia. In October 1993, 2.7 million people inside Bosnia were
dependent on humanitarian assistance (DHA and UNHCR, 1993). Fighting
between Bosnian Muslims and Croats came to an end in early 1994, when the
two sides, pressured by the US, created a Muslim-Croat Federation. By the end
of the war, ethnic cleansing was a good as completed (Kaldor, 2006: 55). As the
Dayton talks were held in November 1995, 2.5 million people were displaced,
1.3 of them IDPs, 500,000 in neighbouring countries, while the remaining
700,000 had received some form of (usually temporary) asylum in Western
Europe (Helton, 2002: 19–21). It was the largest refugee crisis in Europe since
World War Two, taking place in one of the continent’s smallest countries.2 The
scale of the displacement and the targeting of civilians led to an enormous
international relief effort in the midst of war. UNHCR became lead agency
in the former Yugoslavia already in December 1991, a role it retained for the
remainder of the decade, including during the Kosovo war in 1999.
The main response by the international community to this war of ethnic
cleansing, waged mostly by paramilitaries against civilians, was to view it as
a ‘humanitarian nightmare’ (Dahlman and Ó Tuathail, 2005: 578). Flowing
from this view, the main aim of outside actors was to launch and sustain a mas-
sive relief effort in the midst of war. This approach disregarded the fact that
displacement of civilians was not a regrettable side effect but an intrinsic aim
of the warfare. This meant that the international humanitarian effort to assist
civilians, although labelled as ‘neutral’ by UNHCR and its donors, unavoidably
became an important factor in the war dynamics. Starting on 3 July 1992, the
humanitarian airlift of food, medicines, fuel and other necessities—the big-
gest the world has seen—kept the besieged Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, alive for
almost four years (Cutts, 1999: 18). Humanitarian aid helped minority groups
retain control of surrounded enclaves. It also kept the majority of the Bosnian
2
Bosnia counted a population of 4.4 million before the war.
population, whether displaced or ‘war-affected’, alive through four harsh win-

ters of war. Indeed, over forty percent of UNHCR’s target population was in
the category ‘war affected’, rather than displaced (Weiss and Pasic, 1997: 47).
UNHCR worked closely with the UN peacekeeping force, UNPROFOR,
which was established by Security Council Resolution 743, on 21 February
1992, to monitor the cease-fire in Croatia. When war broke out in Bosnia, its
mandate was widened by subsequent Security Council resolutions to include
protection of the humanitarian effort in Bosnia.3 Supporting the humanitar-
ian mission soon became UNPROFOR’s most central task. While the inter-
national community could not come to agreement on how to best solve the
conflict in the former Yugoslavia, they managed to join in their support of the
humanitarian efforts of UNHCR and its partners.
Six ‘safe areas’ were established by the Security Council in 1993 as a meas-
ure to ensure the safe delivery of humanitarian supplies to Bosnian Muslim
enclaves in Serb-held territory. The Security Council Resolutions naming
Sarajevo, Srebrenica, Tuzla, Zepa, Gorazde, and Bihac ‘safe areas’, demanded
that they be free from attack and that UNPROFOR and the humanitarian
agencies be allowed ‘free and unimpeded access’ to them.4 However, the safe
areas concept entailed serious problems. Three should be mentioned in this
short summary of events. First, unlike in northern Iraq, measures to protect
these areas properly were not taken. Second, and another contrast to northern
Iraq, the safe areas were confronted not with a defeated enemy, but with one
that was still fighting and, at the time, winning. Third, Bosnian Muslim fight-
ers did not respect the safe areas as neutral zones and continued their military
operations from within them.
In July 1995, Srebrenica and Zepa were overrun by Bosnian Serb forces. The
atrocities committed during these conquests, including the murder of around
7,000 men in Srebrenica, were an important factor in finally driving the
Western powers to apply the necessary coercive power to push through a nego-
tiated settlement to the war. It took the worst massacre in Europe since World
War Two, perpetrated under the nose of humiliated UNPROFOR troops and
despite the warnings issued by NATO, to secure such decisive international
action. The retaliatory NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serb forces coincided
with a major Croat offensive in the Krajina, where Croatia regained territory
lost to Serbia at the beginning of the war and sent some 200,000 Croatian
3
See Security Council Resolutions 758 (S/Res/758, 8 June 1992), 769 (S/Res/769, 7 August
1992), and 770 (S/Res/770, 13 August 1992).
4
UN Security Council Resolution 824 (S/Res/824, 6 May 1993). Several other resolutions
concerned the safe areas, for instance Security Council Resolution 819 (C/Res/819, 16 April
1993) on Srebrenica.
Serbs fleeing to a Serbia that was already trembling under the weight of pre-
vious refugee influxes and UN-imposed economic sanctions. As Serb forces
rapidly lost territory also in Bosnia, the Milosevic regime opted for a peace
agreement rather than to continue to back the war efforts of the Bosnian Serbs.
The Dayton Peace Agreement was signed on 14 December 1995.
With the Dayton Agreement, UNHCR’s task switched from emergency
assistance to repatriation. Although the refugee agency was initially reluc-
tant to admit so, return took place, especially in the first years, predominantly
to majority areas, thus consolidating the ethnically cleansed Bosnian land-
scape. Bosnia remained divided into three almost completely mono-ethnic
parts, while the political future of the divided country remained dependent
on the presence of some 60,000 NATO-led soldiers in IFOR (Implementation
Force), later replaced by the Stabilization Force, SFOR (1996–2005). SFOR
was accompanied by UNMIBH, the UN Mission in Bosnia and Herzegovina
(1995–2002). Troops have been gradually reduced, and SFOR’s successor,
EUFOR, had in 2010 only 2,000 soldiers remaining in Bosnia.
Minority returns were slightly more successful from 1999 onwards, but by
2004 one million of Bosnia’s war displaced had not returned to their place of
origin, relocating instead to majority areas within Bosnia or remaining in their
asylum countries abroad (Dahlman and Ó Tuathail, 2005: 595). The discus-
sion below concentrates on UNHCR’s humanitarian operation during the war,
rather than the troubled post-Dayton repatriation and reconstruction efforts.5
This is not an account of the complex and difficult negotiations and discus-
sions within and between US and European governments, taking place bilater-
ally or through their membership of the UN, the EU and NATO, on how best
to deal with the break-up of the former Yugoslavia.6 But the outcome of this
discord was important for UNHCR: due to the policy impasse, the humani-
tarian operation became the most central aspect of the international commu-
nity’s efforts until the final months of the war.
To deflect criticism over their inability to find a political solution to the
Balkan conflict, the major powers played up the importance of the human-
itarian operation by suggesting that it would contribute to restoring peace.
5
For an account of this, see Dahlman and Ó Tuathail (2005).
6
For accounts of this, see e.g. Holbrooke (1999), Shawcross (2000) and Economides and
Taylor (2007).
For instance, in 1992, the Security Council stated that ‘the situation in Bosnia
and Herzegovina constitutes a threat to international peace and security and
that the provision of humanitarian assistance in Bosnia and Herzegovina is an
important element in the Council’s effort to restore international peace and
security in the area . . . ’.7 Resolution 770 was path-breaking, since it was the
first time the Security Council used its Chapter VII authority, permitting the
use of force, to authorize member states to use ‘all means necessary’ to defend
a humanitarian operation (Wheeler, 2000: 251–2). It was soon to be repeated
when the Security Council authorized the US led Operation Restore Hope to
protect the humanitarian effort in Somalia.8 However, Resolution 770’s coer-
cive mandate only extended to the self-defence of the troops and the defence
of the humanitarian staff, not to the protection of the civilians for whom the
humanitarian operation was launched.
In the absence of agreement on how to solve the conflict, UNHCR’s human-
itarian activities, supported by UNPROFOR, were until July 1995 the only
substantial international response to the war in Bosnia. As a result, the US and
the EU had a strong interest in the success of the humanitarian mission. This
ensured that the Western powers provided generous relief aid. It also meant
that there was great pressure on UNHCR to remain in Bosnia when danger,
intimidation and aid abuse on the ground led the agency on several occasions
to consider pulling out.
In addition, the same states, especially the EU, had a more particular inter-
est in supporting a massive relief operation within the borders of the former
Yugoslavia. They wanted to avoid millions of Balkan refugees arriving on their
own territory to seek asylum. The containment aspect of the humanitarian
operation was therefore particularly important for the EU. The main official
reason for this containment strategy was that it counteracted ethnic cleansing.
The second and less reputable reason was the EU’s unwillingness to host large
refugee populations. This meant that the EU’s support for UNHCR’s operations
was to some extent contingent on this work taking the form of ‘in-country
protection’. For instance, in the summer of 1992, when ethnic cleansing was at
its worst, Germany, already hosting around 200,000 refugees from the former
Yugoslavia, suggested a burden-sharing agreement between the EU countries.
This idea was vehemently opposed by the other EU members, led by Britain.
Baroness Chalker, then UK Minister of Overseas Development, argued that the
refugees should be accommodated as close to home as possible. ‘She was, she
said, not speaking in the interest of the British or EC tax payer, but in the interest
of the refugees themselves’ (Silber and Little, 1996: 247). After a meeting hosted
7
UN Security Council Resolution 770 (S/Res/770, 13 August 1992).
8
Security Council Resolution 794 (S/Res/794, 3 December 1992).
by UNHCR, EU ministers praised the agency for agreeing that ‘displaced peo-
ple should be encouraged to stay in the nearest safe areas to their home’ and for
promoting the idea of ‘temporary protection’ for those refugees who neverthe-
less made their way to EU countries, so that these could return swiftly as soon
as the war came to an end (UNHCR, 1992e. See also UNHCR, 1992c).
Another group of central actors consisted of the three warring factions
in Bosnia. Their interests regarding the humanitarian operation were more
ambiguous than that of the West. All sides benefited from the aid, since it
helped keep ‘their’ population alive, as well as provided an opportunity to
siphon off resources for their war effort. But all sides also had their quarrels
with UNHCR and UNPROFOR.
In some ways the aid benefited the Bosnian Serb side the most, since
UNHCR attempted to shore up its image of impartiality by doggedly sticking
to the population figures from before the war, thus providing around 30 per-
cent of the aid to the Bosnian Serbs (Cutts, 1999: 14–16). The humanitarian
need, however, was bigger on the Muslim side, compared to population fig-
ures. Bosnian Serb forces also used the provision of humanitarian access as a
bargaining chip in its political negotiations with the UN and Western powers.
They repeatedly threatened to retaliate against NATO air strikes by attack-
ing the humanitarian operation, and took peacekeepers hostage on several
occasions (Rudolph, 1997: 137). This meant that the humanitarian operation,
which in some ways was a ‘fall back option’ for the Western powers while try-
ing to come to an agreement on how to best end the war, became an impedi-
ment to decisive NATO action. For the Bosnian Serb forces, the thousands
of highly vulnerable peacekeepers and humanitarian workers spread thinly
across Bosnia were a guarantee against substantial NATO air strikes. This
remained true until the fall of Srebrenica.
The humanitarian operation was possibly more crucial to the besieged and
embattled Bosnian Government forces (or Bosnian Muslims), especially in
the first couple of years. Without humanitarian aid the surrounded Muslim
enclaves would not have survived. The existence of the enclaves ensured that
parts of the Bosnian Serb forces were tied up in sieges, thus perhaps slowing
down their territorial gains. The presence of the international humanitarian
workers was also a guarantee for the Bosnian Muslims that the war would
stay on the agenda of the international media and in the minds of the Western
public and policy makers. On the other hand, especially towards the end of the
war, the Bosnian government became more ambivalent about the humanitar-
ian operation, since they increasingly believed it stood in the way of NATO
military action.
To conclude, both UNHCR’s main donors, the US and the EU, and the
warring factions inside Bosnia saw the humanitarian operation and the way
in which it was conducted as strongly, maybe even crucially (in the case of
the warring factions), affecting their interests. In the case of the donors, this
translated into strong support for UNHCR, but also led to pressure on the
agency to stay as conditions deteriorated. In the case of the warring factions,
the relationship was volatile. While none of the parties wanted UNHCR to
leave, all were to some degree unhappy with its operation. The agency was
constantly accused of bias and, although the Bosnian Serbs were by far the
most hostile, the attitude of all three warring factions to UNHCR’s operation
oscillated between peaceful co-operation and violent confrontation (Cutts,
1999). During its operation in war-time Bosnia, 50 staff from UNHCR and
associated organizations lost their lives. The casualty rate among humanitarian
staff was substantially higher than among the UNPROFOR soldiers protecting
them (Young, 2001: 792–3).
UNHCR’s decision to go in—and to stay
As was the case in northern Iraq a year earlier, UNHCR did not anticipate the
scale and speed of the displacement crisis in the former Yugoslavia. The refugee
agency had begun in the early 1990s to write Emergency Preparedness Profiles
for various countries. The first report on Yugoslavia was published in March
1991. It is a long list of warehouse capacity, airport locations, hospital facili-
ties, etc. However, there is no suggestion in the report that Yugoslavia might
soon become a refugee producing country (or countries, as became the case).
The fear was rather of an influx of refugees from the former Soviet bloc into
Yugoslavia (UNHCR, 1991). In November 1991, the UN Secretary-General
requested that UNHCR co-ordinate the humanitarian effort in the former
Yugoslavia through the application of its ‘Good Offices’ concept. It seemed a
natural choice. UNHCR already had an office in Belgrade, and had been asked
in mid-1991, when Yugoslavia began to disintegrate, by the then Yugoslav
authorities to respond to the crisis. When Yugoslavia collapsed, many of the
IDPs of the internal conflict became actual or potential refugees. This rein-
forced the perception among key actors, and within UNHCR itself, that
the refugee agency was the most suitable lead agency for the humanitarian
operation.
The precedent of northern Iraq was also frequently brought up. Its opera-
tion there had bestowed on UNHCR the reputation of being the UN family’s
main humanitarian agency, an image nurtured by the agency. It now referred
to itself as a humanitarian organization rather than a refugee agency, and
terms such as ‘emergency preparedness’, ‘in-country protection’, ‘preventive
protection’, ‘containment’ and ‘safe areas’ were now central to the UNHCR
vocabulary. In 1992, coinciding with the rapid escalation of the humanitarian
crisis in Bosnia, Ogata mandated an internal working group to come up with
suggestions for preventive strategies. Their task was to find ‘new responses
which were innovative and realistic, balancing humanitarian concerns with
political realism and States’ interests with the rights and needs of refugees’
(UNHCR, 1992d, quoted in Loescher, 2001: 297). The findings of the work-
ing group were presented in UNHCR’s 1992 Note on International Protection,
thus implicitly defining prevention activities as part of the agency’s protection
mandate. Such ideas suited the vision and interests of UNHCR’s donors, who
wanted the Bosnia displacement crisis contained within the Balkan region.
While ideas of preventive protection were to be severely tested in Bosnia, at
the outset of the conflict they were at the centre of UNHCR’s optimistic endorse-
ment of pro-active, comprehensive approaches to solving refugee problems. As
Part Two showed, UNHCR began to focus on conditions in refugee producing
countries already in the late 1980s and Stoltenberg emphasized how the work
of the agency contributed to international peace and security. Subsequently,
northern Iraq equipped the agency with a precedent for ‘in-country protection’
and an enthusiasm for ‘preventive approaches’ and containment strategies to
defuse the potential regional instability caused by refugee flows.
This approach was not equally embraced by all staff members: ‘The situation
in Bosnia created a lot of discussion internally in UNHCR, it was proof that
the old principles were difficult to apply in these new situations’.9 The Division
for International Protection argued that UNHCR involvement in in-country
protection would undermine the institution of asylum. In addition, a new
point of contention was whether UNHCR should embark on a major humani-
tarian operation in the midst of war. Would protection be possible in such
a setting? Could humanitarian staff be protected themselves? Bosnia consti-
tuted uncharted territory for the agency. Although it had worked in volatile
border areas earlier—on the edges of conflicts—it had not before operated in
the middle of a war zone, shuttling humanitarian aid across rapidly changing
frontlines (UNHCR, 2000: 220; Young, 2001: 793).
Despite the misgivings of some UNHCR staff, the High Commissioner and
her closest associates had little doubt about taking on the lead agency role.10
Pitted against the concerns raised were some considerable political and financial
incentives. Financially, donor countries gave an immediate positive response to
9
Interview with Filippo Grandi, former Chef de Cabinet for the High Commissioner, Geneva
Headquarters, 19 January 2001. See also UNHCR/WFP (1997: 5).
10
This is the conclusion of Loescher (2001: 295), confirmed by the author’s interviews with
Grandi and Jessen-Petersen for this book.
UNHCR’s unprecedentedly high request in 1992 for US$165 million to cover

‘initial humanitarian needs’. Of all the problems UNHCR faced during its Bosnia
operation, funding was not one of them. Never before had a UNHCR operation
been so well-funded. This generous funding ensured that the refugee agency’s
budget soared to unprecedented levels.
In political terms, the rewards of taking on the role as lead agency were
‘relevance’, public recognition, and power. In view of the strong donor pres-
sure to become involved, and the public outrage in the West over the hor-
rors of ethnic cleansing, the first two of these rewards were obvious to the
High Commissioner. Although boosted by its northern Iraq effort, UNHCR
was still recovering from the worst crisis of its lifetime, and Ogata’s foremost
concern was to ‘remain relevant’ in the eyes of the international communi-
ty’s most powerful actors. Public recognition had also become increasingly
important, not only for UNHCR, but for all humanitarian actors competing
for resources and funding. The combination of the strong media attention on
Bosnia and the ‘humanitarian competition’ between hundreds of larger and
smaller NGOs and UN agencies, meant that UNHCR could not easily refuse
the opportunity to become the most prominent humanitarian actor in the
Balkans.
The third reward, increased power and leverage, would be the result both of
increased ‘relevance’ and popularity in the eyes of Western policy makers and
public, and of the access to important political arenas that the lead agency role
opened up for the High Commissioner. It was clear to Ogata that the reward of
political clout would be significant. As the head of the humanitarian operation
she had access to all the major institutions debating the Balkan war: She was
the chairman of the Humanitarian Issues Working Group of the International
Conference on the Former Yugoslavia (ICFY); she was informed and consulted
on all major political initiatives taken by the international community; and she
was regularly invited to present her views on the conflict to the Security Council.
The perceived success of the northern Iraq operation; the fact that UNHCR’s
experiences in northern Iraq consolidated and expanded the agency’s secu-
rity discourse; and the political and financial rewards connected to the role of
lead agency, worked together to ensure that UNHCR’s internal critics were not
heard. Its leadership agreed to take command of the humanitarian operation
in the former Yugoslavia with less hesitation than it had done in the case of
northern Iraq not even a year earlier.
Having decided to go in, UNHCR was on several occasions on the verge of
pulling out. Threats to the security of humanitarian staff and abuse of humani-
tarian aid by the warring factions were constant problems in Bosnia. Each
time another convoy was attacked or humanitarian worker killed, the inter-
nal debate on whether to remain in Bosnia would flare up. Many argued that
UNHCR should only operate in areas where its protection mandate could be
pursued effectively. Mark Cutts, the head of UNHCR’s Sarajevo office during
the war, believed the agency should have suspended the operation on several
occasions:
When they are not prepared to respect us, when they fire on us and when they
persecute civilians in front of us, we should not try to woo these people and make
them our partners. We go much too far in making these thugs our partners. We
must be ready to pull out in these situations, because we cannot leave our staff in
there and denounce these thugs at the same time.11
Once the massive humanitarian operation was set in motion, pulling out
was not an easy option. The High Commissioner herself was reluctant to do
so, both because of the many civilian Bosnians relying on aid for their survival,
and because of the political pressure from an international community unwill-
ing to lose its ‘humanitarian fig leaf ’. Kirsten Young, an UNHCR Protection
Officer in Bosnia during the war, argues that:
UNHCR was ill-prepared to deal with the threats to staff security in terms of
training, equipment, or communications. . . . Thresholds of ‘acceptable’ threats
rose as the organization became increasingly committed to the rapidly expand-
ing operation. Time after time the vaguely defined limits of acceptable risk were
extended, and unacceptable levels were quickly passed. In a climate of heroism
and risk-taking, most UNHCR staff became resigned to the dangers of working
in Bosnia-Herzegovina. (Young, 2001: 793)
The near-impossibility of withdrawing became abundantly clear in
1993, when the High Commissioner decided to suspend the humanitar-
ian operation in protest against the blockades of aid convoys. Her decision
was quickly overturned by the Secretary-General and the humanitarian
operation continued uninterrupted, under UNHCR leadership (Loescher,
2001: 300).
Lacking the option to pull out, the High Commissioner instead began to
tone down the agency’s protection role in Bosnia. She did not hide the fact that
faced with the intransigence of the perpetrators of ethnic cleansing, UNHCR
could not protect the human rights of minorities in Bosnia. She highlighted
instead the importance of the agency’s aid deliveries in keeping hundreds of
thousands of people from starving and freezing to death (see e.g. Ogata, 1993b
and 1993d).12 Thus, UNHCR’s argument for staying in Bosnia became to save
as many lives as possible through its humanitarian assistance programme,
11
Interview with Mark Cutts, Geneva Headquarters, 1 December 2000.
12
Like most of Ogata’s statements to the Working Group, these speeches lament the failure of
protection in Bosnia but do not suggest this as a reason for UNHCR to pull out.
while the agency’s protection mandate receded to the background. In June

1993, the High Commissioner quoted one of her staff in Bosnia to explain the
UNHCR position:
I have a personal and philosophical unrest in my mind, when we neither can pro-
tect the people nor agree to inhumane policies. All I try to remember every day
is that we are here to save as many lives as possible and to alleviate the suffering.
(quoted in Ogata, 1993c)
The transition from a refugee protection agency to a generalized humani-
tarian organization, then, was completed with the decision to take and retain
charge of the humanitarian endeavour in Bosnia.
Lessons learnt
UNHCR’s security discourse facilitated its decision to become lead agency in

the former Yugoslavia, by supplying a world view in which in-country protec-
tion in a war zone seemed a natural task for a refugee agency to perform. This
section will investigate the other side of the dynamics between discourse and
action, and discuss the lessons UNHCR learnt from Bosnia and how these
lessons affected the evolution of the agency’s official discourse. At the end of
the war High Commissioner Ogata (1995d) exclaimed that ‘[n]‌owhere has
UNHCR been more severely tested than in the former Yugoslavia’. UNHCR
was soon to be subject to worse moral and political quandaries in Zaire/
Congo, but the former Yugoslavia confronted it with challenges and dilem-
mas on a scale not previously encountered. Despite this, the agency came out
of the Bosnian war still confident in its security discourse. The major ideas
contained within this discourse were extensively tested in Bosnia. Most sur-
vived, some became redefined and only one (preventive protection) purged
from the agency’s discourse. But the overall emphasis on security was further
strengthened.
Part Two of this book highlighted 1992 as the year when the language of
security took centre stage in UNHCR official communications, not only in
the High Commissioner’s speeches, but also in the more cautious Notes and
Reports. The emphasis on security was particularly evident in documents and
speeches concerning the humanitarian operation in Bosnia, a sign that events
there played an important part in consolidating and adapting the agency’s
security discourse. UNHCR’s pronouncements on Bosnia tend to portray dis-
placement as a security issue and to highlight its own role as a contributor to
international peace and security. The strategic vision presented is that of pre-
ventive, comprehensive, multilateral approaches that deal with the root causes
of displacement.
One factor strengthening UNHCR’s security discourse was the company
the agency was now regularly keeping: military officials on the ground, and
foreign office and Security Council officials in the international debating are-
nas. Throughout the war, UNHCR co-operated closely with UNPROFOR
and was in continuous talks with military commanders from the warring
factions to negotiate safe passage for its aid convoys. The co-operation with
UNPROFOR was in the beginning difficult. Humanitarian staff worried that
the peacekeepers jeopardized their neutrality and impartiality, and the peace-
keepers viewed the humanitarians as ‘undisciplined, amateur do-gooders’
(AbuZayd, 1995). However, as the war went on, UNHCR became painfully
aware that in a war of ethnic cleansing, warring parties were highly unlikely
to view humanitarian assistance as neutral and impartial. As it became clear
that aid could not be distributed without the assistance of UNPROFOR, the
relationship became better. Karen Koning AbuZayd (1995), then Deputy
Director of UNHCR’s Division of Programmes and Operational Support,
suggested that UNHCR staff on the ground in Bosnia had become so used
to the militarization of aid distribution that they allowed themselves to ‘slide
into the logic of war’. This included sliding into the language of security that
comes so naturally to the military actors with which UNHCR was in constant
and close contact.
The same socialization process could be seen in the case of the international
arenas in which the High Commissioner and her closest associates now moved.
The High Commissioner’s speeches to the Security Council, for instance, are
constructed around the formulaic language of that body, frequently bring-
ing up issues of ‘international peace and security’ and focusing mainly on the
security threats posed to the humanitarian operation in Bosnia (see e.g. Ogata,
1993e). Thus, as it gained access to arenas of ‘high politics’, the UNHCR lead-
ership aligned its language to that of the state foreign and security officials it
now routinely met.
The humanitarian operation in Bosnia also affected UNHCR’s security dis-
course in more specific ways. I will first discuss how the Bosnia experience
impacted on the specific ideas of preventive protection and containment. I will
then move on to the problems arising from conducting a humanitarian opera-
tion in the midst of war, and discuss how these problems affected the broader
themes of UNHCR’s discourse, particularly the agency’s emphasis on ‘com-
prehensive approaches’ and its argument that its work should be viewed as a
contribution to international peace and security.
The Failure of Preventive Protection and the Erosion

of Asylum
UNHCR pronounced from the outset that the aim of its humanitarian opera-
tion in Bosnia was to prevent and contain displacement by helping people to
stay in or near their own homes. According to this logic, helping people to
remain at home was the best option, followed by internal displacement and
refuge in neighbouring countries. Asylum in Western Europe was categorized
as the last resort. This preventive approach was strikingly phrased in a UNHCR
(1992b) policy document that pronounced that the agency’s main aim in the
former Yugoslavia was to bring ‘safety to people, not people to safety’. For this
purpose the new concept of ‘preventive protection’ was employed.
The problem was that it proved almost impossible to provide any sort of
legal, human rights or physical protection to civilian Bosnians (Minear et al.,
1995: 18–25; Mooney, 1999: 201; Weiss, 2005: 82).13 The humanitarian opera-
tion ensured that people did not starve to death, but humanitarian staff could
do little to protect people from political violence and ethnic cleansing—except
by evacuating minority groups. ‘The choice we face is either to become agents of
ethnic cleansing, or to leave tens of thousands of people to continue living their
nightmare’, concluded one humanitarian worker (quoted in Silber and Little,
1996: 247). Although UNHCR always brought up the issue of human rights
protection both in the meetings of the Humanitarian Issues Working Group
of ICFY and directly with the warring parties, in practice the agency’s protec-
tion mandate took a back seat in Bosnia. Few experienced international protec-
tion staff were deployed to Bosnia, and the climate of war and ethnic animosity
made the task of those few difficult. The resources spent on protection activities
were dwarfed by those spent on assistance. For instance, UNHCR’s proposed
budget for the first half of 1995 for protection/legal assistance was US$688,800.
This was 0.7 percent of the overall budget of US$95,375,400 proposed for that
period (DHA and UNHCR, 1994: 22). Furthermore, when the two clashed, the
priorities of aid delivery usually overruled those of protection. In the words of
one anonymous UNHCR official on the ground: ‘an active human rights policy
would complicate our assistance role’ (quoted in Minear et al., 1994: 25).
UNHCR quickly admitted that ‘preventive protection’ was a difficult task.
Indeed, after the agency was criticized for attempting to prevent Bosnians
from executing their right to seek asylum,14 it abandoned the concept in
13
Mooney (1999) argues that in-country protection worked poorly in Bosnia and Croatia, but
did better in other parts of former Yugoslavia.
14
For a highly critical academic account, see Barutciski (1996: 50).
favour of the less charged ‘in-country protection’. After the Srebrenica

massacre, UNHCR never mentioned ‘preventive protection’ again. It also
repeatedly cautioned that ‘humanitarian action by itself cannot prevent or
solve refugee problems in the face of relentless warfare and in the absence
of the will to resolve the conflict’ (UNHCR, 1993b: para. 19). The High
Commissioner warned the Humanitarian Issues Working Group already in
1992 about the dangers of creating safe areas: ‘There are very clear limita-
tions to a humanitarian protection role which cannot be enforced. These
constraints must be clearly recognized when we talk of possible safe areas’
(Ogata, 1992f).
The flip side of the coin of in-country protection easily becomes the erosion
of asylum. As hundreds of thousands of Bosnian refugees made their way to
the rest of Europe, particularly Germany, UNHCR began in 1992 to promote
the idea of ‘temporary protection’ rather than asylum, in order to ensure that
they would be allowed to stay. Grandi recalls that:
There was a big debate when we introduced temporary protection. This was hard
to push through internally, resisted by our protection staff, who saw temporary
protection as something that could be renegotiated on the spur of the moment.
But temporary protection was the only way we could negotiate international pro-
tection for a mass flow of refugees in Europe at all.15
Others inside the agency did not agree. In the 1980s UNHCR had fought an
uphill battle against the increasingly restrictive asylum policies of European
governments. Some thought UNHCR missed an opportunity to reaffirm the
relevance of the 1951 Refugee Convention when it failed to transform the
sympathy for Bosnian refugees felt across Western Europe into stronger public
support for the institution of asylum:
The worst side effect of negotiating temporary protection for Bosnian refu-
gees . . . was that they were not given the name ‘refugee’, so that the title ‘refugee’
again could be given credit—as someone who has suffered for his or her iden-
tity. . . . Again there was a real refugee crisis on European soil, and we did not
capitalize on it. By calling them forced migrants, temporary protected and all
these vague titles, the fact of their status was concealed. We lost in terms of image
there—UNHCR did not lose, but refugees lost.16
Despite the displays of sympathy for the Bosnians, the European environ-
ment in the early 1990s was not favourable for asylum seekers. At the same time
Interview with Filippo Grandi, Geneva Headquarters, 19 January 2001.

15
Interview with Jean-François Durieux, then deputy chief of UNHCR’s Europe Bureau,
16
Geneva Headquarters, 14 December 2000.

as refugees began to pour out of the former Yugoslavia, Western Europe, and
Germany in particular, was experiencing a dramatic surge in asylum applica-
tions from all corners of the world.17 This was accompanied by a near collapse
of the asylum application system and a sense of being flooded by unwanted
immigrants. Considering this context, it seems unlikely that UNHCR could
have managed to push through refugee status for Bosnians in exile in Western
Europe.18
The short-term effect of the idea of temporary protection was positive, in
that refugees from the former Yugoslavia were not forcibly sent back during
the war. However, the longer-term effects were more problematic. After the
Dayton Agreement, the fact that Bosnians in exile had a weaker status than
that accorded to Convention refugees, enabled states to begin their repatria-
tion plans with what UNHCR saw as undue haste (see e.g. Ogata, 1996b). Thus
the immediate practical success of a new idea was tempered by its longer term
reverberations.
In Bosnia, neither in-country protection nor temporary protection—the
two main elements of its prevention and containment strategy—had the effect
UNHCR had hoped. Despite this, the refugee agency did not abandon its
emphasis on prevention. In 1997, the High Commissioner said that ‘[d]‌espite
all the constraints of modern conflict, preventive action is the future, not in
Utopia, but for today and tomorrow’ (Ogata, 1997e). An important reason for
this was that the overall security discourse in which the concept of prevention
was embedded was not shaken by the lessons UNHCR learnt from Bosnia.
Winding down the humanitarian operation after the Dayton Agreement, the
agency came out of the Bosnia experience a stronger, more prestigious agency
that was able to plausibly place the blame for most of the faults of the humani-
tarian operation on the shoulder of other, political and military, actors. How
this was done is discussed next.
The Politics of Humanitarian Aid in War
There is broad agreement between students of the war in Bosnia that humani-
tarian action became a substitute for decisive political action by the interna-
tional community to end the war (see e.g. Weiss, 2005: 92). The large-scale
humanitarian relief effort papered to some extent over the disagreement that
17
In Western Europe, there were an average of 13,000 asylum claims in the 1970s, rising to
170,000 in 1985, and 690,000 in 1992 (Gibney, 2001: 3).
18
On temporary protection for ex-Yugoslav refugees in Europe, see Van Selm-Thorburn
(1998).
existed among the international actors, especially among the permanent

members of the Security Council (Economides and Taylor, 2007: 103–4). In
UNHCR’s view, humanitarianism became a ‘fig leaf ’ covering the West’s politi-
cal inaction (UNHCR, 2000: 219), a fact the agency lamented at every pos-
sible opportunity (see e.g. Ogata, 1992f). However, although leading to some
soul-searching among UNHCR personnel (e.g. Cutts, 1999; Young, 2001), this
realization did not dissuade the agency’s leadership from the main tenets of
its security discourse: that the refugee problem was an international security
issue; that the agency’s efforts on behalf of refugees constituted a contribu-
tion to international peace and security; and that this effort can only succeed
when part of a comprehensive approach dealing with the political causes of
displacement. Even in 1994, when the war showed no sign of abating, and the
international community was no closer to agreeing on how to deal with the
‘root causes of displacement’, UNHCR based its call for funds for its Bosnia
operation on an international security argument: ‘We appeal to the interna-
tional community to provide full support to the inter-agency effort which we
firmly believe is a contribution towards lasting peace and stability’ (DHA and
UNHCR, 1994: v).
It is not difficult to explain how the war in Bosnia confirmed UNHCR
beliefs that refugee movements can constitute security threats. The very aim
of the fighting was the conquest of ‘ethnically pure’ territory, and the killings
and displacement caused by this aim increased hatred and ethnic animosity on
all sides of the conflict. A more pressing question is why UNHCR continued
to argue that its humanitarian efforts in the former Yugoslavia addressed this
security problem. How did its belief in ‘comprehensive approaches’ to solve
the root causes of displacement survive when faced with the political paralysis
and policy confusion of the international community? The answer to this is
multifaceted. First, it would have been hard for UNHCR to contradict its main
donors and the Security Council, who were emphasizing the humanitarian
effort in the absence of achieving a political agreement on how to end the war.
The agency could and did criticize the lack of political action but it did not
go as far as to argue that the humanitarian operation had no role to play in
finding a solution to the conflict. Second, as was the case for its main donors,
UNHCR’s prestige became heavily intertwined with the Bosnia operation.
With all the effort and resources spent on aiding displaced and war-affected
Bosnians, it was difficult to argue that it was all to no avail—or that it was
even counterproductive to the peace effort, as argued by some analysts (Weiss,
2005: 92).
Third, a political solution to the war was in the end found, after a combina-
tion of changes in war fortunes on the ground and NATO strikes from the air.
This allowed UNHCR to conclude that it had been right all the time. It had
fulfilled its part of the ‘comprehensive strategy’, and a solution was found once
other actors finally contributed their part. Contested though such reasoning
may be, this conclusion meant that the experiences of Bosnia did not cause
UNHCR to reject its security discourse. On the contrary, based on the evi-
dence of the High Commissioner’s speeches on Bosnia, the political failings
to end the war spurred UNHCR to strengthen its emphasis on the security
dimension of the humanitarian crisis—as a way of imprinting on states the
urgency of finding a solution. At no point, however, did the refugee agency
problematize the relationship between the humanitarian aim to assist victims
and the political aim to end the war. The agency did not enter into the heated
debate on whether the presence of thousands of humanitarian personnel pro-
tected by an inadequate and weak UNPROFOR on the ground hampered the
UN and NATO’s ability to credibly threaten the warring parties with air strikes
and tougher military action.
The Bosnia experience not only consolidated UNHCR’s security discourse,
but also broadened it to include the security of staff and humanitarian opera-
tions, and, in that connection, the abuse of humanitarian assistance by warring
factions. Over 50 humanitarian personnel working for or with UNHCR in
Bosnia were killed during the war, some of them directly targeted because of
their humanitarian role (UNHCR, 2000: 225). This led the agency to repeat-
edly plead for stronger security measures for humanitarian operations (see
e.g. DHA and UNHCR, 1993). The main reason for the increased targeting of
humanitarian workers was the importance of the humanitarian operation for
the political and military aims of the combatants. The politicization of aid was
further reinforced by the emphasis placed by the major powers on the human-
itarian operation. Adam Roberts (1996: 54) observed after the Bosnia war that
‘the very retreat of major powers into the bland language of humanitarianism
has forced aid workers to advocate policy’.
The humanitarian operation became caught up in politics both at the
local and the international level. At the international level, this could also be
discerned in the earmarking of funds by donor states. The media focus on,
and the strong interest taken by Western governments in, the war in Bosnia
ensured that UNHCR’s operation there was well funded. However, due to the
view in most Western capitals that the Serbs were most to blame for the war
and its atrocities, UNHCR soon found out that ‘politically unworthy’ vic-
tims—and those victims not in the media spotlight—were difficult to raise
funds for. Sanctions were imposed on Serbia and Montenegro (the Federal
Republic of Yugoslavia, FRY) in May 1992.19 UNHCR was against this, since
In Security Council Resolution 757 (S/Res 757, 30 May 1992).

19
the sanctions quickly deteriorated the conditions for civilians, including

refugees and IDPs. UNHCR’s Chief of Mission in Serbia and Montenegro
at the time, Judith Kumin, called it ‘a fundamental contradiction—trying to
implement a humanitarian programme in a sanctions environment’ (quoted
in Roberts, 1996: 64). UNHCR also found it difficult to find NGOs willing
to operate in Serbia, and to raise funds for needy Serb civilians, compared to
the funding earmarked for Bosnian Muslims and Croats. In October 1993,
it complained that the ‘relatively modest representation of NGOs in the
Republics of Serbia and Montenegro, where humanitarian needs are par-
ticularly pressing, remains a matter of serious concern’ (DHA and UNHCR,
1993: 8).
UNHCR’s operations in the former Yugoslavia were so well-funded overall
that this problem did not reach critical dimensions. It did, however, confirm
the agency’s long standing conviction that when humanitarian aid is a feature
of the calculations of political actors, its impartial distribution becomes impos-
sible. While in the 1970s and early 1980s this conviction led the agency to
endeavour to stay away from politically contentious humanitarian operations,
in Bosnia UNHCR embarked on a series of complicated rounds of negotia-
tions with warring parties, donors and neighbouring countries, with the aim
of ensuring that the distribution of aid reflected the needs of the population as
far as possible, given the political constraints. This meant that Bosnian Serbs,
due to their strong bargaining position, received more than their fair share of
the aid distributed within Bosnia, while civilians within Serbia proper received
less than they needed. These negotiations created problems of ‘humanitarian
recognition’: by negotiating access to victims, UNHCR had to recognize ‘ille-
gitimate’ actors (Pasic and Weiss, 1997; Cutts, 1999). As a result of its new
strategy of providing humanitarian relief in the midst of armed conflict, this
was a problem the agency routinely faced across the world in the 1990s, and
most starkly in eastern Zaire in 1994-97.
It has been argued that UNHCR became so immersed in Bosnia that it ‘for-
got’ other refugees around the world, and that the agency’s ambition to be
relevant led it to focus excessively on ‘popular’ humanitarian crises. Loescher
(2001: 296) writes that ‘[b]‌y the end of the war, the organization became badly
overextended in the former Yugoslavia, inevitably at the expense of other crises,
particularly in Africa’, having committed one quarter of its staff and one third
of its resources to its Balkan operation during most of the war. It is difficult to
assess how detrimental the focus on the Balkans was to refugees in other parts
of the world. Several interviewees at UNHCR headquarters pointed out that
the Balkans operation was so well funded and created so much positive public-
ity for UNHCR that it enabled the agency to spend more resources on other
humanitarian emergencies than ever before—a sort of ‘trickle-down effect’ of
resources from Bosnia to other UNHCR programmes across the world. Thus,
the fact that UNHCR spent a disproportionate amount of resources on the
former Yugoslavia did not necessarily mean that other refugees suffered more
than they otherwise would have done. Primarily due to the Bosnia operation,
UNHCR’s funding levels soared in the early 1990s, from 544 million in 1990
to 1.143 billion in 1995. Even if one third of UNHCR’s budget was spent on the
former Yugoslavia, the two thirds that were left were still more money than the
agency had ever seen before.20
A Tragic Hero
UNHCR branded its Bosnia operation a cautious success, based on the lives it
had saved and the time it had bought for others to find a political solution to
the war. The agency argued that ‘[u]‌ndoubtedly, international assistance has
played a major role in keeping people alive in the republic’ and that a ‘major
catastroph [sic] was averted through the untiring effort of the coordinating
agencies’ (DHA and UNHCR, 1994: 7 and 15). With hindsight, too, UNHCR
evaluated its operation as a flawed success, but a success nevertheless:
During the war, the food aid programme within the emergency relief operation
had a critical impact on the survival of a very high proportion of the country’s
population. It contributed to the survival of communities in siege, prevented fam-
ine from becoming a defining characteristic of BiH [Bosnia and Herzegovina]
and signalled international solidarity at a time when other responses of the inter-
national community may have seemed less than adequate. In the unusually com-
plex political and military environment in which the operation took place, and
given international concern for such a crisis in Europe, UNHCR’s usual objectives
related to refugees and displaced persons gave way to a concern with alleviating
suffering and saving as many lives as possible. (UNHCR and WFP, 1997)
A suitable image to sum up how UNHCR and many media commentators
portrayed the agency’s efforts in Bosnia is that of the tragic hero. Encountering
astounding obstacles, witnessing horrible atrocities and struggling against
cruel antagonists, UNHCR did the best job possible considering the gruelling
circumstances. It came out of the experience with its reputation intact, if not
enhanced. One UNHCR staff member I spoke to, put it this way: ‘In Bosnia,
UNHCR performed no more than adequately, but much better than anyone
else—therefore its good reputation’.
20
Figures provided by UNHCR’s Donor Relations and Resource Mobilisation.
Some analysts have supported this view of UNHCR’s Bosnia operation as

a cautious success. Roberts (1996: 59) argues that humanitarian aid may well
have prolonged the war in Bosnia. But it also significantly decreased suffering
and death among civilians, especially in 1993–94. And despite functioning as
a fig leaf for several years, it eventually provided the international community
with an imperative to act decisively. However, Roberts argues that the link
between the humanitarian effort and the peace effort in Bosnia was of a dif-
ferent nature than the one asserted in UNHCR’s security discourse. It was not
a well-functioning, but a collapsing humanitarian effort that helped create the
climate for decisive political action:
A more robust policy of decisive enforcement action only became possible
in Bosnia after the humanitarian aid programme had practically stopped in
mid-1995 due to Bosnian Serb actions. Once UNPROFOR no longer had person-
nel widely spread out and hence vulnerable to Serb retaliation, it was more able
to act, and once the Bosnian Serbs had shown contempt for humanitarian efforts,
for the ‘safe areas’ and for the Security Council, there was more reason to act.
(Roberts, 1996: 38–9)
This particular lesson from Bosnia was ignored by UNHCR at the time. It
took the refugee disaster in the Great Lakes of Africa to show the agency that
humanitarian operations, no matter how many lives they save, do not always
contribute to international peace and security. The relatively ‘happy ending’ of
the Dayton Peace Agreement enabled the agency to repress the more disturb-
ing aspects of its Bosnia experience, and to avoid a closer inspection of two
core tenets of its security discourse: first, the belief that the tasks of protecting
and assisting the displaced are valuable contributions to international security;
and, second, the conviction that due to the serious security implications of
large-scale displacement crises, states will act both decisively and comprehen-
sively to resolve them.
Conclusion: Practical, pragmatic
and popular
By the end of 1995, UNHCR was a transformed agency. Its new, pragmatic
and security-oriented outlook helped ensure that the agency was chosen as
the main non-military executor of the Western powers’ new-found humani-
tarian approach to dealing with internal conflict. Its prominent role in Bosnia
transformed UNHCR from an anonymous, timid and troubled refugee agency
to a fast-growing, popular and respected global security actor. From this
perspective and in the short term, Bosnia—and northern Iraq before it—were
significant successes.
In the longer term, many aspects of the Bosnia operation could be viewed
as the beginning of a troubling trend rather than aberrations to an over-
all successful approach. The use of safe havens instead of traditional asy-
lum turned out to be a humanitarian disaster in Bosnia, revealing the very
special circumstances in northern Iraq that made the creation of such a
zone a realistic option. But the disaster of Srebrenica and the long, violent
and tortuous road to the Dayton Peace Agreement were not interpreted
by UNHCR as a reason to change its course. It ended up seeing its Balkan
operation as an overall success. This positive verdict consolidated the agen-
cy’s security discourse and, arguably, further tipped its inclination towards
the interests of states rather than the traditional protection of refugees. This
said, the problems of prevention and containment and the political uses
and abuses of aid in Bosnia did sow seeds of doubt within the agency. These
doubts strengthened in the latter half of the 1990s, as the next two chapters
will show.
11
Protection Disaster in Eastern Zaire,

1994–96
The second half of the 1990s was among the most testing periods in UNHCR
history. While the agency continued its rise as a global security actor, its suc-
cesses in terms of institutional and budgetary growth and political stature
were matched—in some commentators’ view eclipsed—by protection failures,
moral quandaries and political controversy. UNHCR had become the world’s
leading humanitarian agency, and it was its operations in, and on the borders
of, conflict zones that now defined the agency’s sense of success or failure.
What most characterized this period, however, was the ambiguities of what
in fact ‘success’ or ‘failure’ meant when it came to judging UNHCR perfor-
mance. What were the criteria for success? Which concepts should guide the
agency’s understanding of the refugee problem, what its own role should be
in dealing with it, and where its responsibilities end and those of other actors
begin? These questions were most acutely posed in the Great Lakes region of
Africa. This chapter follows UNHCR’s horrific moral and political predica-
ment in the eastern provinces of Zaire in the aftermath of the Rwandan geno-
cide. It assesses the centrality of the agency’s security discourse in shaping its
operational decisions, and, vice versa, the impact of its operational experi-
ences in eastern Zaire on the further evolution of this discourse.
The Rwandan geno cide and its refugee

aftermath
The Rwandan genocide in 1994 and the ensuing massive refugee crisis in the
Great Lakes region of Africa had a long and complex genesis. While the dis-
tinction between Hutu and Tutsi preceded colonial rule, the Belgian colonial
masters transformed the social distinction into a caste-like system, reserv-

ing higher education and government jobs for the Tutsi minority. After the
overthrow of the Tutsi monarchy in 1959 and independence in 1962, a Hutu
dominated government was installed in Rwanda, while around 120,000 Tutsi
refugees fled to neighbouring countries. The Tutsi refugee communities in
Burundi and Uganda, archetypical refugee warrior communities, staged
numerous raids into Rwandan territory in the 1960s—actions that lead to
retaliations against the local Tutsi population in Rwanda, triggering in turn
more refugee flight. Thus Rwanda’s vicious spiral of ethnic animosity was per-
petuated by the actions and reactions of the Tutsi refugee community and the
Hutu-dominated authorities.
After a period of relative calm, the Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), an exiled
Tutsi army based in Uganda, invaded Rwanda in October 1990. Although a
peace agreement, the Arusha Accord, was signed in August 1993, propos-
ing power-sharing and the deployment of UN peacekeepers, the RPF inva-
sion strengthened the hand of Hutu hard-liners in the government, police and
army. They depicted the Tutsi not as a national minority with legitimate claims
to participate in the country’s political life, but as an ‘alien race’ thirsting for
the reinstatement of Tutsi power and the subjugation of all Hutus. A period of
detailed planning, including the organization of secret ‘death squads’ into cells
that could be mobilized within hours, and relentless anti-Tutsi propaganda
spewed out by local radio stations, Hutu extremists launched a genocidal cam-
paign against Tutsis and moderate Hutus on 7 April 1994. Around 800,000
people were killed, most of them within the first four weeks of the genocide.
The killing did not stop until the rapidly advancing RPF forces took control of
the country in mid-July 1994. The perpetrators of the genocide fled to neigh-
bouring countries, together with around two million civilian Hutus fearing
reprisals from the RPF. Many headed to Zaire, creating the largest sudden ref-
ugee influx into one area seen in the history of UNHCR. In four days, over one
million refugees flooded into the town of Goma in eastern Zaire.
The international community was conspicuously absent from the scene dur-
ing the hundred days of genocide in Rwanda between April and July 1994. The
lesson drawn by the US from its botched humanitarian intervention in Somalia
the year before was to avoid involvement on the ground in African conflicts.
Belgium and France, the two Western countries with the keenest interest in
Rwandan affairs, were traditional Hutu allies and reluctant to act. There was
a UN peace-keeping mission, UNAMIR, in the country when the violence
broke out. UNAMIR was tipped off already in January 1994 that an extermina-
tion project was in place for Tutsis in the capital Kigali, allegations confirmed
by the peacekeepers’ own investigations. The UNAMIR Force Commander’s
request to be allowed to take action against exposed ‘death cells’ was rejected
Protection Disaster in Eastern Zaire, 1994–96 215
by New York headquarters (Reyntjens, 1996: 247–8). In Resolution 912 of 21

April 1994, despite being informed of the genocide underway, the Security
Council Resolution decided to reduce the size of UNAMIR to a token force
of 270 personnel (Adelman, 1999: 298). By the time the UN re-deployed to
Rwanda in July 1994, it was in the form of the French ‘Opération Turquoise’,
which limited its task to create a ‘safe humanitarian zone’ in south-west
Rwanda. This zone protected the retreating Hutu army, militias, and civilians
from RPF retaliation, thus deterring retaliatory massacres, but also assisting
the safe and orderly escape of the génocidaires across the border to Zaire. Once
established in North and South Kivu with command structures intact, the old
regime was quickly re-established within the refugee camps. With the only
international presence in eastern Zaire being that of overwhelmed humanitar-
ian personnel, the génocidaires seized control of the camps and prepared for
an offensive against the new rulers in Kigali.
The militarized camps created and exacerbated ethnic tensions within
eastern Zaire. With the quiet consent of Zaire’s president Mobutu Sese Seko
and the Zairian army, the Hutu Interahamwe militia and ex-FAR (the former
Rwandan government army) not only staged several attacks on Rwanda from
the camps and created an atmosphere of generalized violence in eastern Zaire,
but also intimidated and massacred local Tutsis, known as the Banyamulenge.
The reply came in late 1996, in the form of a rebellion against Mobutu’s
regime. The rebels included the militias from several ethnic groups in the Kivu
area, including a strong component of Banyamulenge. Known as the AFDL/
ZC (Alliance des forces démocratiques pour la liberation du Zaire/Congo),
the rebels were led by Laurent Kabila and backed militarily by Rwanda and
Uganda. While the AFDL swept the country and overthrew Mobutu, in Kivu
the Rwanda-supported rebellion immediately took the form of retaliation
against the Rwandan Hutu militants and the refugees among whom they
lived. In the process, local Hutu inhabitants also suffered, since, in the eyes
of the Banyamulenge and the Rwandan forces supporting them, they had
been tainted by their apparent willingness to host the génocidaires (Mamdani,
2001: 260).
UNHCR’s task in late 1996 and early 1997 became to oversee the panicked
return of hundreds of thousands of Hutu refugees flooding back across the
border to Rwanda, and to seek out and help to repatriate the unknown num-
ber of refugees and local Hutus who fled into the interior of Zaire, sometimes
forced in that direction by the génocidaires, but also pursued into the forests by
the AFDL and its allies. UNHCR has cautiously stated that thousands of refu-
gees perished in the forests of eastern Zaire (UNHCR, 2000: 268–71). A draft
report from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, leaked in August
2010, estimated the number of deaths in the tens of thousands, and provided
relentless details of specific massacres to back up its figures (UNHCHR, 2010

(unpublished): para. 512). The draft report was strongly condemned by the
Rwandan authorities (Richardson, 2010).
The account below will not discuss the international community’s failure to
prevent or end the genocide in Rwanda. It is confined to UNHCR’s involvement
in the refugee crisis erupting in the aftermath of the genocide. It concentrates
on the refugees in eastern Zaire/Congo rather than the entire Hutu refugee
population in Rwanda’s neighbouring countries. It was in eastern Zaire that
UNHCR met its worst challenge in post-Cold War history. Although Tanzania
faced the same problem of génocidaires attempting to control the camps, it was
a stronger, more coherent state than Zaire, and able to cope with the problems
created by the militarized Rwandan refugee population. Although the destabi-
lizing effect of the mixed population of refugees and militants led Tanzania in
December 1996 to forcibly repatriate all Rwandan refugees (Milner, 2000: 2),
the way in which this was done did not lead to the levels of death and destruc-
tion witnessed in Zaire.
This is not an exhaustive account of all the goals of all actors in the Great Lakes
tragedy, from the Security Council and Western capitals to local militia groups.
The focus is on the interests and views of central actors to the extent they
impacted on UNHCR’s humanitarian operation in Zaire. For this purpose, the
central actors can be divided into international, regional and local ones.
Western states were highly reluctant to become involved militarily to pre-
vent or stop the genocide and to support the humanitarian action in its after-
math. The US was badly burnt by its experience of humanitarian intervention
in Somalia. While the media images of starving Somalis had amalgamated
domestic popular support for Operation Restore Hope in late 1992 (Wheeler,
2000: 180), the ‘CNN effect’ can be said to have had the opposite effect in
Rwanda in 1994. The murder of Belgian peacekeepers in Kigali stuck to the
mind of the US public and policy makers, reminding them too closely of the
killing of 18 US elite troops (and at least 500 Somalis) in street battles in the
Somali capital Mogadishu in October 1993. The killing of the Belgian peace-
keepers had the effect the génocidaires hoped for. It ensured that Belgium
pulled out of Rwanda and that other Western countries became deeply reluc-
tant to deploy troops, let alone to stop the genocide, but also to disarm the
génocidaires once they fled to the refugee camps in eastern Zaire. Nobody
wanted to ‘cross the Mogadishu line’ from peacekeeping to peace enforcement
in the Great Lakes (Wheeler, 2000: 216). Somalia had instilled in Western
policy makers a ‘Heart of Darkness’ belief that outsiders could do little to stop
the savagery of African conflicts. This view was aided by the Western pow-
ers’ determination to understand the hundred days of genocide as a ‘civil war’
rather than as the massacre of the unarmed civilians of one ethnic group per-
petrated and planned by the leadership of another. The complex genesis of the
Rwandan conflict and genocide made it easier to argue that there was little the
international community could do.
The large-scale suffering of the Rwandan Hutu refugees in the aftermath
of the genocide nevertheless stirred the international community to ‘do
something’. This ‘something’ became to fund a huge humanitarian operation
supporting in eastern Zaire alone one million refugees in camps the size of
cities. When cholera broke out among the refugees in August 1994, the US
and Britain finally mobilized their forces to provide logistical support for the
humanitarian effort in eastern Zaire. Put simply, the response of the inter-
national community—in this case, the permanent Security Council mem-
bers and UNHCR’s main donors—was to fund and support the humanitarian
operation in the Kivus relatively generously,1 but to commit few political or
military resources to deal with the security situation in the region.
Regional actors had a much stronger interest in the security situation in
the refugee hosting areas. The Mobutu regime vacillated between reluctant
co-operation with UNHCR and enlisting the camps’ Hutu leadership as allies.
However, as Mobutu lost control over large swathes of his country, the Kivus
were left increasingly in the power of the génocidaires. This situation was intol-
erable to the new, Tutsi-led, regime in Kigali. It perceived the refugee camps
to be enemy army bases and repeatedly warned UNHCR and the international
community that if the camps were not demilitarized and the refugees allowed
to repatriate, Rwanda would do this themselves. UNHCR was, the Kigali gov-
ernment argued, supporting the military struggle of the génocidaires, rather
than merely aiding refugees (UNHCR, 2000: 262).
Thus, both refugee host and refugee sending states were hostile to the
UNHCR-led operation. Kinshasa wanted the humanitarian operation to feed
génocidaires and refugees alike and refrain from criticizing the political situa-
tion in the camps, while Kigali wanted the camps dismantled and the refugees
sent home in the name of national security.
Finally, the interests of the local actors in eastern Zaire—the ex-FAR and
Interahamwe, the Banyamulenge and ADFL—were also closely linked to the
1
From April to December 1994 US$1.4 billion was allocated by the international community
to the humanitarian operation in the Great Lakes (Steering Committee for Joint Evaluation of
Emergency Assistance to Rwanda, 1996).
humanitarian operation. For the génocidaires, control of the camps guaranteed

their grip on power over the Hutu population, and humanitarian aid was the
means with which they could maintain this grip. For the Banyamulenge, the
camps became synonymous with the génocidaires, and a threat to their sur-
vival as a people. This perception became stronger as the génocidaires became
bolder in their military raids and massacres, both across the border in Rwanda
and against the Banyamulenge in Zaire. The Banyamulenge made up a strong
section of the anti-Mobutu coalition that was building in eastern Zaire. While
the aim of the coalition’s leader, Laurent Kabila, was to seize power over the
whole of the country, the immediate aim of Banyamulenge fighters and their
Rwandan backers was to destroy the refugee camps.
The decision to go in, and whether to

pull out
It seemed a natural decision for UNHCR to take responsibility for the

Rwandan refugees—more so than in Bosnia, where the majority of the recipi-
ents of UNHCR aid were non-refugees. For decades the agency had assisted
Rwandan Tutsi refugees in Uganda and Tanzania, and it had recently opened
an office in the Rwandan capital Kigali to deal with around 200,000 Burundian
Hutu refugees who arrived in Rwanda after the 1993 coup and massacres in
their country, as well as around 950,000 Rwandan IDPs displaced by the civil
war between the government forces and the RPF. When the genocide started,
UNHCR and most other international humanitarian organizations pulled out
of Rwanda. After the massive influx of Rwandan Hutus into eastern Zaire and
the outbreak of cholera among the refugees, the refugee agency hurried back
to the region. The dramatic death rates among the refugees made quelling
the epidemic and setting up organized camps an urgent priority. Questions
of mandatory responsibilities became secondary to saving lives and UNHCR
did not have the capacity to screen refugees from combatants (Halvorsen,
1999: 310).
A more difficult decision for UNHCR was whether to pull out again. In the
chaotic first weeks of the refugee emergency, the power of the génocidaires
over the refugees was not immediately clear. However, UNHCR soon realized
the seriousness of the security situation in the camps. Field staff reported that
civilian refugees were more or less held hostage by militants, who were hinder-
ing refugees from repatriating (Ogata, 1994d; UNHCR, 1994c). Repatriation
was discouraged, sometimes physically and through intimidation, but also, as
Terry (2002: 173) points out, less coercively through scare propaganda.
It was clear as early as November 1994 that the génocidaires not only con-
trolled, bartered and smuggled humanitarian aid, but that their profits from this
activity were used to fund preparations for an invasion of Rwanda (Halvorsen,
1999: 312). The refugee camps functioned as a ‘humanitarian sanctuary in
which the war criminals and army received protection, sustenance and legit-
imacy’ (Terry, 2002: 173).2 Neither the host country Zaire nor the interna-
tional community showed the political will to demilitarize the camps. After
several rounds of consultations with the UN Secretary-General, the Security
Council and the Mobutu regime, UNHCR settled for a deal wherein troops
from Mobutu’s elite presidential guard were paid and equipped by UNHCR to
police the camps.3 The soldiers were not tasked with disarming the génocid-
aires and the improvement in camp security was short lived. As the political
situation in eastern Zaire deteriorated and the anti-Mobutu alliance began to
build up, the Zairean elite troops allied themselves with the génocidaires and
violence and intimidation in the camps reverted to their former dismal levels
(Gnamo, 1999: 328).
UNHCR was aware by November 1994 that most core principles of its
Statute were violated in the camps of eastern Zaire. Inside the camps, UNHCR
personnel could barely provide protection for themselves, let alone refugees,
against the militants. The génocidaires also prevented the implementation of
durable solutions by hindering the refugees from repatriating. Furthermore,
even by the standards of the refugee agency’s laxer understanding in the 1990s
of how its work should be ‘non-political’, the eastern Zaire operation failed.
While an important motivation behind the creation of UNHCR and the inter-
national refugee regime had been to defuse the potential international ten-
sions created by refugee flows, the agency maintained and supplied refugee
camps that were an obvious and serious threat to local and regional stability
and that in the end triggered a war that soon involved most of Zaire’s (now the
Democratic Republic of Congo) neighbours.
Considering Rwanda’s history, it should not have come as a surprise that
the refugee community in eastern Zaire would become a regional powder keg.
In the words of Mamdani (2001: 234): ‘Conventional wisdom in Goma and
Bukavu has it that Kivu Province in eastern Congo is where losers in Rwanda
traditionally end up; and it is from Kivu that they prepare to return to power
in Rwanda’. There were also a number of direct warnings of impending armed
conflict, issued by the Rwandan government and in reports by the UN and
2
Terry backs up her claims with strong documentary evidence. See Terry (2002: 157–69 and
appendix).
3
UNHCR and the Government of Zaire signed a Memorandum of Understanding on camp
security on 27 January 1995 (Halvorsen, 1999: 317).
some NGOs from the autumn of 1994 onwards. For instance, the French sec-
tion of Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) terminated its operation in eastern
Zaire in late 1994 (Terry, 2002: 4) arguing that it was morally wrong to aid the
perpetrators of genocide and that an invasion of Rwanda from the camps could
lead to ‘another round of genocide’ (Halvorsen, 1999: 316). One UNHCR staff
member explained the agency’s reluctance to withdraw by referring to the dif-
ficulty of pulling out once involved on the ground:
When people were starting to die in thousands when the cholera epidemic broke
out at the beginning of the refugee crisis in Congo, UNHCR could not very well
stand idly by. The problem was that there was no exit strategy. Once in the quag-
mire we could not get out—we did not see any way how to.4
When faced by dilemmas it is common to stick with the evil one knows.
If UNHCR had closed the camps and terminated the aid operation in 1995
or early 1996, the refugees would have had to return. With hindsight this
would have been the better option, both from the perspective of the refugees,
tens of thousands of whom were killed during the dispersal of the camps in
1996–97, and for reasons of regional stability. However, two reasons made
UNHCR remain in Zaire. The first was the fear of reprisals against returnees
by the new regime in Kigali. This fear was to some degree supported by facts,
especially after the massacre of Hutu IDPs during the forced closure of the
Kibeho IDP camp in south-western Rwanda in April 1995 (UNHCR, 1995e).
The second was that although aid was diverted by militants, the humanitarian
operation also saved civilian lives. Ogata stated that there was no dilemma
whether to stay or not as long as there were lives that could be saved in the
camps: ‘My mandate—unlike those of private aid agencies—obliges me to
help’, she explained (quoted in Wilkinson, 1997: 9). The humanitarian effort
on behalf of the Rwandan Hutu refugees in Zaire did indeed save innumerable
lives, particularly by checking the spread of cholera and dysentery that killed
around 30,000 people in July 1994 (Steering Committee for Joint Evaluation of
Emergency Assistance to Rwanda, 1996).
While it was uncontroversial for UNHCR to be concerned about the safety
of returnees and the voluntary nature of repatriation, the latter reason—to stay
as long as lives could be saved—was a sign of how far UNHCR’s reinterpreta-
tion of its role had come by the mid-1990s. Fifteen years earlier, the agency
had taken the opposite stance when Khmer Rouge controlled camps on the
Thai-Cambodian border constituted a similar threat to regional stability. The
Khmer Rouge, with Thai and (tacit) US support, used the refugee camps as
4
Interview with senior UNHCR protection officer, Geneva Headquarters. Interview
no. 2000–2001C.
military bases in their fight against the new Vietnamese-supported regime in

Phnom Penh (Loescher, 2001: 217–18). UNHCR refused to assume respon-
sibility for the border camps, arguing that the camps constituted a source of
tension between states; that they were too close to a disputed border; that the
refugees were used as ‘human buffers’ between armed forces; that the camps
were militarized and used as recruitment grounds by the Khmer Rouge;
and that the refugees were used as political pawns by those opposed to the
Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia (Robinson, 1998: 71–4; Robinson, 2000:
23–37).
UNHCR’s decision to remain in Zaire both confirmed the centrality of the
agency’s security discourse and revealed a contradiction within this discourse.
The decision confirmed the pragmatism of the agency’s security discourse by
disregarding the statutory principles that led the agency to avoid the Khmer
Rouge border camps in 1979. It confirmed the agency’s new raison d’être as an
all-round humanitarian agency whose task it was to save lives, rather than to
be confined as the guardian of the international refugee regime.
But the decision also revealed a contradiction within UNHCR’s security dis-
course by evidently disregarding the serious threat the refugee camps posed
to regional security and by ignoring the security benefit the dismantling of
the camps may have brought. This latter claim must be qualified. UNHCR did
indeed repeatedly point out the seriousness of the security situation in eastern
Zaire and urged the international community to disarm the génocidaires and
restore law and order in the camps (see e.g. Ogata, 1996c). But faced with
international inaction and the failure of its own arrangement with the Zairean
presidential guard, the agency did not take the consequences of this and close
the camps. Thus UNHCR’s security discourse was exposed as principally a tool
with which to induce state action, not a guide for the agency’s own decisions
to stay or to go.
Lessons learnt
Many of the problems UNHCR encountered in Bosnia reappeared in Zaire

on a more critical scale. Among the most serious problems were: the lack of
an adequate emergency response capacity (Halvorsen, 1999: 308–10; Borton,
2001: 95); lack of effective co-ordination of the humanitarian activity (Roberts,
1996: 73); a difficult and hostile working environment; the ethical dilemma of
supporting a mixed flow of refugees and militants in the midst of violent con-
flict; and the lack of political will among the major powers to establish the con-
ditions for a durable solution to the refugee crisis. The issue of coordination
led to a flurry of evaluation activity and ‘capacity building’ based both on pre-
vious experiences in northern Iraq, Bosnia and other operations, and on the
particularly chaotic conditions in eastern Zaire (see e.g UNICEF, UNHCR and
WFP (1998); UNHCR (1999f); and UNHCR (2000c)). They also led, together
with the lessons from the Kosovo crisis, to UN-wide coordination efforts such
as the cluster approach.5 But the political, military and security obstacles to
UNHCR’s work in the Eastern Zaire war zone could not be dealt with through
internal UN processes. They led the agency to a stronger degree of introspec-
tion and a re-evaluation of its security discourse and the practical strategies
this discourse favoured. Many of the earliest UNHCR documents in which the
concept of ‘human security’ occur are concerned with the Great Lakes.
Security and Responsibility: The Moral Dilemmas of

Working in War Zones
Identity, displacement, conflict, and war have long been closely linked in the
Great Lakes of Africa, as they have in the Balkans, confirming UNHCR’s secu-
rity discourse of refugee movements as potential threats to state and interna-
tional security. The dilemmas of the Bosnia operation became even starker in
Zaire. While it was criticized in Bosnia for allowing the political and criminal
use of its aid to take place, in the Great Lakes UNHCR was directly giving suc-
cour to the perpetrators of genocide, who were in command of the population
in the refugee camps. As a result of this, UNHCR’s Zaire operation became the
object of some of the harshest criticisms the agency had experienced. Some
even argued that UNHCR complacency was directly to blame for the explosive
situation in Zaire (Mamdani, 2001: 255).
While it is unreasonable to place the main responsibility for the violent
events in eastern Zaire from late 1996 onwards on UNHCR rather than the
warring factions (and Security Council inaction), the argument that the refugee
agency was complacent is a fair one. UNHCR argued from the start that quick
repatriation of the refugees was the only solution, since ‘[t]‌heir prolonged stay
in refugee camps in neighbouring countries, is neither a viable option for the
host communities, nor for the refugees themselves, nor for Rwanda’ (Ogata,
1995e). Considering what it knew from an early stage about intimidation, vio-
lence and propaganda in the camps, the agency painted a positive gloss on the
possibility for large-scale voluntary repatriation, suggesting in early 1995 that
the repatriation of around one million Rwandan refugees would be possible
5
More on which in chapter 13.
during the course of the year (Ogata, 1995e). By early 1996, after very few refu-
gees had repatriated and some of those who tried had been beaten to death by
militia members (Halvorsen, 1999: 312; Terry, 2002: 175–6), UNHCR was less
optimistic, but did not question its approach. Ogata (1996d) told EXCOM: ‘I
am convinced that, at the humanitarian level, we are doing all that is possible
to facilitate and promote repatriation, on a voluntary basis’.
The fault, the High Commissioner argued, lay with governments and other
political actors. In June 1996 Ogata urged the Security Council to ‘break the
deadlock in the repatriation of 1.7 million Rwandan refugees’. She demanded
that the camps be moved away from the border; action be taken to remove
extremists so that they lose their grip on the civilian camp population; that the
borders be monitored; and that the work to set up an international tribunal
to provide justice for the victims of genocide be speeded up (Ogata, 1996c).
Apart from the tribunal, none of the measures were taken. Rather than let this
inaction affect its humanitarian operation, UNHCR continued as before. It is
in this sense the agency can be accused of being complacent. It criticized other
actors for not taking the security situation in the Great Lakes seriously, but it
did not take into account the negative security consequences of its own pres-
ence and actions.
UNHCR’s security discourse rendered the agency less certain about its
responsibilities than its traditional discourse would have done. The agency’s
traditional discourse provided it with a narrow set of responsibilities: to pro-
tect and assist refugees and to defend and promote the international refugee
regime. Thus, UNHCR could, to a strong degree, decide on the appropriate
path of action by consulting its Statute and international refugee law. As the
example of the Khmer Rouge camps showed, its choice would then quite likely
have been to withdraw from eastern Zaire sometime in 1995 or the first half
of 1996. The foremost expert on international refugee law, Guy Goodwin-Gill,
argued vehemently for UNHCR’s withdrawal from eastern Zaire. According
to Goodwin-Gill (1999: 229–31), refugee law clearly proscribed the agency
from extending its protection and assistance activities to a refugee camp con-
trolled by militants. UNHCR’s security discourse, on the other hand, had so
many different components—from saving lives to contributing to regional
and international security—that it became harder to gauge where UNHCR
responsibilities lay. It muddled on in eastern Zaire, not deliberately deciding to
stay, but postponing the decision to leave. The protection disaster that ensued
taught the agency the lesson that its security discourse had become too wide
and contradictory. This was one of the main reasons why it started a process
of redefining the concept of security into a more clearly humanitarian notion,
centred around the idea of human security rather than the security interests
of states.
Staff Security
A second factor leading to the re-evaluation of UNHCR’s security discourse

was staff security. In 1996 Assistant High Commissioner Jessen-Petersen
argued that:
The risks taken by unarmed aid workers go way beyond what any military would
tolerate. . . . UNHCR and other agencies may have already crossed the threshold of
acceptable risk, having had to strike a balance between the safety of its own staff
and the life or death needs of the victims. It’s not beyond the realm of possibility
that sooner or later we could just say ‘no’ when asked to go into these dangerous
situations without better protection. We are very close to the limit of what we as
humanitarians can do. (quoted in Wilkinson, 2000: 10–11)
In the 1990s operating in hostile environments became the norm rather
than the exception for UNHCR staff. The Bosnia experience also contrib-
uted to the focus on staff security in the last years of the 1990s. But in eastern
Zaire humanitarian personnel did not even have the support of peacekeepers
while attempting to conduct their work in an intensely hostile environment.
Intimidation and threats were everyday events and several international and
numerous local aid workers were killed. After Bosnia and the Great Lakes
followed East Timor, where three UNHCR international staff members were
targeted and brutally murdered by a pro-Indonesian mob in West Timor
(UNHCR Inspector General’s Office, 2000; UNHCR, 2000i), and numerous
other dangerous refugee situations in places such as Sierra Leone, Liberia and
Guinea.6 The many deaths and the resulting angry reaction from UNHCR staff,
led to a host of reports on security in refugee camps (see e.g. UNHCR, 2000e)
and staff stress and security (see e.g. UNHCR, 1997c). The latter report quoted
statistics that were highly revealing of the degree to which UNHCR’s opera-
tional environment had changed in the course of the first half of the 1990s:
Of the 118 countries in which UNHCR now operates, 45 include duty stations
which are classified by the United Nations Security Coordinator as ‘hazardous’.
At 31 August 1996, 71% of all UNHCR staff were working in areas where security
presents a problem. The proportion of international posts in the most difficult
category E duty stations have almost tripled between 1990 and 1996, from 10% to
30%. (UNHCR, 1997c: para. 2)
The reformulation of UNHCR’s security discourse after 1996 was to a strong
degree led by the experiences of UNHCR staff on the ground. The agency was
reaching a threshold for what it could tolerate of protection failures—the failure to
6
Almost simultaneously with the murders in West Timor came the killing of a senior UNHCR
officer in Guinea on 17 September 2000.
protect both the lives of their own staff and those of refugees. This forced the agency
to reconsider what security meant in the context of refugee crises and whose security
was the most important for the refugee agency. In the assistant High Commissioner’s
words, ‘[t]‌he bottom line is: if we are going to save the lives of others, then we too
must be alive. It is melodramatic but true’ (quoted in Wilkinson, 2000: 11).
International Security and Inaction
The many moral dilemmas when operating in the midst of conflict and threats
to the security of staff were two important reasons why UNHCR in the late
1990s toned down the political and statist components of its security discourse
and focused its attention on the humanitarian components of security, and par-
ticularly the security of staff and refugees. The Great Lakes was a crucial turn-
ing point in this regard, since both problems were particularly visible during
the Rwandan refugee crisis. But the third lesson from eastern Zaire was perhaps
the most important, since—unlike the two discussed above—it questioned
whether the whole strategy behind UNHCR’s security discourse had failed.
The Great Lakes refugee disaster displayed starkly how narrow the limits
to international security solidarity were in situations of humanitarian emer-
gencies. In the Great Lakes, a situation defined repeatedly as a clear and pre-
sent threat to international security led to conspicuous international inaction.
Despite a flurry of resolutions and consultations in the Security Council, the
OAU, EXCOM and other international organs, UNHCR and the other human-
itarian agencies in eastern Zaire were left facing, in the High Commissioner’s
words, ‘a quandary of humanitarian, political and security challenges’ on their
own (Ogata, 1996e). Considering that imbuing the refugee problem with a
sense of urgency and priority had been a central, perhaps the key, rationale
behind UNHCR’s adoption of a security discourse and projection of itself
as a global security actor, this inaction reduced markedly the leadership of
UNHCR’s view of the discourse’s utility. This lesson was compounded, albeit
in a very different manner, by UNHCR’s experience as lead agency during the
Kosovo crisis, and I will return to the issue of the limits of international secu-
rity solidarity from a different perspective in the next chapter.
Conclusion: A d oubting global

securit y actor
After the optimism of the first years of the post-Cold War period boosted the
agency’s security discourse, UNHCR’s experience in eastern Zaire dented its
belief in the possibility of redefining the concept of security as ‘our common

security’. It consequently began to depict security in a wholly human-focused
manner. But at other levels, UNHCR continued its upward trajectory. It
remained the ‘natural’ lead agency for large-scale humanitarian operations,
and the profile of High Commissioner Ogata remained strong. The goodwill—
and willingness to provide funds—of Western donors was not dented by the
Great Lakes tragedy. By staying until the bitter end, UNHCR had after all fol-
lowed a policy that suited its major donors, and they were decent enough not
to pretend otherwise after refugee disaster struck in the shape of the Rwandan
invasion of eastern Zaire. The zenith of UNHCR’s rise as a global security actor
was still to come, linked to its role in the Kosovo conflict.
When UNHCR took on the challenges of the Rwandan refugee crisis in
1994, it had a strong belief in the success of its post-Cold War strategy of
highlighting the security dimensions of refugee movements, its own role in
contributing to peace and security, and the security imperatives behind pre-
venting, containing and solving refugee problems. The lessons learnt from
northern Iraq and Bosnia were that this strategy worked, albeit not smoothly,
and that the international community, embodied in the Security Council, now
included refugee problems on its security agenda. True, in Bosnia, UNHCR
had repeatedly lamented the use of humanitarian aid as a ‘fig leaf ’ covering the
political inaction of the international community. It took until the summer of
1995 before the West finally employed enough military coercion to force through
a negotiated end to the conflict. But the NATO action, although arriving late,
enabled UNHCR to conclude that the international community will act eventu-
ally, as long as the pressure is kept up by the media, NGOs and UN agencies. The
Dayton Agreement allowed UNHCR to forget its suspicion that the will of states
to ‘do something’ when faced with humanitarian catastrophes often goes no fur-
ther than providing funds for humanitarian operations. In the end, it had worked
well to appeal to the political and security interests of powerful Western states in
order to solicit financial and political support both for the humanitarian action
and, eventually, a political solution, in the former Yugoslavia.
However, UNHCR disregarded the fact that in Bosnia the humanitarian
instincts of the western European states were aligned with their self-interest in
containing the influx of asylum seekers onto their own soil and NATO’s fear that
instability could spread to other parts of eastern and central Europe. The Rwandan
refugee crisis appealed to no such self-interest in the West. The humanitarian
instinct to ‘do something’ led to significant funding of the humanitarian opera-
tions in the Great Lakes. But the Great Lakes showed that UNHCR’s reliance on
appealing to the duty of states to promote international peace and security was
of limited use when the threat to stability was geographically, politically and stra-
tegically remote from the core interests of Security Council powers. Instead, the
world watched while the situation steadily worsened in the refugee hosting areas,
leading in the end to large-scale war and the massacre of tens of thousands of
refugees.
The protection disaster in the Great Lakes in 1996 left UNHCR staff and lead-
ership with a strong sense of betrayal. The 1997 annual EXCOM session high-
lighted the political tensions in which UNHCR had become embroiled in the
Great Lakes and also showed how hurt the agency felt by the behaviour of states.
Unusual for EXCOM meetings, UNHCR was the object of a broadside from the
Rwandan government delegation, which accused the refugee agency of enticing
refugees out of the country, and even of being responsible for starving several
thousand of them to death, for reasons of political expediency. In his angry reply,
the then Director of the Division of International Protection, Dennis McNamara,
concluded that the allegation ‘shows the new depths to which this disowning of
[state] responsibility has descended’ (quoted in Barutciski, 1998: 236, footnote 1).
Years after the experience in the Rwandan refugee camps in eastern Zaire,
UNHCR staff still lowered their voice in sadness or shook with indignation
when they spoke about it.7 The shock over the international inaction led the
agency to seriously reconsider its security discourse. If the security interests
of states suggest that they refuse to take political or military action to deal
with refugee problems, as the case was with the Western powers, or that they
launch an invasion to disperse and massacre refugees, which was the Rwandan
response, then appealing to the security interests of states could no longer be a
palatable strategy for UNHCR.
Further compounding UNHCR apprehension over the attitudes of states
to refugee protection, the Great Lakes protection disaster was followed by
the suggestion from some states that the international refugee regime was no
longer fit for purpose. During the 1997 EXCOM meeting, recognition of the
pivotal role the refugee situation played in plunging Zaire into war led EXCOM
members to question the relevance of the international refugee regime after
the end of the Cold War (Barutciski, 1998: 244). This alarmed UNHCR, which
reacted with a partial return to its previous discourse of emphasizing the legal
responsibilities of states to provide protection to refugees and to ensure the
non-military nature of refugee settlements. Ogata (1997g) herself laid the
blame for the protection and security failures in the DRC squarely at the feet
of states, arguing that ‘[s]‌ome of the appalling problems encountered in the
Great Lakes Region could have been avoided had States supported our actions
and well-established principles more decisively’. After the Great Lakes protec-
tion disaster, UNHCR still saw itself as a global security actor, but one fighting
7
Interviews and conversations with UNHCR staff from October 2000 to February 2001.
an uphill battle against shortsighted state actions. That the Hutu refugee camps
in eastern Zaire were a regional security threat was beyond doubt, but the
agency now coupled an acute sense of the security situation on the ground
with the realization that obvious threats to international peace and security
did not always lead the international community, embodied by the Security
Council, to act. Despite this, UNHCR seemed unwilling to take the conse-
quences of such inaction to contemplating withdrawal of humanitarian aid—
whether based on security calculations or in the name of its own Statute and
the principles of refugee law.
12
How Success Became Failure: The

Kosovo Crisis, 1998–99
The crowded and competitive ‘humanitarian market place’ of the Kosovo crisis
stands out from the other displacement emergencies discussed in this book.
It was an exceptionally well-funded humanitarian operation. The more than
850,000 Kosovar Albanians who in the course of a few weeks in 1999 poured
into neighbouring Albania and Macedonia, were, after some initial disorder,
hosted by the local population or accommodated in state-of-the-art camps.
Nutrition and health levels among the refugees remained good throughout the
crisis. The fears harboured by Macedonia over hosting ethnic Albanians were
alleviated through a burden-sharing arrangement, where almost 90,000 refu-
gees were airlifted to third countries and given humanitarian leave to remain
for one year. A military intervention by NATO resulted in the swift return of
the vast majority of the refugees within months of the original flight. In short,
one should think this was a unique success at all levels for the lead humanitar-
ian agency, UNHCR.
This was not the case. While the Kosovo crisis was the pinnacle of UNHCR
fame in world politics, it also caused a sharp decline in the agency’s reputa-
tion as a global security actor. A barrage of criticisms from NGOs, NATO and
donor states during and after the crisis; increasingly obvious disgruntlement
from other UN agencies; and the politicization—and accompanying bilater-
alization—of aid (in order to ‘win hearts and minds’), all worked together to
undermine UNHCR’s humanitarian leadership role. Its Kosovo experience
also led to a loss of confidence that the agency could and should play such a
role. This chapter accounts for how the success of the Kosovo operation took
on the hue of failure and contributed to UNHCR’s reassessment of its security
discourse as the eventful 1990s came to an end.
The Kosovo crisis
It was in Kosovo in the late 1980s that the events leading to the break-up of
Yugoslavia began, and it was in Kosovo the process culminated a decade later.
Many indeed believed that the war in the former Yugoslavia would erupt in
Kosovo. Instead it was the powder keg in Bosnia that ignited first. In Kosovo,
tension, violence and human rights abuses became increasingly acute until
large-scale violence broke out in 1998. I will not conduct a detailed analysis
of the genesis (over hundreds of years) of the Kosovo conflict between ethnic
Serbs and Albanians, but give a short account of developments from the late
1980s onwards as background for the discussion of UNHCR’s response to the
IDP and refugee crises in the late 1990s.
After World War Two, Kosovo remained the poorest and most unstable
region of Tito’s Yugoslavia (Judah, 2000). As an autonomous province within
the republic of Serbia it had many of the same freedoms as the Yugoslav repub-
lics, except the right to secede. In the 1980s, the repression of Kosovo’s major-
ity Albanian population increased markedly. Special privileges were given to
Serb settlers in an attempt at Serb recolonization of the province. An increas-
ingly virulent Serb nationalism focused on Kosovo as the cradle of the Serb
nation, culminating in the removal of Kosovo’s status as autonomous province
in September 1990.
Kosovar Albanians responded by creating their own shadow government
structures, under the leadership of Ibrahim Rugova and his Democratic
League of Kosova (LDK). The LDK eschewed violent protest in favour of an
intricate system of parallel governance, including elections, the creation of a
shadow parliament and government, parallel taxation, and a parallel school
system. This ‘shadow state’, with Rugova as president, continued to function
throughout the 1990s, but with increasing difficulty as the Albanian popula-
tion struggled to cope with the strains of worsening repression and, in prac-
tice, double taxation. An estimated 400,000 left for western Europe in the
early 1990s (Independent International Commission on Kosovo, 2000: 47).
The deployment of Serb paramilitary units in Kosovo hardened sentiments
among Kosovar Albanians, and a switch of allegiance took place from the
non-violent LDK to the violent secessionist struggle of the Kosovo Liberation
Army (KLA). The radicalization of Kosovar Albanian opinion was particu-
larly evident among the diaspora in western Europe and North America.
Diaspora groups became the driving force behind the creation of the KLA,
as they switched payment of their informal tax from the LDK to the KLA
(Independent International Commission on Kosovo, 2000: 45).
The 1995 Dayton Agreement was a turning point for many Kosovar
Albanians. The settlement cemented the independence of Slovenia, Croatia
How Success Became Failure: The Kosovo Crisis, 1998–99 231
and Bosnia, but hardly mentioned Kosovo. Rugova was mostly ignored by the
mediators. The lesson for many Kosovar Albanians was two-fold: First, that
only war could focus the international community’s attention on the plight
of Kosovar Albanians; and, second, that independence rather than autonomy
was a viable goal for Kosovo.
Fighting broke out in Kosovo in February 1998. After a year of intense
diplomacy and the threat of use of force, NATO launched an air campaign
with the aim of compelling Milosevic back to the negotiation table in a man-
ner similar to the run-up to the Dayton Agreement. The US-led NATO air
campaign lasted from March 24 to June 10, 1999, as the envisioned short and
decisive blow to the Milosevic regime turned into 78 days of aerial bombing.
As soon as the NATO campaign started, the FRY army and paramilitaries set
about displacing and deporting the Kosovar Albanian population. In a few
weeks, around 90 percent of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian population was dis-
placed, 863,000 in neighbouring countries, and another 590,000 internally dis-
placed. Some left the country in their own vehicles, others were put on trains
and buses and shipped to the border in a well-planned deportation exercise
(Independent International Commission on Kosovo, 2000: 90).
As hundreds of thousands of Kosovar Albanians began pouring across the
borders to Macedonia and Albania, an enormous humanitarian operation was
set in place. Initially, most of the aid, including the building of refugee camps,
was delivered by various national contingents of the NATO troops already
deployed on the ground (Minear et al., 2000: 13–14). UNHCR took longer
to respond. This tardiness was partly due to the agency’s lack of ‘prepared-
ness’, but also due to NATO’s reluctance to allow the refugee agency to play a
coordinating role. Despite their inexperience in refugee relief, NATO did not
accept advice from UNHCR on topics such as camp building (Independent
International Commission on Kosovo, 2000: 203). When the hand-over to
civilian humanitarian actors finally took place, the different NATO contin-
gents mostly did so to their own national NGOs rather than to UNHCR,
despite its formal role as lead humanitarian agency.
While Albania opened its borders to the refugees from the start, a poten-
tially disastrous situation developed on the Macedonian border crossing at
Blace in the early days of the emergency. Citing national security concerns,
the Macedonian government closed the border, leaving thousands of refu-
gees stranded, with thousands more arriving every day. An unorthodox
burden-sharing mechanism was developed to resolve the crisis before lives
were lost. Refugees were airlifted in an ad-hoc humanitarian evacuation pro-
gramme to countries willing to host them. By the end of the war, in mid-June,
86,783 refugees had been evacuated to 30 different countries (UNHCR,
1999g: para. 13) and given humanitarian leave to remain for one year. The
programme was set up bilaterally between NATO and the Macedonian gov-
ernment. UNHCR then took over its management despite concerns that it
would undermine central refugee protection principles, particularly the right
to first asylum.
The humanitarian crisis in Albania and Macedonia ended as abruptly as it
started. Within days of the end of the war, hundreds of thousands of refugees
broke camp and returned to Kosovo—catching UNHCR off guard with the
speed of their movement. By November 800,000 had returned. The humani-
tarian operation switched to Kosovo, and focused on assistance and winter
preparations for returning refugees and IDPs. Kosovo, while nominally still
a part of Serbia, became a de facto UN protectorate. Among the interna-
tional actors running Kosovo, UNHCR was given charge of ‘humanitarian
affairs’, the ‘fourth pillar’ of the United Nations Interim Mission in Kosovo,
UNMIK. The agency posted 78 international staff members to the territory
(Independent International Commission on Kosovo, 2000: 107). Despite the
heavy presence of KFOR soldiers and UN administrators, ethnic cleansing
continued in liberated Kosovo, but this time of the minority Serb and Roma
populations. Little was done by international forces or humanitarian organi-
zations to protect these minorities from harassment, violence, and revenge
attacks perpetrated by elements of the Kosovar Albanian population, and few
NGOs wanted to work on behalf of the Serb population (The Independent
International Commission on Kosovo, 2000: 206). By the end of the summer
of 1999 half of Kosovo’s pre-war Serb population of 200,000 had left. Some
followed the retreating FYR troops while others were forced out by Kosovar
Albanian acts of revenge, intimidation, and violence.
By June 2000, when the emergency phase of the post-war return was over,
UNHCR’s formal role as leader of UNMIK’s fourth pillar came to an end, but
its non-emergency work for returning refugees continued. The ensuing dis-
cussion of UNHCR actions and performance concentrates on the immediate
run-up to the war, the refugee crises during the war, and the return phase in
the first few months after the war ended.
The humanitarian response to the Kosovo crisis displayed some similar char-
acteristics to that in eastern Zaire in 1994–96. As in Zaire, UNHCR was lead
agency in an operational environment occupied by a vast number of NGOs
and UN humanitarian actors in need of coordination. As in eastern Zaire, the
warring factions saw the refugee emergency as core to their security interests.
And as in Zaire, the traditional UNHCR donors in the West were keen to pro-
vide funds for the humanitarian relief operation.
Here the similarity ended. In eastern Zaire, donor support for UNHCR’s
lead role in the humanitarian operation was financially strong but politically
uninterested, and donors’ lack of security stakes in the Great Lakes region
meant that humanitarian actors were left to fend for themselves. In contrast,
in Kosovo UNHCR’s main donors (the NATO powers) were also one of the
warring factions. As a party to the conflict, they had a clear security interest
in how the refugee crisis unfolded. This led to a highly unusual (at the time)
humanitarian response, where UNHCR donors were desperate to support the
humanitarian operation, desperate to be seen to support it, and even desper-
ate to be seen to be leading and running it themselves. The Kosovar Albanian
refugees were too important for NATO countries to leave to UNHCR. As a
result, a much battered refugee agency emerged from the Kosovo crisis. In
the ensuing account, I concentrate on the interests of the government of
the former Yugoslavia; the two main Kosovar Albanian factions; the NATO
allies, especially the US; and the two main refugee host countries, Albania
and Macedonia. In addition, in order to understand the problems UNHCR
encountered and the ferocity of the criticisms it received, I also include major
humanitarian NGOs and other UN agencies among the core actors whose
interests affected UNHCR’s leadership of the Kosovo operation.
The Milosevic Regime
The government of the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, by now consisting only

of Serbia (including Kosovo) and Montenegro, was in essence the same as
the one that had signed the Dayton Agreement in 1996. Milosevic remained
committed to using virulent Serb nationalism as a means to keep his hold
on power. Kosovo, the mythical ‘cradle’ of Serb nationhood, was central to
this ideology. After the Dayton Agreement, there were signs that Milosevic’s
regime was losing its grip on power. Milosevic responded to mass demonstra-
tions in Belgrade by returning to the tried and tested formula of ethnic politics
(Economides, 2007: 223). Appealing to a Serb nationalism that combined a
superiority complex with a sense of persecution, Milosevic notched up police
and paramilitary violence against Kosovar Albanians in the name of ‘rescuing’
Kosovo as the Serb heartland.
Milosevic, a ruthless political opportunist, had discovered Serb nationalism
as a vehicle to propel himself to power in the late 1980s (Malcolm, 1998: 341).
The regime he headed in Belgrade had by the late 1990s come more to resemble
a criminal network than a state government. Thus, the interests of Milosevic
and his cronies in Kosovo must be understood as primarily instrumental—as

a means to holding on to power in Belgrade. As argued by Kaldor (2006) and
others, peace was not in their economic interest. Instead, instability strength-
ened the black economy, which was controlled by Milosevic and his allies.
At the same time, destabilizing Kosovo strengthened Milosevic’s political
position. The ethnic violence in Kosovo, mostly perpetrated by official and
unofficial agents of the regime in Belgrade, but also on a smaller scale by the
KLA, fed anti-Albanian sentiment in Serbia. The uncompromising response
to KLA attacks helped rehabilitate Milosevic’s nationalist credentials after
the face-losing Dayton Agreement. And the West’s criticism of human rights
abuses against Kosovar Albanians, which escalated to threats of a NATO mili-
tary intervention in 1998, rallied the Serb population against a common threat.
In summary, the Milosevic regime viewed violence in Kosovo—even war—
as in its interest. The regime used displacement, especially across FRY’s borders
into Albania and Macedonia, as a policy tool. NATO airstrikes were immedi-
ately used as an excuse and opportunity for ethnic cleansing, making the dis-
tant dream of a Serbian majority Kosovo for a short while look like a practical
possibility. It also caused embarrassment to the NATO coalition, unable to halt
the displacement through its chosen strategy of high-altitude bombing.
The Kosovar Albanian Factions: Independence

Through NATO Intervention
During their protests in the late 1980s, the aim of most Kosovar Albanians
had been to achieve autonomy rather than independence, and the non-violent
approach of the LDK received massive popular support. This changed as the
former Yugoslavia broke up and the FRY government was forced to accept the
independence of Bosnia. By 1998 both the LDK and the KLA had changed
their aim from autonomy to independence.
The two Kosovar Albanian factions concurred in their view that a NATO
intervention would pave the road to independence, but differed in their view
on how to trigger NATO action. While Rugova put his trust in the moral force
of advocacy and non-violent protest, the KLA used guerrilla tactics against
police and Serb civilians (as well as Albanian ‘collaborators’) to provoke ever
more extreme responses from the FRY government. From the point of view of
the KLA leadership, the internal displacement within Kosovo during 1998 and
the forced expulsions during the NATO war in 1999 were beneficial since they
helped force NATO’s hand. This created a strange convergence of interest in
the displacement of the Kosovar Albanian population between the KLA and
the Milosevic regime, although for different ultimate purposes.
NATO’s ‘Humanitarian War’
In the case of Kosovo, the interests of UNHCR’s main donors were also the
interests of one of the warring factions, the NATO alliance. Thus, UNHCR
was doubly reliant on NATO countries: to fund its operations and, since
NATO controlled the airspace around Kosovo and had troops on the ground
in neighbouring countries, for access to the refugees.
During 1998, as violence spread inside Kosovo despite sustained diplomatic
pressure and NATO threats, UNHCR’s main donors had a strong interest in
supporting its IDP operation. European donors were particularly worried
about an influx of Kosovar Albanian asylum seekers (Barutciski and Suhrke,
2001: 99) and wanted to ensure that internal displacement did not become
a European refugee crisis. In addition, through its strong presence on the
ground inside Kosovo, UNHCR played a useful role as a rapporteur to the UN
Secretary-General, Security Council and the Organization for Security and
Cooperation in Europe (OSCE).
Donor interests changed dramatically as war broke out. Shocked by the
large-scale ethnic cleansing carried out in Kosovo, and even criticized by
some as ‘causing’ the mass refugee outflow, NATO quickly relabelled its
bombing campaign as a humanitarian war and promised the fleeing and
deported Kosovar Albanians that ‘We will bring you back’ (Independent
International Commission on Kosovo, 2000: 89). Rather than taking place
at the periphery of conflict, the humanitarian relief operation for Kosovar
Albanian refugees became core to NATO’s security interests. NATO aimed to
create a media image of its troops as humanitarian saviours: NATO soldiers
were building refugee camps and hospitals while fighting to make Kosovo
safe for refugee return. At the same time, the traditional interest of Western
donors of containing refugees in their immediate region in order to avoid
asylum seekers arriving at their own borders remained intact. The official
policy of EU countries was to enable refugees to remain as close to home as
possible—if not within Kosovo then at least in the region (Barutciski and
Suhrke, 2001: 100)—and to avoid a drawn-out conflict like that in Bosnia,
which led to large numbers of asylum seekers in the rest of Europe (Coker,
2002: 72).
As a result of this combination of interests, the humanitarian action in sup-
port of Kosovar Albanian refugees in Albania and Macedonia was extremely
well funded, but UNHCR saw little of the money. Bilateralism, always a chal-
lenge for UNHCR, was taken to new extremes as national NATO contingents
sought to plant their flags in ‘their’ refugee camps. Part of NATO’s commu-
nication strategy towards the media consisted of denigrating UNHCR efforts
as inefficient and amateurish. The powerful US Special Envoy, Christopher
Hill, made particularly disparaging off-the-record comments on UNHCR to

reporters.
The Interests of Refugee Hosting Countries
Part of Milosevic’s strategy was to destabilize the region through mass expul-
sions of Kosovar Albanians. To some extent, he succeeded. Albania, Europe’s
poorest country, received 426,000 refugees, and the influx led to a militari-
zation of the border region and shelling within Albanian territory by FRY
forces. The KLA were active in Albania’s border regions, contributing to small
arms proliferation and the recruitment of refugees as KLA fighters (Loescher,
2001: 328). Adding to the militarization, NATO deployed 8,300 troops as part
of ‘Operation Allied Harbour’ to provide humanitarian relief for the refugees
(Minear et al., 2000: 6).
However, camps were soon moved away from the border regions and
Albania welcomed the refugees as brothers and sisters in need. The NATO and
International humanitarian presence was also seen as an opportunity, creat-
ing jobs, infusing dollars into the economy, and drawing the isolated country
closer into the European fold. Long-standing hostile relations between Serbia
and Albania ensured that the latter supported the NATO war and the Kosovar
Albanian quest for autonomy, if not independence. For Albania, the mass refu-
gee influx was both a challenge and an opportunity.
The situation was different in Macedonia, which received 228,000 refugees
over the 10-week period of the NATO bombing campaign. Deported to the
Macedonian border by Serb forces, 45,000 Kosovar Albanians arrived within
24 hours on 2 April (Loescher, 2001: 328). Fearing for the stability of its own
frail ethnic balance between its majority Slav and minority Albanian popula-
tion, the Macedonian government closed the Blace border, and entered into
a tough bargaining process with NATO and UNHCR to have the refugees
removed from Macedonian territory. Unlike in Albania, the refugees were
treated with suspicion and hostility by the local Slav population. Macedonia’s
primary interest was to avoid the establishment of a long term Kosovar
Albanian refugee population on its soil.
Neither Macedonia nor Albania saw it as in their interest to address the
humanitarian emergency through UNHCR. Both viewed the Kosovo crisis as
an opportunity to forge closer relations with NATO and the European Union
(Minear et al., 2000: 16). Rather than allow UNHCR the space to co-ordinate
the humanitarian operation, they preferred direct co-operation with NATO
and its member states. UNHCR thus became sidelined not only by donors and
NATO, but also by host states.
The Interests of Other Humanitarian Actors
The Kosovo refugee emergency created an unparalleled humanitarian

‘free-for-all’. The 1990s saw a vast growth in humanitarian funding—parts of
which had allowed UNHCR’s own expansion into the world’s leading human-
itarian agency administering billion dollar budgets. According to Weiss
(2007: 74), humanitarian aid increased ‘from about $800 million in 1989 to
some $4.4 billion in 1999’ and to $10 billion by 2004. The almost 300 NGOs
and national aid agencies active in the field during the Kosovo refugee crisis
exceeded anything seen earlier, and included charitable entities with pockets
full of bilateral donor money but little experience in emergency relief (Suhrke
et al., 2000: para. 425; Loescher, 2001: 330).
This plethora of humanitarian NGOs must be added to the list of key actors—
not because they affected the outcome of the Kosovo war, but because their
actions and criticisms contributed to undermining UNHCRs role as a ‘natu-
ral’ humanitarian lead agency. The numerous and often uncooperative NGOs
seemed eager to make use of the bilateral mood of donors to wrest humani-
tarian power from UNHCR. The Independent International Commission on
Kosovo (2000: 202) observed that ‘UNHCR appeared even more underfunded
relative to the unusually generous funding received by many other human-
itarian agencies after the crisis emerged. As a result, UNHCR faced special
challenges in trying to fulfil its role as lead agency when surrounded by other
actors flush with large resources and little need to respect UNHCR’s coordi-
nating authority’. Nicholas Morris, the former UNHCR Special Envoy in the
Balkans in 1993–4 and again from 1998 to April 1999, described the situation
in dire terms:
Coordination in Kosovo, though a mandated UNHCR responsibility, was always
difficult and at times impossible in a ‘free-for-all’ atmosphere. UNHCR was
urged to coordinate more effectively by governments which then made bilateral
arrangements for assistance and camp construction about which UNHCR often
learned post facto. (Morris, 1999: 19)
With so much bilateral funding available, cut-throat competition for a share
of the pot was a natural result. The intense media interest in the crisis also
resulted in what the independent Kosovo inquiry described as ‘an unseemly
race for visibility’ at the cost of efficiency and coordination (Suhrke et al.,
2000: para. 421). Planting their own organization’s or country’s flag became a
core aim for NGOs and national aid agencies alike.
But the poor UNHCR-NGO relationship during the crisis was also a result
of longer-term discontent with UNHCR humanitarian leadership over the
course of the 1990s. The Kosovo crisis became an opportunity to change
the humanitarian playing field and increase NGO power relative to the UN
agency. NGOs shared this interest in reducing UNHCR dominance with other
UN agencies. Competitors within the UN system such as the World Food
Organization, UNDP and UNICEF were less than pleased with the repeated
conferral of lead agency status on UNHCR in the highest profile humanitar-
ian emergencies of the 1990s. In the name of coordination and efficiency, they
were pushing for a less prominent role for UNHCR in humanitarian emergen-
cies and for increased visibility of their own efforts.
UNHCR (in)decisions: Between
pragmatism and principles
How did UNHCR navigate an operational field stacked with actors resist-
ing or working against its ambition to lead and coordinate the humanitar-
ian response to the Kosovo crisis? Two contradictory positions influenced its
decision-making. The first was pragmatic. The Kosovo crisis was yet another
opportunity for UNHCR to be a humanitarian leader, and through this leader-
ship assert its position as a global security actor highly relevant to the Security
Council’s task of promoting international peace and security. The second posi-
tion was principled. The high profile of the Kosovo crisis, and thus its signal
effect, made it more important than ever to adhere to the core principles of
international refugee protection and promote UNHCR’s mandated responsi-
bilities. These contradictory positions played out in UNHCR’s decision-making
at three stages of the crisis: its assumption of the role of ‘lead agency’; the
emergency preparedness planning and early response period; and the estab-
lishment of the humanitarian evacuation programme. Overall, its experience
led to a deepening unease of the signal effect from the Kosovo crisis, regarding
both the lack of impartiality and fairness in refugee assistance provision and a
cavalier attitude towards core principles of international protection.
A Leader with Few Followers
The role of lead agency during the Kosovo refugee crisis was not so much
decided on as automatically assumed. UNHCR’s mandate as lead agency in the
former Yugoslavia, officially bestowed by the UN Secretary-General in 1992,
was assumed by all actors involved to also include the situation in Kosovo.
This view made sense. UNHCR was by now well acquainted with all the
central actors in the former Yugoslavia, whether the Security Council powers,
the Contact Group, or indeed political leaders such as Milosevic, whom High
Commissioner Ogata had met several times. The High Commissioner regu-
larly attended all main international forums on the Balkans conflicts. UNHCR
had organizational structures in place dedicated to the former Yugoslavia,
both at headquarters and in the region—including an office in Kosovo. After
years of dealing with the results of ethnic cleansing in the region, many of
its staff members were highly knowledgeable about the Balkans. Thus, when
internal displacement gathered pace in 1998, the lead agency role for the for-
mer Yugoslavia was matter-of-factly extended to cover the Kosovo crisis.
Before the war, UNHCR had a good working relationship with the main
regional organization involved in monitoring the escalating violence inside
Kosovo in 1998. Its staff in Kosovo liaised with and briefed on a daily basis the
Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe’s Kosovo Verification
Mission. The UN Secretary-General’s reports to the Security Council on
Kosovo in 1998 made use of UNHCR reporting from the field, especially on
the humanitarian situation. High Commissioner Ogata maintained relations
with the Belgrade regime and met with Milosevic twice in the latter half of
1998. Thus, UNHCR played a useful role, both in political and humanitarian
terms, for international actors during the long build-up to the Kosovo war, and
was encouraged and supported in its task as lead humanitarian agency inside
Kosovo.
There seems to be general agreement within UNHCR that its operation
within Kosovo during 1998 and early 1999 was well executed, particularly
considering the insecurity, threats and harassment experienced by its staff
on the ground. There was little debate among staff or leadership whether it
was appropriate for UNHCR to lead an operation on behalf of IDPs and war
affected populations inside Kosovo. By 1998 in-country operations in the
midst of violent conflict and ethnic cleansing had become a common sce-
nario for the refugee agency. Earlier in the decade the decision to assume lead
responsibility in northern Iraq and Bosnia had been accompanied by inter-
nal debate on whether this was an appropriate interpretation of UNHCR’s
mandate. By the time of the Kosovo crisis, little controversy remained.
After restructuring and hiring exercises, the refugee agency was no longer
dominated by international lawyers whose primary instinct was to protect
UNHCR’s unique mandate for international refugee protection. Institutional
memory of a more restrictive interpretation of the mandate was impeded by
the rise of a security discourse from the late 1980s onwards, a discourse that
emphasized UNHCR’s contribution to the UN’s aim of furthering interna-
tional peace and security. This was exactly the agency’s role within Kosovo in
the year leading up to the NATO war, and a role High Commissioner Ogata
was keen for her Office to play.
Once war broke out in late March 1999, UNHCR’s assumption that it was
the natural lead agency was reinforced. After all, the people streaming out of
Kosovo were traditional refugees fleeing across an international border, thus
fitting firmly within its statutory responsibilities. UNHCR took for granted
that it would receive the same level of support from international actors dur-
ing the refugee crisis as it had enjoyed for its IDP work inside Kosovo. After
the war UNHCR staff bitterly depicted how the agency had been made into a
convenient scapegoat for everything that went wrong during the humanitarian
emergency. But in the early days of the refugee crisis the criticism and lack of
support apparently came as a surprise. UNHCR staff and leadership seemed
unprepared for the very different political environment created by NATO air
strikes and Serb mass deportations of Kosovar Albanians. An anonymous sen-
ior UNHCR official told Refugees Magazine soon after the crisis was over that:
Perhaps one of the most fundamental mistakes we made was to underestimate
the enormity of the stakes on the table . . . We knew of course that Kosovo was a
huge humanitarian crisis, but the political and military stakes were even higher.
In that environment every success, and every mistake was magnified. And while
everyone was quick enough to take credit they were even quicker to pass on the
blame. We were amateurs in this game. (quoted in UNHCR, 1999g: 13)
To some extent the high level of support it had enjoyed for its work inside
Kosovo explains how UNHCR failed to think through the consequences of
assuming the leadership of the humanitarian operations in Macedonia and
Albania. The agency did not anticipate the lack of cooperation from refugee
host states. It did not consider sufficiently the consequences of the different
interests of its donors once the situation shifted from an IDP crisis attributable
to Serb paramilitary and police violence to a refugee crisis taking place during
a NATO initiated war. Maybe because of this, UNHCR failed to negotiate what
its lead status meant. It did not ensure it had a formal coordination mandate
from NATO (Suhrke et al., 2000: para. 421), and it did not seek guarantees
that it would get the political and economic backing necessary to coordinate
effectively. Thus, UNHCR’s decision to take lead responsibility was taken more
based on habit, previous experience in other parts of the Balkans, and a sense
of natural humanitarian leadership, than on a careful calculation of how and
if the agency would be allowed to fulfil this lead role in a satisfactory manner.
Emergency Planning, Early Response
Another set of UNHCR decisions that had an impact on the agency’s interna-
tional reputation and its subsequent policy direction, concerned its emergency
planning and early response. The problems UNHCR encountered in this area
are closely related to its decision to take on lead agency responsibilities with-
out careful deliberation of the obstacles to its performance of this role. But the
slow and inadequate response was also due to internal management decisions
made in the period preceding the Kosovo crisis, which left a deficit of stock-
piles as well as of experienced emergency staff.
UNHCR was criticized for deploying inexperienced and young emer-
gency staff to the Kosovo refugee crisis. The late 1990s had seen a flight from
UNHCR to other UN agencies of many middle and senior level managers,
among other things due to the refugee agency’s uncompromising field rotation
system that made family life difficult for employees. There was a lack of experi-
enced senior staff to lead emergency response missions, leaving the same few
people to be called upon again and again. As the Kosovo refugee crisis erupted,
only 15 UNHCR staff were sufficiently trained and experienced to be placed
on its senior emergency roster (Loescher, 2001: 361). This contributed to the
refugee agency’s hesitant initial response. The many young and inexperienced
staff deployed in Macedonia and Kosovo also contributed to the refugee agen-
cy’s lack of authority vis-á-vis NATO officials, host governments and other
humanitarian agencies.
UNHCR’s delay in deploying its humanitarian response team was partly due
to its lack of capacity, taking time to find deployable staff, and partly due to
an initial lack of urgency among the Geneva leadership. Refugees began to
arrive in large numbers in Albania from Saturday 27 March, and the UNHCR
Tirana office’s request to ‘send as many as you can’ was received at the Geneva
Headquarters on Sunday morning, the 28th. Despite this, the Task Force meet-
ing to authorize an emergency response team was not convened until Monday
morning, 29 March 1999. But this tardiness was compounded by NATO’s deci-
sion to prioritize its own military flights over that of UNHCR’s early response
team, delaying agency staff by yet another day by not giving it clearance to
fly to Albania. The team was not deployed at Albania’s Kosovo border until
2 April, when NATO countries had already organized their own emergency
response in the glare of an intense international media spotlight (Suhrke et al.,
2000: 32).
UNHCR’s early response was also accused of lacking in ‘preparedness’. But
the agency was not alone in being taken by surprise at the scale, speed and
duration of the refugee emergency. Fernando del Mundo, who had worked for
UNHCR inside Kosovo and pulled out when the NATO air strikes started on
24 March, said after the war that ‘[w]‌e, like everyone else at the time, thought
that if it came down to a shooting match between NATO and Belgrade it
would last for a few days, and we would soon be back in operation’ (quoted in
UNHCR, 1999h: 10). Nicholas Morris, the former UNHCR Special Envoy in
the Balkans in 1993-94 and again from 1998 until April 1999, argued that no
one was prepared for the scale of the exodus, nor were they politically willing
to bankroll such a level of preparedness:
Until days before the exodus, key western governments were banking on peace
and urging UNHCR to prepare for the early implementation of the Rambouillet
accords. It is unlikely these same governments, some of whom have been sharply
critical of UNHCR’s lack of preparedness, would have responded to a request
for massive preparations predicated on the failure of their own peace efforts. To
have been prepared for what actually happened, such a request would have had
to be already met at a time when the success of peace efforts still looked possible.
(Morris, 1999: 18–19)
This did not stop NATO and other humanitarian actors from blaming
UNHCR for the initial chaotic conditions when Kosovar Albanians arrived in
the hundreds of thousands in neighbouring Albania and Macedonia. NATO
contingents and bilaterally funded NGOs sidestepped the agency and went
ahead with camp building and aid provision. Thus the agency’s coordination
efforts started on the back foot: arriving late, allowing other actors to estab-
lish their ‘turfs’; lacking seniority and authority on the ground, thus allowing
those turfs to be easily defended; and arriving ‘unprepared’, without sufficient
emergency stores and manpower, thus relying on the logistical capacity of other
(particularly NATO military) actors. Dennis McNamara, who took over from
Nicolas Morris as UNHCR Special Envoy to the Balkans in April 1999, summed
up UNHCR’s woes as ‘a Catch-22 situation to some extent. Initial criticism led
to withholding of funds and an amazing situation where we had to keep appeal-
ing for humanitarian funds during a conflict when governments had spent bil-
lions on military hardware’ (McNamara quoted in UNHCR, 1999g: 22).
Humanitarian Evacuation: Pragmatic Solution or

Flouting Protection?
UNHCR’s ambivalent role in the humanitarian evacuation programme is a tell-

ing instance of the conflicting instincts guiding the agency’s decision-making
during the Kosovo crisis. The wish to ‘remain relevant’ to NATO powers
remained strong, but a deep sense of unease spread over how the relief effort
flouted core principles of refugee protection and humanitarian neutrality.
Already placed on the back foot after its late arrival and the widespread resist-
ance to its humanitarian leadership role, UNHCR reluctantly agreed to take
on the management of the humanitarian evacuation programme, despite deep
misgivings.
UNHCR’s main concern was that the humanitarian evacuation pro-

gramme undermined the principle of first asylum by allowing the granting of
asylum to be made conditional on resettlement agreements (Barutciski and
Suhrke, 2001: 99). Furthermore, refugees resettled through the evacuation
programme were not given the chance to apply for asylum as Convention
refugees, but were given humanitarian leave to remain for one year in their
host country. These concerns were pushed aside by the United States and its
NATO allies. NATO had different concerns: the political stability of its ally
Macedonia; threats from Macedonia to withdraw its support of NATO unless
the refugees were removed; and the public relations disaster created by the
pictures of desperate refugees stranded on the Blace border. Through nego-
tiations led by the US, the humanitarian evacuation programme was agreed
directly between Macedonia and (mostly NATO) resettlement states, with-
out UNHCR input. At the same time, the US put pressure on UNHCR not
to criticize the Macedonian government for closing its borders to refugees
(Loescher, 2001: 331).
The choice for UNHCR was not whether or not refugees should be evac-
uated to resettlement countries. That decision had been taken out of its
hands. Instead the refugee agency had to decide, under great US pressure,
whether to assume responsibility for the implementation of this evacua-
tion programme. UNHCR had not planned for burden-sharing through
relocation, since they believed this would undermine the non-negotiable
principle of non-refoulement, by allowing states to make asylum condi-
tional on resettlement. The refugee agency nevertheless agreed to take on
the implementation of the evacuation, arguing that by doing so it could
retain some control over the process and ensure special care was taken to
address the protection needs of the most vulnerable refugees. UNHCR’s
support for the evacuation programme was never more than lukewarm,
and Barutciski and Suhrke (2001: 99) argue that even when the programme
was well underway, pushed by states, the refugee agency remained reluc-
tant. Together with its criticism of Macedonia’s forced relocation of some
refugees to Albania (Suhrke et al., 2000: 39), this reluctance added to US
dissatisfaction with UNHCR.
To sum up, UNHCR was humanitarian coordinator during the Kosovo
crisis only in name. In reality its influence over core assistance and pro-
tection decisions (such as where to place camps, the humanitarian evac-
uation programme) was minimal. The lack of coordination made the
Kosovo emergency action one of the most wasteful in the agency’s history.
Meanwhile the agency’s fundraising efforts for refugee situations in Africa
were flagging.
Lessons learnt: Bigger, better, but

more modest
The humanitarian effort in Kosovo has been scrutinized from every angle.
As Porter (2000) aptly observes: ‘A plethora of independent evaluations
have been carried out, their number ironically propagating precisely the
duplication of resources and lack of co-ordination that is a principal criti-
cism of the original aid programme’. The aim here is not to provide a list of
all the recommendations and advice provided in these evaluation exercises,
but to highlight the lessons UNHCR actually seemed to take to heart in
the years following its Kosovo experience. Since these lessons further high-
lighted the pitfalls of relying on states’ sense of their security interests, the
lessons from Kosovo contributed to the refugee agency’s move away from a
security discourse in the 2000s.
The Need for ‘Preparedness’ and Coordination
Not everybody within UNHCR learnt the same lessons from Kosovo. One
lesson, which was taken onboard by the agency’s leadership, was the need
to increase and improve the agency’s humanitarian leadership capability,
through training staff and establishing new emergency response procedures
and stronger ‘surge capacity’ for rapid and substantial deployment of staff
and equipment. The debacle of waste and duplication, and the criticisms of
UNHCR’s lack of leadership, made the issue of humanitarian coordination
with other UN agencies and NGOs a priority. In its response to its own com-
missioned Kosovo evaluation report, UNHCR argued that no agency alone
could have the stockpiles and response capacity to deal with an emergency on
the scale of the Kosovo crisis. Instead it would place ‘particular importance
on broadening and strengthening partnership arrangements with other agen-
cies, both governmental and non-governmental, which can be activated at a
moment’s notice in response to imminent and actual emergencies’ (UNHCR,
2000j). Humanitarian leadership remained a key goal for UNHCR, but the
Kosovo crisis made it clear that the agency could no longer monopolize
this role.
As the independent evaluation of the Kosovo operation pointed out, there
had been a problem with UNHCR’s emergency preparedness throughout the
1990s (Suhrke et al., 2000: xiv). The question was why this led to a barrage
of criticism in 1999, while up until then UNHCR had mostly been viewed
as a competent agency. In the case of Bosnia, one UNHCR staff member
suggested that ‘UNHCR performed no more than adequately, but much bet-
ter than anyone else—therefore its good reputation’.1 It could have been added
that Western powers were willing the refugee agency to do well in Bosnia—and
in the African Great Lakes—since they were unable or unwilling to come up with
effective political actions of their own. UNHCR arguably performed equally ade-
quately during the Kosovo crisis, but in this case there was no corresponding will
among the agency’s donors to put a positive spin on its work. Instead it was in their
interest to highlight their own humanitarian generosity and competence through
bilateral action. One way of achieving this was to sideline UNHCR and denigrate
its work.
National Security Interests and the Fickleness

of Donor Support
The need to improve ‘preparedness’ and leadership capacity in large-scale emer-

gencies was a lesson of a practical nature. The behaviour of its core donor states
led UNHCR to draw a more fundamentally troubling conclusion, reinforcing
doubts caused by the protection disaster in eastern Zaire. This conclusion was
that the nature and level of host and donor support for UNHCR’s work depended
strongly on how the refugee situation impacted on their perceived security inter-
est. In the case of host states, this was perhaps not surprising, and UNHCR had
expected reluctance from Macedonia if a mass influx of Kosovar Albanians were
to take place. But the agency had expected more support from its donors.
In eastern Zaire, donors had little stake in the conflict and were happy to fund
the humanitarian operation in lieu of political or military action to reduce insecu-
rity in the refugee hosting region. In Kosovo, a reverse situation proved equally dif-
ficult for UNHCR (albeit far less disastrous for the refugees the agency worked to
protect): The high stakes for NATO meant that UNHCR was swept to the sidelines
and allowed to ‘lead’ only in name, and in order to take the blame when things
went wrong. The lesson, then, was that whether the political stakes were high, as
in Kosovo, or low, as in eastern Zaire, UNHCR could not count on its donors to
provide the necessary support for its refugee protection task. Indeed, it seemed the
agency’s ability to influence refugee host and donor states were at an all-time low.
The Demise of Humanitarian Neutrality
Having discovered how little influence it had over donor and host decisions in
Kosovo, UNHCR also found its neutrality undermined by the militarization
1
Interview with UNHCR official, Geneva headquarters. Interview no. 2000–2001A.
(by NATO) of refugee relief provision; the horse-trading with protection

principles; and the (justified) impression of humanitarian aid being distrib-
uted according to political bias and expediency rather than human needs and
suffering. Thus a key lesson from Kosovo was the urgent need for the refu-
gee agency to attempt to restore its reputation, as set out in its Statute, as an
‘entirely non-political [ . . . ] humanitarian and social’ agency.
Despite the unseemly humanitarian posturing and competition, waste
and duplication, the generous overall funding level nevertheless meant that
the Kosovo operation generally went well, from the point of view of refugee
welfare. Standards were higher than ‘normal’ for emergencies, and certainly
much higher than what UNHCR and other humanitarian agencies provided
to refugees in Africa. Porter concludes that the problem was not that the
Kosovo operation was generously funded, but that waste and duplication led
to hardship for other refugee populations, as emergency appeals for humani-
tarian relief in Africa and central America had poorer than usual responses.
He observes that ‘the money spent by the US Army/OFDA [Office of Foreign
Disaster Assistance] on Camp Hope in Albania, which housed just over 3,000
people for two months, was roughly the same amount as the UN’s entire
annual appeal for Angola’ (Porter, 2000).
The wastefulness of the Kosovo refugee relief operation, including stories
of ‘luxury camps’, added ammunition to the growing number of critics of
humanitarian aid, who presented the Kosovo crisis as the latest and most bla-
tant refutation of the myth of non-political and impartial humanitarian aid.
The Kosovo crisis showed more clearly than ever before that, depending on
political and security calculations, some victims are more deserving than oth-
ers. As the lead humanitarian agency, UNHCR became a target for this criti-
cism, because the agency allowed NATO’s politicization of humanitarian aid to
take place under the guise of a UN-led operation. Porter (2000) argues that the
‘agreement between UNHCR and NATO was the Trojan Horse that allowed
NATO to effectively take over the humanitarian operation from the inside.
Cloaked in the legitimacy of an invitation from the United Nations, NATO’s
involvement in humanitarian activities had political objectives, including
maintaining support for the air campaign’.
A More Modest but Principled Agency
The combination of lack of influence and lack of independence (and thus neu-
trality) during the Kosovo crisis led many staff members to question Ogata’s
venture into the high politics of crisis diplomacy and international security,
including her promotion of UNHCR as a global security actor. Added to this
was a strong sense of a missed opportunity to reassert the relevance and signif-
icance of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. Sympathy was pouring out from
western European publics towards the Kosovar Albanians, who were blatantly
victims of persecution and ethnic cleansing. Instead of attempting to translate
this sympathy into support for the Refugee Convention, UNHCR became part
of a humanitarian evacuation programme (note how it was not entitled a refu-
gee evacuation programme) that in many of its own staff ’s view undermined
the fundamental Convention principles of non-refoulement and first asylum.
UNHCR fell between two chairs. It was not pragmatic enough for the lik-
ings of its key donors (in this case NATO countries), venting its concerns over
refugee rights and slowing down the evacuation in its attempts at register-
ing the refugees and prioritizing the needs of particularly vulnerable persons.
But it was not principled enough, either, since it begrudgingly took on formal
responsibility for the coordination of a highly politicized aid operation and
an evacuation programme that undermined international refugee protection
principles.
Conclusion: Neither relevance nor

independence?
The Kosovo crisis, following the eastern Zaire operation, showed UNHCR
that when push came to shove, it could muster little leverage over the deci-
sion making of other central actors—despite going to great lengths to speak
to their security concerns and remain relevant to their interests. Even worse,
many within the agency felt that in its quest to achieve such leverage through
‘being relevant’ to host and donor states, it had lost its identity, autonomy and
even credibility. Loescher’s conclusion, on summing up the 1990s, was shared
by many UNHCR staff:
Because the UNHCR had willingly accepted responsibility for dealing with com-
plex humanitarian emergencies and had accepted, and in some cases endorsed,
most of the experiments in refugee protection and humanitarian response, it was
not in a strong position to protest the worldwide decline in refugee protection.
Indeed, the Office became complicit in many of the refugee protection failures of
the decade. (Loescher, 2001: 339)
Distrust of politics, and especially of security politics, returned to force
within the walls of UNHCR headquarters. The combined experiences of east-
ern Zaire and the Kosovo crisis heralded the decline of UNHCR as a global
security actor. Other ways had to be found in which to remain relevant in
international refugee politics which were truer to the agency’s mandated

responsibilities. Resorting first to the language of human security as a way
of distinguishing its mandate from that of state security priorities, UNHCR
began gradually but markedly to return to describing itself as a protection
agency. I conclude this chapter by discussing the limits of international secu-
rity solidarity and how (and why) by the end of the 1990s UNHCR’s decline as
a global security actor set in.
By the end of the 1990s, UNHCR concluded that its language of security
could sometimes do it more harm than good. The proclamation of ‘safe areas’
in Bosnia in the name of international peace and security without displaying a
will to defend them lead to massacres, while numerous Security Council dec-
larations on the security problems created by the refugee situation in the Great
Lakes were followed by inaction. In Kosovo, donor states’ security interests
ensured that refugees were looked after (although not granted full Convention
refugee protection) but in their urge to take credit for the relief operation,
UNHCR was both sidelined and made into a scapegoat.
In their different ways, the eastern Zaire and Kosovo experiences left
UNHCR disillusioned and distrustful of state intentions, including the inten-
tions of donor states whose support the agency had come to presume. In east-
ern Zaire, this left the agency weighed down by a sense of tragedy. In the case
of the Kosovo crisis, the feeling of betrayal was possibly stronger, as it was
UNHCR’s traditional supporters that were vigorously and publicly under-
mining its efforts. As a result, its old distrust of the motivations of states was
returning and affecting the agency’s discourse after the momentary optimism
of the early 1990s.
The direct effect of the disastrous failure of refugee protection in the
Great Lakes had been that UNHCR began to lose its faith in the interna-
tional community’s sense of common security. As a consequence it began
to doubt the wisdom of invoking the security interests of states in order
to muster support for refugee protection. The vigour with which NATO
member states contrived to aid Kosovar Albanian refugees without afford-
ing them full Convention refugee status or offer them asylum added to
UNHCR’s alarm over the erosion of international protection standards. In
fact, in the late 1990s UNHCR experienced what looked like an attack from
a wide range of states on the 1951 Refugee Convention. After the Rwandan
and Kosovar Albanian refugee situations, UNHCR’s EXCOM embarked on
a series of discussions of the burdens shouldered by states hosting large ref-
ugee populations. While affirming the 1951 Convention as ‘the foundation
of the international refugee regime’ the 1999 EXCOM conclusion on inter-
national protection suggested ‘that there may be a need to develop com-
plementary forms of protection’ (EXCOM, 1999: 8). UNHCR accordingly
started a process of Global Consultations on protection, but with the

slightly different aim of reconfirming the 1951 Convention’s contempo-
rary relevance. The consultation process culminated in a ministerial level
conference attended by 156 countries in Geneva in December 2001 which
solemnly reconfirmed the principles of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention.
This was a symbolic victory in a deteriorating protection environment. And
as UNHCR acquired a new High Commissioner, accompanied by demands
to reduce staff and expenditure levels, it entered a new decade—and a new
millennium—with reduced ambitions and a narrower understanding of
what role it should play in the global politics of humanitarianism and refu-
gee protection.
13
Challenges of Protection After 9/11
The terror attacks on Washington and New York on 11 September 2001, fol-

lowed by other high profile terror attacks such as the Madrid and London
bombings in 2004 and 2005, contributed to an unprecedented level of suspi-
cion against and fear of asylum seekers and refugees in the West. As described
in chapter 8, in this hostile climate UNHCR returned to a discourse centred
on promoting protection and human rights of the displaced. These discursive
changes were a response to the dramatic changes in the international security
climate in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In response to the 9/11
attacks, the US government launched what it called a global ‘War on Terror’—a
controversial term abandoned in 2008, when Barak Obama replaced George
W Bush as president. The ways in which this ‘war’ was conducted and resisted,
at home and abroad, led refugee and asylum politics to new levels of political
controversy.
Arguably, never before in the history of UNHCR had the international pro-
tection regime for refugees been so unpopular with both donor and host states.
At the same time, a persistent perception of migrants and refugees (increas-
ingly seen as two inextricable parts of the same problem) as security threats
ensured that the problem of forced migration remained high on states’ agen-
das. In this hostile atmosphere, the perennial question of how UNHCR could
‘remain relevant’ to donor and host states while at the same time safeguarding
its protection mandate, was again tossed up in the air. In the 1990s, UNHCR
believed it had found the right formula by recasting itself as a global security
actor contributing to both human and international security through its role
as humanitarian lead agency in conflict zones around the world. In the highly
politicized displacement crises of the 2000s, this role became neither feasible
nor desirable. The backlash against immigrants and refugees in Northern and
Southern countries alike made a security discourse seem increasingly inap-
propriate when uttered by the agency mandated to safeguard the international
refugee protection regime.
Challenges of Protection After 9/11 251
This chapter follows UNHCR’s response to the anti-migrant fall-out from

9/11 in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In a harsher and polarized
political climate, the refugee agency attempted to carve out a more independ-
ent position in refugee and humanitarian politics, keeping Western security
agendas at arm’s length. The result of these manoeuvrings was its clear decline
as a global security actor, a lower profile, and to some extent a return to a more
limited interpretation of its mandate and capabilities. But the agency has also
continued the trend of working pragmatically with states in its field opera-
tions, albeit with a lower profile and through quiet diplomacy. Its budget, after
a slump in the early 2000s, has continued its remarkable growth.
The discussion in this chapter stands out from the other chapters of Part
Three in that it is thematic rather than built around a specific humanitarian
emergency. The overall thematic frame is asylum and refugee protection in
an era of counter-terror measures and wars. One sub-theme under this frame
is the homeland security policies of Western countries after the 9/11 attacks.
Another is the impact on displacement, protection and humanitarian assis-
tance in the South. The first sub-theme is addressed by analysing the range
of measures UNHCR took to enhance its reputation as an independent and
credible protection agency without alienating its traditional donor base to the
extent of losing their political and financial support.
I then attempt to do justice to the second sub-theme—an enormous task—
through a combination of pursuing broader trends and discussing aspects of
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. UNHCR has been less central to the political
dynamics of the displacement crises of the early twenty-first century than it
was in the 1990s, and has not retained its role as lead humanitarian agency. It
has been one among many actors involved, often keeping a low profile in order
to avoid controversy in highly politicized displacement situations. I explore
the broader trends that contributed to this lesser role for the refugee agency,
and analyse UNHCR’s experiences in the political and security minefields
inside Afghanistan and Iraq in the wake of the US-led invasions of the two
countries in 2001 and 2003 respectively.
Asylum crisis in the North and the

credibilit y of UNHCR after 9/11
The terror attacks on 11 September 2001 were a watershed in global politics,

leading Western states to declare international terrorism as the foremost threat
to their national security. To claim such a watershed is no exaggeration in the
case of international refugee politics. I will come to the repercussions in the
South later in this chapter. Meanwhile, in the North, the threat of international
terrorism led to a renewed preoccupation with border control, homeland
security and clamp-down on immigration loopholes. After 9/11, the asylum
system was almost immediately depicted as a particularly ‘risky’ loophole that
could be abused by terrorists, both in the US and other Western countries.1 For
instance, soon after the attacks, the US Attorney General extended the legal
authority to detain, often in prisons, asylum seekers and circumscribed the
right to appeal asylum decisions (Human Rights First, 2004: 17). This built on
the already draconian policy of arbitrary detention of ‘illegal’ immigrants intro-
duced in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility
Act, thus illustrating that the foundations for post-9/11 asylum practices were
laid in the preceding decade. In 2003, the newly established Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) introduced a nationality-based detention policy.
Asylum seekers from a list of over 30 mostly Muslim countries and territories
were automatically detained for the crime of originating from what the DHS
saw as particularly terror prone countries. In defence of this policy, Tom Ridge,
the then Homeland Security Secretary, wrote that ‘these heightened security
measures will help deter terrorism and increase protection of America and
Americans’ (Human Rights First, 2004: 24).
This preoccupation with the ‘asylum loophole’ was not only a reaction to
9/11. The threat of international terrorism added momentum to an already
restrictive trend in the asylum policies of states. Having already criminal-
ized the majority of asylum seekers by classifying them as ‘failed’ economic
migrants, asylum systems now also branded them potential terrorist threats.
In that sense, 9/11 functioned as an enabler. A study of European asylum prac-
tice argued convincingly that 9/11 was ‘particularly used as a trigger to con-
solidate policies, measures or legislation, which has been waiting for a long
time for enough support, but found only acceptance in the joint resolution to
combat terrorism’ (Brouwer, 2003: 422).
UNHCR’s Response: Donor Distance and

Diversification
Alarmed by the post-9/11 reaction of states, UNHCR hastened the aban-

donment (starting in the late 1990s) of its claim to be a global security actor.
The anti-asylum aspects of homeland security were so blatantly at odds with
UNHCR’s core mandate that the protection of the agency’s reputation and
credibility demanded the demarcation of political distance from its main
1
For more detail, see chapter 3.
donors. This distancing was particularly noticeable after Antonio Guterres

took over as High Commissioner from Ruud Lubbers in 2005. Chapter 8
described UNHCR’s discursive repositioning, asserting its authority as the
guardian of the international protection regime and arguing that linking asy-
lum seekers and refugees to terrorism was both ‘dangerous and erroneous’
(UNHCR, 2003e).
At a practical level, the heightened tension of the post-9/11 period offered
UNHCR limited leverage in the West. Recognizing this, the agency instead
took steps to assert independence from its traditional donors. One such step
was to attempt to diversify its donor base. The agency’s main donors, in partic-
ular the US, which contributes around 25 percent of UNHCR’s budget, inevi-
tably have a greater say in the agency’s activities. ‘Major donors sometimes
feel they own UNHCR’, one senior UNHCR official acknowledged.2 This had
always been the case, but was keenly felt at a time when US and UNHCR goals
were often at odds. To counterbalance this influence, UNHCR tried to solicit
support from oil rich Gulf states and sponsorships and partnerships with pri-
vate companies. Since donor influence is unavoidable, it would be ‘better with
a wider base of donors for UNHCR’s independence and integrity’.3
Attempts at increasing private donations had some success. In 2005,
UNHCR received about US$30 million in contributions from private sector
donors, increasing to US$111 million in 2011. However, overall contributions
to the agency rose sharply over the same period, from US$1.1 billion in 2005
to US$2.1 billion in 2011. The share of private contributions rose to 5 percent
in 2011, up from 2.2 percent in the period 1990 to 2005.4 Although UNHCR
emphasized its private sector partnerships in its promotional literature, they
remained marginal to the refugee agency’s budgetary needs.
UNHCR also had some success in leveraging support from Gulf states. This
was not just a matter of soliciting donations. As one staff member put it, ‘you
don’t just knock on the door when you want money; the Arab states hate that
and never respond to it’.5 The coincidence in the mid-2000s of Guterres taking
over as High Commissioner and a vast Iraqi refugee crisis developing in the
Middle East, strengthened links between UNHCR and Arab and Islamic states.
The High Commissioner made high-profile visits to the Middle East and com-
missioned a flattering book on Islam’s contributions to refugee law (UNHCR,
2009i). He strengthened the regional office in Riyadh and opened up channels
2
Interview with UNCHR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008G.
3
Interview with UNHCR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008L.
4
Figures on private funding are taken from UNHCR funding data in UNHCR (2006f, 2012f,
and 2012g).
5
Interview with UNHCR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008L.
to humanitarian NGOs in, among others, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Jordan.
These NGOs are often more accurately described as quasi-governmental
organizations with close links to ruling elites. The refugee agency signed a
Memorandum of Understanding with the Saudi Red Crescent Society, headed
by one of the Saudi King’s sons, who in turn visited UNHCR Headquarters for
workshops and talks. Forging links with regional NGOs as implementing part-
ners served two goals: soliciting funds for regional operations in the Middle
East, and improving access to displaced populations, especially in closed and
suspicious Syria.
Both goals had some success. Guterres himself, as well as Radhouane
Nouicer, his newly appointed Director of the Regional Bureau for the Middle
East and North Africa, enjoyed respect and access among regional govern-
ments. During the Iraq refugee exodus, UNHCR became an ally to the Syrian
government, helping solicit funding for its vast Iraqi refugee population.
UNHCR saw its cooperation with Syria, and the latter’s toleration of the influx
of around one million refugees, as mutually beneficial, since UNHCR diplo-
macy could boost Syria’s international reputation. This was, of course, short
lived. In March 2011, Syria descended into a bloody and destructive civil war,
leading to the flight of its Iraqi and Palestinian refugee populations, as well
as of two million (and rising) Syrians crossing into Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey
and, indeed, Iraq.6 Reflecting his role in UNHCR’s efforts to build relation-
ships within Syria, Nouicer was appointed the UN’s Regional Humanitarian
Coordinator for the Syrian emergency in 2011.
Funding levels also improved. Having received insignificant or no funding
from Gulf states in the first half of the 2000s, the refugee agency received con-
siderable donations from 2007 onwards. These sums however were ad hoc and
earmarked, not a reliable funding flow. For instance, contributions from the
United Arab Emirates (UAE) fluctuated wildly between US$10 million in 2007
(a breakthrough causing much excitement within the agency), down to zero
the next year, jumping to US$30 million in 2009, dropping to US$4 million in
2010 and only US$500,000 in 2011.7
The outbreak of civil war in Syria increased the pressure on Gulf states to
fund relief efforts for millions of Syrian refugees and IDPs. In January 2013, at
a major UN pledging conference in Kuwait for the Syrian emergency, Kuwait,
Saudi Arabia and the UAE each pledged at least US$300 million in contribu-
tion to the humanitarian effort. This led to the largest donations received from
6
As of September 2013, up from one million in March 2013. More than four million were
internally displaced (UNHCR, 2013).
7
Figures from UNHCR Global Reports.
Middle Eastern states in UNHCR’s history. However, far from all the pledged
funds were distributed through the UN. Hundreds of millions of dollars were
channeled as bilateral aid to fellow Arab governments hosting Syrian refugees,
and—more problematically—directly to the civilian relief arm of Syrian Sunni
rebel groups. As we will see in the later discussion of humanitarian space dur-
ing the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the Gulf states are not alone in preferring to
provide their aid directly to allies, or to groups they hope to win over as allies,
in support of foreign policy goals. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Kuwait distrib-
ute humanitarian aid in a manner supporting Sunni co-religionists against a
Syrian regime dominated by Alawites, a minority belonging to a variant of Shia
Islam. Iran, on the other hand, provides—in addition to military aid—lines of
credit to the Syrian government. It has also funded hospitals and humanitar-
ian aid to cover basic needs in government controlled areas (IRIN, 2013). As a
result of such politicization of aid (a trend continuing from the Kosovo crisis),
humanitarianism, understood as a non-political, neutral, needs-based and
multilateral activity, has become an increasingly problematic concept.
UNHCR’s donor diversification strategy improved the funding for Middle
Eastern displacement emergencies. But due to the exceptional and often bilat-
eral nature of funding from Gulf states, it has not dented UNHCR’s reliance on
the more dependable donation flows from the West. The refugee agency’s top
ten donors in 2011, supplying 80 percent of voluntary contributions, remained
exclusively governments from North America, Europe and Japan. This said,
reducing Western influence is not only about money. In the words of a senior
UNHCR official: ‘Equally important to major donors are politically important
countries such as emerging countries like China. Diverse support base is the
key to carving out UNHCR’s own space, giving the agency leverage and room
to manoeuvre’.8 To some extent, the refugee agency achieved this, even if it was
mostly a matter of recovering from the damaging Eurocentric label acquired
during Ruud Lubbers’ tenure as High Commissioner.
A highly visible practical step to distance itself from the onslaught on asy-
lum by traditional Western donors, was UNHCR’s restoration of the prestige of
its Division of International Protection (DIP) and the creation of the position
of Assistant High Commissioner for Protection. The position was proposed by
the High Commissioner in 2004, arguing the need for ‘strengthening the voice
and authority of UNHCR on protection, at a crucial time when the principles
and the practice are both seriously under threat’ (UNHCR, 2004b: 3). Despite
resistance from an EXCOM concerned with reducing rather than increasing
UNHCR’s top management tier, the position was created in 2006, as part of a
8
Interview with UNHCR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008G.
broader organizational reform. Two decades of downgrading the DIP during

the tenures of High Commissioners Hocké, Stoltenberg and Ogata, had left
international protection subordinate to field operations both institutionally
and in practice (Loescher, 2001: 249–50 and 324–5). This changed with the
2006 reforms, which gave international protection an equal position to that of
operations in the agency’s institutional hierarchy.
UNHCR’s attempts at distancing itself from the political agendas of states,
and to counteract what the agency saw as obsessive concern with national
security and counter-terrorism, was to some extent a return to the agency’s
approach in the 1970s. But UNHCR was now a vast humanitarian organiza-
tion. The agency’s admonitions to safeguard asylum and protection principles
were coupled with a continued pragmatic approach in the field. Protecting the
displaced needed to involve more than advocacy and public education. It was
also an operational task, performed in possibly the most challenging security
environment the refugee agency had experienced.
The humanitarian squeeze in the

South: Afghanistan and Iraq
At the same time as contributing to the (already considerable) backlash against

asylum in the North, 9/11 had major repercussions for displacement patterns
and humanitarian politics in the global South. In Somalia, US-supported mili-
tary action against Al Shabaab led to escalation and internationalization of
Somalia’s civil war, with renewed and massive forced migration within Somalia
and across the border to Kenya and Ethiopia. In Iraq, millions were displaced
inside and outside the country in the years of turmoil and bloodshed follow-
ing the US-led invasion. Since Iraqis and Afghans constituted UNHCR’s two
largest refugee and asylum seeker populations ‘of concern’ in the 2000s, I con-
centrate the analysis on these two countries. The high political and military
stakes of the US-led invasions and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq created
immense challenges for UNHCR. Security conditions for field staff deterio-
rated dramatically in the violent atmosphere of counter-insurgency warfare.
Two developments contributed to the shrinking humanitarian space for
UNHCR staff. The first was the uses and abuses of humanitarian aid for political
and military purposes, and the second was the series of UN reforms aimed at
bringing the various members of the UN family—humanitarian, development,
political and military (peacekeeping)—closer together and better coordinated.
Both trends served to undermine the perceived neutrality and non-political
nature of UNHCR and expose its staff to targeted violence. I discuss some of
the measures taken by UNHCR to alleviate this shrinking humanitarian space,
at the level of UN politics as well as internally and operationally.
The Security Squeeze: What Happened to

Humanitarian Space?
The ways in which the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq unfolded during the
2000s delivered a severe blow to the possibility of non-political, neutral and
principled humanitarian action in aid of civilians in the midst of conflict. The
US and its allies aimed to control and run humanitarian and development
aid operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in order to ‘win hearts and
minds’ (Fishstein and Wilder, 2012). This was a continuation of the trend from
Kosovo, but exaggerated, as coalition troops found themselves the occupying
forces fighting counter-insurgency campaigns in increasingly hostile territory.
In 2008, the High Commissioner declared that the ‘space for humanitar-
ian action is being squeezed within an ever more restricted perimeter, and
humanitarian workers are increasingly targeted by terrorist attacks’ (Guterres,
2008e: 93). The sharp rise in killings, kidnappings and injuries of humanitar-
ian staff (Tennant et al., 2010) can partly be explained by the fact that UNHCR
operated as a matter of routine in war zones and complex emergencies—by
their nature violent, lawless and volatile. But attacks also resulted from a
more specific development: the branding of UNHCR and other UN agencies
by some Jihadist, terrorist or insurgent groups as part and parcel of Western
interventionism and therefore as legitimate targets of attacks. The highly polit-
icized responses to displacement and humanitarian action by coalition troops,
insurgents, terrorist groups, host and donor states alike, left UNHCR strug-
gling for ways to avoid being reduced to a pawn in the strategies of military
and political actors more powerful and ruthless than itself.
The militarization of aid is a long-standing phenomenon, as this book has
shown. Safe havens were created in places like northern Iraq and Bosnia, and
soldiers set up refugee camps and protected aid convoys. The US-led mili-
tary intervention in Somalia in 1992 was justified on humanitarian grounds,
to create a secure environment for aid delivery. But the trend was taken to
a new level in the 2000s. UNHCR’s main donors openly aligned aid budg-
ets to national interests and harnessed development and humanitarian aid
to foreign policy agendas and military-strategic aims. The previous chapter
showed how NATO viewed the Kosovo relief operation as too important to
leave to UNHCR. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the stakes were even higher. The
militarization of aid, both in terms of its delivery and its aims, were taken
to their extreme: ‘Between 2002 and 2005, the share of U.S. official develop-

ment assistance (ODA) channeled through the Pentagon budget surged from
5.6 percent to 21.7 percent, rising to $5.5 billion’ (Patrick and Brown, 2007: 1).
By the mid-2000s the Pentagon was distributing billions of dollars in aid as
part of its counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq, leading William
Easterly (2008: 51) to announce the existence of an ‘aid-military complex’,
while Fishstein and Wilder (2012: 8) argued that:
Political and national-security considerations have always influenced U.S. foreign

assistance policies and priorities. Since 9/11, however, this influence has grown
greatly, as development aid for countries like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan has
been increasingly and explicitly subsumed under the national security agenda.
The blurring of lines between foreign policy aims, war fighting strategy,
and humanitarianism in Afghanistan and Iraq was profound. Initially, the
US and its allies justified the two wars primarily as national and international
security necessities (defeating the Al Qaeda terrorist network and its Taleban
sponsors in Afghanistan, and removing the Baathist threat of weapon of mass
destruction (WMDs) in Iraq). When these aims could not be achieved, due
to the elusiveness of Al Qaeda and the Taleban and the non-existence of Iraqi
WMDs, a humanitarian rationale became added to the mix of justifications—
although the aims of liberating the suffering populations of Afghanistan and
Iraq from oppressive regimes were never offered as stand-alone justifications
for the wars.
The US-led coalitions used what Weiss (2005: 156) calls a ‘slippery humani-
tarian logic’ mainly to further war aims rather than out of principled convic-
tion. When presenting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars in a humanitarian light,
the US did so in two ways. First, the wars served the humanitarian purpose
of removing tyrannical regimes. Second, and added later, coalition soldiers
were presented as humanitarians: building schools, hospitals and roads and
distributing emergency relief aid. Such humanitarian roles for soldiers were
partly the result of the dire security situation on the ground, making it too
dangerous for civilian aid organizations to operate. But it was mainly a delib-
erate aspect of the military strategy of ‘winning hearts and minds’ in a vicious
counter-insurgency war in which most casualties were civilians. The idea was
to utilize humanitarian and development aid to restore the reputation and
improve the trust of coalition troops among local populations. Particularly
after the arrival of General David Petraeus as Commander of the US-led forces,
first in Iraq and later Afghanistan, new rules of engagement combined with
humanitarian good deeds were introduced with the aim of reducing civilian
support of insurgent groups. While not discounting the motivation to improve
the lot for Afghan and Iraqi civilians, the humanitarian work was primarily a
means to a military end.
This instrumental use of humanitarian reasoning (as post-hoc justification
for invasion and as part of ‘hearts and minds’ campaigns) had two different but
mutually reinforcing effects on UNHCR’s operational work. First, it continued
the erosion of UNHCR’s humanitarian leadership role. Kapstein and Kathuria
(2012: 15) could claim with little exaggeration that ‘[t]‌he story of foreign assis-
tance to Afghanistan is largely one of support to an ongoing military campaign’.
The Pentagon became the country’s single largest ‘aid organization’, spending
tens of billions of dollars on relief and reconstruction. The US government
spent nearly US$62 billion on relief and reconstruction in Afghanistan from
2002 to 2011 (Johnson et al., 2011: 1). The majority of these funds were spent
by the Pentagon—60 percent according to Fishstein and Wilder (2012: 43).
Pentagon-funded aid was disbursed largely according to military rather
than humanitarian needs, often with corrupt and wasteful effects. Particularly
problematic was the Commanders’ Emergency Response Program (CERP),
an easy flow of aid money, with little oversight and much abuse, put at the
disposal of US field commanders to launch quick impact projects aimed at
gaining the goodwill of local leaders and populations, and hence making their
counter-insurgency task easier. CERP funding in Afghanistan rose ‘from zero
in 2003 to $1.2 billion in 2010’ (Fishstein and Wilder, 2012: 13). In comparison,
UNHCR’s expenditure in Afghanistan in 2010 was less than US$70 million,
aiding 1.3 million IDPs, returnees and other ‘people of concern’ (UNHCR,
2011b: 207–11). From 2004 to 2010, the US Congress allocated US$2.6 billion
to CERP programmes alone in Afghanistan. In the same period, total UNHCR
expenditure in Afghanistan was US$425 million. In this context, exhortations
of the non-political and neutral nature of humanitarian assistance rang hollow
with Afghan civilians and insurgents alike. What they were more likely to see
and experience were the political, and often corrupt, uses of aid to bolster allies
and weaken opponents.
One UN, One Enemy?
The very visible militarization of aid in the setting of counter-insurgency war-

fare unavoidably undermined the image of UNHCR and other humanitarian
organizations as neutral non-parties to the conflicts within which they oper-
ate. This was compounded by another trend: the perception that the US and
the UN shared similar political agendas—or rather that the UN was bound
to the agenda of the US. As a UN agency, this affected UNHCR’s operational
environment.
Traditionally, the UN distinguished between its political organs and its spe-
cialized agencies, such as UNICEF and UNHCR. Since the end of the Cold War,
the various arms of the UN family have become gradually more integrated, in
the name of cohesion and coordination. In the 2000s, the ‘One UN’ project
became particularly visible in the field of humanitarian emergency response.
Complex emergencies are addressed through integrated missions of UN
humanitarian agencies and UN peacekeepers or other international forces. In
peacekeeping or peacemaking situations where the UN’s political or military
involvement was opposed by some of the combatants, humanitarian staff was
easily tarred with the same brush. After the US-led invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq, UN humanitarian staff and property soon became prominent targets
for Al Qaeda and other terrorist or insurgent groups, starting with the devas-
tating 19 August 2003 suicide bombing of the UN headquarters in Baghdad.
The Baghdad attack killed 22 people, including Sergio Vieira de Mello, Special
Representative of the UN Secretary-General to Iraq and former senior UNHCR
official, as well as Arthur Helton, a distinguished refugee advocate.
The Baghdad bombing brought home to UNHCR the dangers of too close an
association with the UN’s political organs. The UN headquarters were targeted
in what seemed a direct response to the Security Council’s decision on 14 August
to create a UN Assistance Mission to oversee the reconstruction of Iraq.9 The sui-
cide blast happened only five days after this decision, killing the just-appointed
UN Special Representative, one of the world organization’s most senior and
capable officials. The blast also killed the UN’s hopes of taking leadership of the
reconstruction effort in Iraq. The attack was the most extreme expression of a
growing sentiment in countries on the receiving end of the US-led global coun-
terterrorism operations that the UN (viewed as a monolith) had taken the West’s
side in a polarizing ‘war on terror’. A UNHCR report on staff security, written
a year after the attack, argued that the erosion of the ‘perception of impartiality
and neutrality [of the UN] has affected UNHCR’ to the extent that there is ‘even
a belief by some that we are legitimate targets’ (UNHCR, 2004f: 10, 11).
UNHCR’s response to the securit y

squeeze
UNHCR responded to the security squeeze with both political and practical
measures. The refugee agency set out to bolster its image as a distinct, unique and
independent actor, whose aims and activities were driven by humanitarian needs,
9
Security Council Resolution 1500 of 14 August 2003.
protection principles and refugee law, not the interests of the UN Secretariat,
Security Council or Western states. This exercise was often described by UNHCR
officials as one of enhancing, or even restoring, the agency’s credibility.
Distance, Resistance and Credibility
We saw earlier how UNHCR attempted (with moderate success) to distance

itself from its traditional Western supporters through broadening its donor base
and nurturing diplomatic ties with Middle Eastern and Asian countries. The
refugee agency became careful about presenting itself as not toeing the US line,
despite sometimes being under enormous pressure to do so, particularly in the
case of Iraqi displacement. In 2007, after two years of horrific sectarian violence,
the US increased dramatically the number of soldiers on the ground in Iraq,
brokered a ceasefire deal with the influential Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr, and
co-opted some Sunni militants into training and employment in the Iraqi secu-
rity forces. This ‘surge’, as it was called, lead to a clear reduction in sectarian vio-
lence, although—as UNHCR officials made clear—the reduction was as much
the result of Iraq having become a physically segregated country along sectarian
lines after years of killings and displacement. Wishing to show off the success of
the surge, the US authorities began in late 2007 to push UNHCR to declare Iraq
safe for refugees to return. UNHCR officials told of daily phone calls from US
representatives urging a statement from UNHCR and suggesting it could start
encouraging ‘return’, not to places of origin, but to other parts of Iraq where
the refugee would belong to the majority population. Several European govern-
ments added their voice to this behind-closed-doors pressure, hoping that they
would be able to start returning their own Iraqi asylum seekers.
Since this would have been a de facto acceptance of the violent ethnic/
religious cleansing that had taken place in Iraq, UNHCR was reluctant to
encourage refugee return. The agency had numerous reports of refugees being
threatened or killed when trying to reclaim their properties, and they were
aware that most Iraqis returning from Syria and Jordan did so only because
they were running out of funds to sustain themselves. One UNHCR official
stated simply: ‘Our best indicator of security is can refugees return to their
houses. Those who returned did not go to their houses. Some were killed’.10
UNHCR displayed that it could act independently of its main donors when,
in a December 2007 Addendum to its guidelines on the international protection
needs of Iraqi asylum seekers, it came out advising strongly against sending Iraqi
refugees and asylum seekers back (UNHCR, 2007g: 7). Interviewed soon after
10
Interview with UNHCR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008A.
the decision, a senior UNHCR official explained: ‘There was a lot of pressure on

the High Commissioner from the US to say it is better in Iraq and people can go
home. We have come out saying the opposite, quite strongly. You have to be cred-
ible’.11 The decision had not been easy: ‘It was a high risk strategy to raise the pro-
file of Iraqi refugees, due to the interest of our donors in Iraq. But it has paid off ’.12
Radhouane Nouicer, at the time head of UNHCR’s Bureau for Middle East
and North Africa, provided an explanation of how UNHCR saw its task in the
region. He acknowledged that the US and Iraqi governments in 2007 were cre-
ating an image that UNHCR was encouraging Iraqi refugees to return, when it
was not. But he went on to say that there was widespread respect for UNHCR’s
main task in the region, that of non-political diplomacy:
Everybody sees that this [the Iraqi refugee crisis] is a humanitarian issue. Our
role is to ensure this is not politicized, it remains a humanitarian issue and is dealt
with as such. Donors and hosts are working well together on this in practice,
despite sometimes some political speeches that are much more virulent (on both
sides, Syria and the US). Diplomacy, pulling things together, is our job. It is not
easy, but it is working well.13
UNHCR’s stance after the ‘surge’ deserves being highlighted as an example
of the agency asserting its right as a refugee protection expert to go against the
wishes of its strongest state backers. The Afghan repatriation operation, which
will be discussed in the next chapter, shows a more ambivalent approach to
protection and return—in a more ambiguous security environment for the
refugees, both in their host states and on their return.
The Dangers of UN Integration
In addition to forging a more boldly independent role vis-à-vis its traditional

donors, UNHCR also attempted to keep the ‘security squeeze’ at bay by dis-
tancing itself from the UN’s political organs. In 2004, UNHCR published a
report on staff security in response to the 2003 bombing of the UN’s Baghdad
Headquarters. The report noted that ‘today the United Nations is clearly per-
ceived as being linked to one party of the conflict. This has eroded the organi-
zation’s neutrality to an unprecedented degree’ (UNHCR, 2004f: 10). Asserting
UNHCR’s independence from the rest of the UN was hence not just a matter of
credibility, but of avoiding becoming a proxy target for anti-Western terrorism.
11
Interview with UNHCR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008B.
12
Interview with UNHCR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008A.
13
Interview with Radhouane Nouicer, Geneva Headquarters, 5 June 2008.
Keeping the rest of the UN at arm’s length was not easy. As one staff member
lamented, it is ‘not like the Ogata period, when we would have been on the front-
line, very visible. UNHCR has changed and the UN has changed: UNHCR is
not allowed such independence and prominence anymore’.14 UNHCR had been
reigned in. The trend since the mid-1990s had been one of ever closer integration
of the UN’s humanitarian response capacity, including safety and security pro-
cedures for field operations. From a purely selfish point of view, the ‘Delivering
as One’ UN reforms undermined the high-profile humanitarian leadership role
won by the refugee agency under Ogata’s leadership. Some within UNHCR felt
this was a necessary development, since the agency had overstretched itself in the
1990s. Others believed the paring down of UNHCR was the result of intra-UN
rivalries and jealousy of the leadership expertise and experience accumulated by
the refugee agency. Worse, there were suspicions that coordination negotiations
were being used by other agencies to encroach on UNHCR’s core turf. This was
not an inconsiderable turf, since UNHCR fiercely defended its legal obligation to
remain in charge of everything to do with refugees—protection, assistance and
solutions, including support for returnees.
UNHCR was not in a position to opt out of the One UN process, particu-
larly after the severe criticisms of its coordination role during the Kosovo cri-
sis. The reforms culminated in the mid-2000s with the launch of the cluster
approach to humanitarian emergencies, accompanied by an ever more com-
prehensive UN wide staff security system. Most UNHCR staff were sceptical
of the cluster approach and the uniformity of the staff security regulations.
They would have liked to see the refugee agency recognized as belonging in
the same independent category as the ICRC. Nevertheless, UNHCR managed
to emerge from the coordination negotiations with a clearer demarcation of its
identity than most UN agencies. With an (unusually) united staff supporting
him, High Commissioner Guterres advanced a strong and ultimately successful
argument that he had a personal and statutory obligation to take responsibility
for the UN’s response to all aspects of refugees’ plight—protection, assistance
and solutions—and could not legally or morally disperse this responsibility
across a range of UN actors. Indeed, for many UNHCR staff this responsibility
has almost sacred dimensions. Janet Lim, Assistant High Commissioner for
Operations, phrased it in a manner commonly heard in UNCHR headquarters:
It is very important: In all of the UN agencies, no other have a mandate like the
High Commissioner. He is the High Commissioner; he has a responsibility for
a particular population, because they have no government to take care of them.
Refugees are the High Commissioner’s citizens. He was given this responsibility
14
Interview with UNHCR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008J.
by the General Assembly for all refugees’ well-being. The High Commissioner is
personally accountable to the General Assembly for taking care of refugees—in
all areas regarding their well-being.15
However, for IDP situations and environmental displacement, UNHCR
became one of many ‘clustered’ UN actors, allotted camp management and
protection as its two areas of responsibility. Overall coordination responsibil-
ity was in these cases mostly left to OCHA or UNDP. The civil war in Syria is
a case in point, where UNHCR leads and coordinates the regional response
to the refugee outflow, while the humanitarian assistance inside Syria is coor-
dinated by OCHA, with the approval of the Syrian government, and with the
Syrian Red Crescent Society as lead agency on the ground.
UNHCR harboured several concerns about the cluster approach. With
UNDP or OCHA taking the lead coordinating role, the agency felt that pro-
tection activities would suffer. One UNHCR field staff, who had worked as
protection officer in Darfur, voiced a widespread concern: ‘Protection belongs
to all the clusters, so we [UNHCR] need to take part in everything. UNHCR
does not fit into the cluster thinking’.16
Nevertheless, by taking on the responsibility for the protection cluster in
non-refugee emergencies, UNHCR bolstered its efforts to define itself as the
UN’s protection agency—not only within the narrow perimeter of the Refugee
Convention, but in humanitarian emergencies in general. This confirmation
and broadening of its protection identity aided many of the refugee agency’s
goals: It set UNHCR apart from other UN agencies in the humanitarian turf
war. It affirmed UNHCR’s undisputed leadership role in refugee emergencies
as well as its natural position as a major humanitarian actor in other emergen-
cies. It allowed UNHCR to seize the opportunity offered by the UN General
Assembly’s adoption of the principle of a Responsibility to Protect, to position
itself as indispensable to the achievement of the UN’s goals and ambitions.
Finally, by becoming the UN’s protection agency, UNHCR could emphasize
its unique and non-political protection mandate, in the hope of insulating its
staff and structures against hostility and violence aimed at the UN in general.
UN and UNHCR Security Reforms
The bombing of the UN’s Baghdad headquarters in 2003 accelerated the

UN-wide process of centralizing, standardizing, and bureaucratizing safety and
security procedures, which began with the introduction of MOSS (Minimum
15
Interview with Janet Lim, Geneva Headquarters, June 6 2008.
16
Interview with UNHCR official. Interview no. 2008I.
Operating Security Standards) in 2001. The impact of the Baghdad bomb was
immediate. A damning investigation of the attack, published in October 2003,
described a nonchalant attitude to security. The report concluded ‘that the cur-
rent security management system is dysfunctional. It provides little guarantee
of security to UN staff in Iraq or other high-risk environments and needs to be
reformed’ (United Nations, 2003).
UNHCR had adopted MOSS along with the other UN agencies. But its own
2004 staff security report noted a series of problems with MOSS: tension between
UNHCR and UN Headquarters on security matters; a feeling within UNHCR
that the one-size-fits-all UN security system did not address the refugee agen-
cy’s own particular needs and tasks; frustration among UNHCR field staff with
unresponsive and bureaucratic security systems at country level that hindered
them from doing their job. The problems were not just due to standardization,
but the ambiguities within this standardized system, leaving individual field
security officers unsure about their level of responsibility if a security incident
were to happen (UNHCR, 2004f: 23). This encouraged risk-averse behaviour,
where security officers preferred UN field staff—especially international staff—
to remain within the relative safety of high compound walls rather than enabling
their movement among the beneficiaries of aid. The situation was particularly
dysfunctional in Iraq. Hansen (2007: 49) describes the UN’s security posture at
its compound in reasonably safe Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, as ‘absurdly
out of step with the actual level of risk’, with ‘three layers of blast walls guarded
by three levels of armed guards’. Each time international staff wanted to venture
out from behind their three-layer walls in Erbil, approval had to be given by the
UN Department of Safety and Security in New York.
Although venting concerns about the UN wide security system, the
UNHCR report argued forcefully that the refugee agency itself needed to
develop a ‘security culture’, to the degree that ‘UNHCR staff members at all lev-
els are disciplined in their compliance with security rules and protocols, and
non-compliance is grounds for dismissal’ (UNHCR, 2004f: 14). A Division of
Emergency Security and Supply was created, one of two divisions under the
Assistant High Commissioner for Operations, in order to make staff security
an integral aspect of all field operations. A range of new security procedures
and measures were put in place, not all to the liking of the agency’s field staff.
The Ambiguous Security of Physical Protection
Inevitably the UN responded to direct attacks by increasing physical security,

erecting walls and barriers between itself and the local population, and some-
times travelling only with the protection of the military (whether UN or AU
peacekeepers, such as in Darfur, or parties to the conflict, such as the coali-

tion forces in Iraq). By October 2003, two months after the bombing of the UN
Headquarters, the UN had removed all but the most essential staff from Iraq and
moved the rest to within Baghdad’s Green Zone, a safe area protected by coali-
tion forces and also housing the coalition leadership. The few UNHCR interna-
tional staff left in Baghdad were not allowed to conduct field missions outside
of the Green Zone unless they received clearance from and were escorted by
coalition forces. Thus UNHCR’s security measures, dictated to it by the UN’s
New York headquarters, reinforced the image that it was a branch of the occupy-
ing coalition troops. The shrinking humanitarian space for independent, civilian
aid distribution (not to mention protection activities) in conflict zones, and the
measures the UN put in place in response to attacks on its staff, thus became
mutually reinforcing. In the words of one UNHCR staff member, talking about
Iraq: ‘How objective can you be when you fly in a Black Hawk helicopter?’17
The resistance within UNHCR to creating a ‘security culture’ remains
strong. Both veteran and younger staff worry that measures to protect their
own safety are setting them apart from the people they are there to protect and
assist. This is making their tasks, especially protection, harder to perform and
the legitimacy and respect from locals and beneficiaries harder to earn. One
veteran staff member echoed the views of many:
We have lost the use of common sense. Security is also about common sense. Not
just rules and restrictions. If you have a security system that restrains you so much,
why are you there at all? I tell the security people: you are there to help us do our
task efficiently; how to best minimize the risk while still doing the task. Not always
take the easy way out, saying we just cannot go there. Sometimes, yes, the risk is too
high. But often it is about minimizing risk rather than saying no.18
Practical security management systems have to some extent undermined
UNHCR’s diplomatic and normative efforts, discussed earlier, to bolster its
identity as an independent, neutral, protection agency. This contradiction was
felt keenly by both field staff and at Headquarters. Inside Iraq, the inability of
UNHCR to operate independently of coalition forces led the agency to attempt
a new form of humanitarian assistance: ‘remote control operations’.
The False Promise of Remote Control Operations
UNHCR never had a strong presence inside Iraq. From August 2003, only
a skeleton presence of international staff was retained, sheltering inside the
17
Interview with UNHCR staff member, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008A.
18
Interview with UNHCR staff member, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008G.
Green Zone. At first, the refugee agency focused almost solely on Iraqi return-
ees, mostly Shias from Iran, who arrived in modest numbers in the first cou-
ple of years after the invasion. But UNHCR was an insignificant actor on
the ground, with little funding. The agency seemed unwilling to become too
involved in the controversies around the US invasion. Its lack of engagement
with Iraq meant that the agency was slow to realize, and even slower to react to,
the mass displacement crisis unfolding inside the country. Sectarian violence
and attacks on minorities started in the first months after the invasion, then
gradually increased in scope until exploding into mass killings after the bomb-
ing of the Al Askari mosque, one of Shia Islam’s holiest sites, on 22 February
2006. The attack destroyed the mosque and led to immediate reprisals against
Sunnis, followed by escalating tit-for-tat violence (UNAMI, 2006).
Around the time when the golden dome of the Al Askari mosque collapsed
from the impact of the explosion, UNHCR was talking of winding down rather
than stepping up its Iraq operation. Its repatriation programme was coming
to an end, as few Iraqis were returning. It had hardly any funding and little
local knowledge. The UN as a whole had a poor reputation among Iraqis after
12 years of harsh UN sanctions, the Food for Oil corruption scandal, and the
reliance on American troops to provide security for UN staff and facilities after
the 2003 invasion. The assessment of one UNHCR staff member was stark: ‘we
don’t have access to people; we don’t have a good reputation’.19 UNHCR was
nevertheless unwilling to leave Iraq completely. It was damaging to the agen-
cy’s international reputation to be seen as unresponsive to the plight of Iraq’s
IDPs, and it hurt its staff members’ pride to be ignored in media and research
reports on Iraqi displacement. Since a large-scale operation inside Iraq was
deemed impossible, due to both security and funding considerations, UNHCR
experimented instead with remote control operations.
Remote control operations were an answer to the question of how to con-
tinue work if insecurity hindered the deployment of international staff. In
remote control operations, UNHCR relied on local implementing partners for
field presence, with international staff parachuting in occasionally and when
deemed safe, to oversee and advise on the work carried out. This became the
main form of operation within Iraq. By 2008, UNHCR had 16 protection and
legal advice centres around the country, run by local NGO partners as imple-
menting agents. But even with the somewhat improved security situation
inside Iraq following the US ‘surge’ in 2007, UNHCR had little control over
what was going on at the NGO centres. Clearance from the coalition forces
for international staff to leave the Green Zone needed 25 days’ advance notice,
19
Interview with senior UNHCR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008B.
and even cleared field missions were often cancelled last minute when the
promised military protection was withdrawn. As a result, UNHCR had little
oversight of what went on at the NGO protection centres. Communication
lines between international staff, barricaded in the Green Zone, and national
staff and implementing partners were poor. Due to their military escort by
coalition troops, visits by international staff could endanger the integrity of
the projects they visited, as well as the lives of national staff and implementing
NGO partners. For the same reason, Iraqi aid workers were unwilling to visit
the Green Zone, where UNHCR worked in close proximity to UN political
actors and the US coalition forces. Entering the Green Zone could single Iraqi
civilians out for attack by insurgent groups (Hansen, 2007).
As a result of these profound restrictions, remote control operations in Iraq
entailed little actual control, including with how, and for whom, money was
spent. Local NGOs did not have trained protection officers. Worse, sectarian
tensions were also penetrating into the offices of some of UNHCR’s implement-
ing partners. A report based on interviews with a wide range of humanitarian
actors and community leaders in Iraq noted that ‘many agencies also reported
increasing security-related stresses and inter-communal tensions within their
own staff, with resulting declines in effectiveness’ (Hansen, 2007: 46). The
report argued that ‘[p]‌erceptions of communal bias in decisions over resource
allocation and personnel management are also becoming a pressing problem’
(Hansen, 2007: 52). UNHCR was concerned that discrimination along sectar-
ian lines was taking place in the provision of advice and assistance. Some NGO
workers may have been discriminating in pursuit of sectarian agendas of their
own, others because providing protection and assistance to ‘wrong’ groups could
lead to the NGO itself becoming a target of violence. Acknowledging this reality,
and adopting a pragmatic response to the unique difficulties of operating within
Iraq, UNHCR felt it was inevitable to tailor the religious and ethnic identity of
national staff and implementing agents to the communities they served.
Corruption and misuse of funds were also a problem. A UN auditing report,
posted on Wikileaks, of UNHCR’s remote control operations in southern Iraq
was critical: ‘internal controls over programme related matters were assessed as
weak even taking into consideration the limitations imposed by remotely manag-
ing most of the programme activities’ (UN OIOS, 2008). In interviews, UNHCR
officials working on Iraq voiced their concern with where the money was going.
One official added that UNHCR had become too risk averse on behalf of its inter-
national staff: ‘For instance in Iraq: International staff cannot talk to IDPs, only
deal through our national colleagues. We don’t get the whole picture that way’.20
20
Interview with UNHCR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008F.
Early enthusiasm for the concept of remote control operations was followed
by the realization of its shortcomings in the Iraqi setting. As a result, the refu-
gee agency maintained a moderate level of activity on behalf of Iraq’s IDPs,
focusing instead its efforts on the more easily accessible—and at less risk to
security and reputation—Iraqi refugees in neighbouring Syria and Jordan.
The security situation was less stark, but also deteriorating, in Afghanistan.
Already in November 2003 (a bad year of casualties for the refugee agency),
a young UNHCR officer, Bettina Goislard, was assassinated in Ghazni while
travelling to work in her car—the first UN casualty in Afghanistan after the
2001 invasion. Her murder evidenced the resurgence of the Taleban and
marked the beginning of rapidly deteriorating security conditions for human-
itarian staff in Afghanistan. In 2008, UNHCR (2008e: 166) reported that 38
humanitarian workers had been killed, twice as many as the year before. By
the end of the decade, the Pakistani border regions with Afghanistan had
also become highly volatile, with both the Pakistani Taleban and tribal mili-
tias in the ascendant. Millions of Afghan refugees still lived on the Pakistani
side of the border, where UNHCR was managing the voluntary repatriation
operation. In 2009, three UNHCR staff members in Pakistan (two national,
one international) were killed, while John Solecki, the head of the UNHCR
office in Quetta, Balochistan, was kidnapped and released after two months.
In 2011, three guards were killed in a planned attack on the UNHCR office in
Kandahar.
Already in 2005, while the NATO coalition was still portraying the invasion
of Afghanistan as a success story, UNHCR (2006f: 294) noted that the ‘dete-
riorating security situation had a marked adverse effect on UNHCR’s pres-
ence, access and operational outreach’. The reduction in staff numbers on the
ground told the story: In 2002, 81 out of 598 UNHCR employees working
in Afghanistan had been international staff (UNHCR, 2003f: 298). Ten years
later, it employed 339 people in Afghanistan, only 29 of whom were inter-
national staff. By then, the refugee agency had ‘direct access to less than half
the country’ (UNHCR, 2012h: 172). Almost all international staff remained in
Kabul and a few other urban centres and relied on remote control for many
operational programmes.
An internal auditing report, posted on Wikileaks, makes clear the dif-
ficulty of ensuring remote control and oversight of operational activities in
Afghanistan. The audit found many questionable practices among UNHCR
implementing partners (including, particularly, the performance of the
Afghan government’s Ministry of Refugees and Repatriations, MORR). It con-
cluded nevertheless that, considering the difficulties of access and monitoring,
the overall performance was acceptable (OIOS, 2004). UNHCR was prepared
to reduce standards of oversight and the quality of performance from their
implementing partners as the price of continued operations in Afghanistan.

Even so, few within the agency saw remote control operations as a satisfactory
solution to the security squeeze in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Conclusion
9/11 and its aftermath in the North and the South accelerated UNHCR’s disil-
lusionment with the main tenet of its 1990s security discourse: that the power
of the language of security could be harnessed to convince states to deal com-
prehensively and in a refugee-friendly manner with displacement crises and
refugee and asylum flows. 9/11 was a watershed, but with precedents in the
protection disaster in the Great Lakes (and on a smaller scale in many other
places) and in the politicization of aid and humanitarian posturing of NATO
states during the Kosovo crisis. The optimism of the early 1990s was replaced
by grim realism in the early 2000s that UNHCR’s ability to influence donors
and warring parties by ‘speaking their language’ had backfired.
This chapter has shown how as a result the refugee agency dropped its
ambition to be a global security actor in favour of the ambition to become
the UN’s protection agency. The change had become a matter of credibility,
but also a matter of pragmatic assessment of its operational environment in
the 2000s. In the highly polarized political context of the post-9/11 period,
many situations of mass displacement were closely linked to the contest
between insurgents and international terrorist groups, on the one hand, and
the US-led counter-insurgency and counter-terror operations on the other.
In this environment, UNHCR had little political space in which to influ-
ence the refugee or asylum politics of donors, and concluded it was better
to assert its independent, non-political role rather than become complicit
in the security justifications used to undermine international protection
principles. The agency combined some examples of high-profile defiance
of US pressure, particularly when refusing to declare Iraq ‘safe’ for return
after the coalition’s ‘surge’ operation of 2007, with quietly and pragmatically
conducting refugee and IDP operations that were far from satisfactory from
a protection perspective but useful for host and donor states. This combina-
tion of principles and pragmatism was often muddled, but contributed to
improving the agency’s reputation as well as its funding situation over the
course of the decade.
14
Repatriating Afghan Refugees
UNHCR’s highest profile operation in the 2000s was its repatriation exercise
overseeing the return of more than five million Afghan refugees from neigh-
bouring states. This chapter studies the Afghan repatriation operation in order
to map the constrictive political space in which UNHCR operated. In addition
to the practical challenges of return and reintegration on this massive scale,
the repatriation operation presented the refugee agency with a fraught and
sensitive political situation, wedged as it was between the mutually distrustful
governments of Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and the US. Despite these con-
straints, which led to serious questions of the voluntariness and sustainability
of the returns, UNHCR nevertheless managed to carve out a role that allowed
some influence on the nature and pace of repatriation flows.
The return of Afghan refugees was high on the agenda of all the key actors
shaping UNHCR’s operational environment. I begin by accounting in broad
strokes for these interests, which left little leeway for UNHCR. As in ear-
lier chapters, I do not aim to provide an exhaustive account of all the goals
of all actors, but focus on the interests of central actors to the extent they
impacted on UNHCR’s work. This limits the discussion of the Afghan repa-
triation operation to the US, the two main refugee host states, Pakistan and
Iran, and the Afghan central government. I do not include the Taleban. The
motivations of Taleban insurgents were pertinent to the earlier discussion
of shrinking humanitarian space. In this analysis of the repatriation opera-
tion, the insurgency and attacks on humanitarian staff form the backdrop for
UNHCR’s assessment of the feasibility and desirability of refugee repatriation.
Considering this backdrop, how did the refugee agency navigate, negotiate
and mediate between the interests of the governments of the US, Pakistan,
Iran and Afghanistan?
The atmosphere was less polarized in Afghanistan than in Iraq, particularly
in the first five years after invasion, when a success story could be told of mil-
lions of Afghan refugees returning from Pakistan and Iran. But from 2006
onwards, repatriation flows slowed down and evidence emerged of insecu-
rity, hardship and internal displacement for returnees. The ensuing analysis
focuses in particular on this period between 2006 and 2012.
US Interests: UNHCR Repatriation Operation, but

Bilateral Aid
The interests of the US governmental and military actors had the greatest
impact on UNHCR’s Afghan repatriation operation, both as the occupying
power in Afghanistan and as the refugee agency’s biggest donor. The US gov-
ernment had a strong interest in the repatriation of Afghan refugees, but com-
peting interests sometimes got in the way of this goal.
First, as a donor, the US government had an interest in repatriation in gen-
eral. During UNHCR’s lean years from 1997 to 2002, when its budget slipped
well below the US$1 billion mark to which it had become accustomed, the US
was among the donors that had tightened their purse strings. The low-point
was in 2000, when UNHCR received just over US$700 million in overall con-
tributions. From 2000 to 2004, US contributions remained steady at around
US$250 to US$300 million.1 UNHCR was ‘encouraged to work towards a
more achievable budget that emphasized core functions and clear priorities’
by EXCOM (UNHCR, 2000k: 3). The most desirable of these ‘core functions’
was solutions: a reduction in refugee and asylum numbers, preferably through
voluntary repatriation. The opportunity after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan
to repatriate the world’s single biggest refugee population therefore came at an
apt moment for UNHCR. Taking charge of the repatriation operation helped
improve the perception that the agency was useful not only as an outlet for
donors’ humanitarian ambitions to save lives, but also to achieve their political
interests in reducing the refugee and asylum seeker burden on states.
Welcome as it was, the global reduction in refugee numbers did not rank
high on the list of the US government’s political priorities. But, as was the case
with Kosovar Albanian refugees in 1999, the return of Afghan refugees after
1
Funding information is available in UNHCR’s annual global reports.
Repatriating Afghan Refugees 273
the 2001 invasion became central to US strategic interests. Mass refugee return
was a propaganda victory for the US. It could be showcased as ‘voting with the
feet’ in reverse; proof of the popularity and legitimacy among ordinary Afghans
of the overthrow of the Taleban and the rebuilding of Afghanistan under the
new government of President Hamid Karzai. A report by the Congressional
Research Service to the 110th Congress in 2007 put the point across firmly:
The safe and voluntary return of refugees to Afghanistan is not only a major part
of the U.S. reconstruction effort in Afghanistan, but also an important indicator
of its success. To the extent that refugees continue to return, it can be seen that
Afghans are taking part in the future of their country. (Margesson, 2007)
The desire to tell a repatriation success story was tempered by developments
on the ground, particularly from 2005 onwards. As insurgency gained force
and insecurity spread, concern grew that returns could contribute to worsen-
ing security conditions inside Afghanistan. Thus, while the US government
desired refugee repatriation, it was not deaf to UNHCR arguments about
sustainability. Cables from the US embassy in Kabul, released by Wikileaks,
showed that US diplomats there viewed UNHCR officers as useful sources of
information on the refugee situation in Pakistan, returnees in Afghanistan,
and the Afghan government’s (lack of) initiatives on refugee issues.
While the US government took on a highly visible role in the reconstruction
and humanitarian effort inside Afghanistan, it had no interest in taking charge
of the repatriation operation from neighbouring countries. This was left under
UNHCR control. Any other decision would have undermined claims that
returns were spontaneous and voluntary, and not the result of US pressure. It
would also have put the US government in an awkward diplomatic position as
a negotiator between refugee host and sending states. Particularly, the US gov-
ernment did not want to enter into negotiations with Iran on refugee matters,
considering the animosity between itself and the Iranian government.
Thus far, US and UNHCR interests were largely in line. However, when
turning to US interests inside Afghanistan, these were less complementary
to UNHCR’s repatriation operation. Part of the strategy inside Afghanistan
was for the US to take on, and take credit for, large-scale reconstruction and
humanitarian work, as last chapter’s discussion of humanitarian space showed.
This undermined UNHCR’s position inside Afghanistan. The militarization of
aid made it harder for the agency to move freely around the country, while the
bilateralization of aid restricted its funding flows. This contributed to making
UNHCR’s efforts on behalf of returnees more moderate and short-term than
the agency would have liked.
The divergence of US interests can to a large extent be explained by
institutional divisions inside the US government. The State Department
represented the US government’s political interest in successful repatriation,

while the Pentagon represented the military interest in ‘winning hearts and
minds’ through the strategic use of bilateral aid. In this conflict of interests,
the Pentagon largely won out. Compared to the Pentagon’s vast and expand-
ing aid spending, the budget of the State Department’s Bureau of Population,
Refugees, and Migration (PRM), was not just small, but dwindling. The PRM’s
funding, mostly channeled through UNHCR, ICRC and other international
organizations, for work on behalf of Afghan refugees and returnees dropped
from US$160 million in 2002, to US$61.5 million in 2003 and US$47 mil-
lion in 2005 (Margesson, 2007: 12–13). Thus while the US government saw
it as in its interest to urge and facilitate repatriation of Afghan refugees, the
State Department did not put sufficient monetary investment into this goal to
ensure a broad based, long-term reconstruction, repatriation and reintegra-
tion plan aimed at making returns sustainable. This stands in stark contrast
to the vast sums spent by the Pentagon just on the Commanders’ Emergency
Response Program (CERP), where humanitarian and development decisions
were made by military commanders based on local, short-term military needs.
In 2012, the US government spent US$400 million on CERP projects, while
it spent US$81 million on migration and refugee assistance (SIGAR, 2012: 5).
The Interests of Pakistan and Iran: Veteran Host States
Pakistan and Iran have hosted millions of Afghan refugees for decades, often
with little engagement or help from the rest of the world, particularly in the
case of Iran. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, both countries pro-
vided generous asylum for Afghan refugees, and allowed Mujahedin fighters
to use their territory (including refugee camps) as bases. The hosts became less
supportive of refugees during the Taleban regime in the 1990s, but generally
retained an open border policy. Both countries’ governments were aware of
the economic contributions the refugees made to their economy as labourers
in textile, agriculture, construction and (in the case of Iran) the oil and gas
industries. In Iran most refugees lived outside of camps. Pakistan had a camps
policy, but many Afghans made their way to urban areas for employment. In
both Pakistan and Iran, an increased reluctance to host Afghan refugees from
the early 1990s onwards was linked to reduced humanitarian and other aid
from UNHCR, WFP and bilateral donors after the withdrawal of Soviet troops
from Afghanistan.
After the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistani and Iranian perceptions
of Afghan refugees changed for the worse, both among the population and
governments. This was not only due to changes inside Afghanistan. Attitudes
towards refugees and asylum seekers were hardening across the world. Afghan
refugees suffered from the general feeling among Southern refugee host states
of carrying an unduly heavy burden, at the same time as Northern states
attempted to reduce their, in comparison, small number of asylum seekers in
the name of security and social cohesion. The idea of burden-sharing, always
difficult, was at a historical low within the international refugee regime. The
newly prevalent combative attitude was exemplified by Pakistan’s top admin-
istrator on Afghan refugee matters, Habibullah Khan, on the occasion of his
government’s threat to revoke refugee status for all Afghans by the end of
2012: ‘The refugees have become a threat to law and order, security, demogra-
phy, economy and local culture. Enough is enough. [ . . . ] If the international
community is so concerned, they should open the doors of their countries to
these refugees’ (quoted in Shah, 2012).
Both Pakistan and Iran were struggling with worsening economic condi-
tions in the latter half of the 2000s. Lawlessness increased in both countries’
border areas, but particularly in Pakistan, whose central government gradually
lost its ability to assert control over Baluchistan and other frontier regions with
Afghanistan. Both Pakistan and Iran increasingly viewed Afghan refugees
through a security lens, albeit coupled with a more pragmatic understanding
of the refugees’ economic contributions. Pakistan’s powerful security organs
routinely accused Afghans of terrorism, crime and violence on Pakistani terri-
tory, and also saw refugee repatriation as a tool with which to put pressure on
Kabul. Thus, the fate of the refugees was caught up in the conflict and distrust
between Pakistan and Afghanistan’s governments, wherein both accused the
other of supporting their respective insurgents and terrorist groups. Overall,
pressure on Afghans to repatriate increased in intensity over the course of the
decade. Pakistan declared its intention to repatriate all Afghans by 2009, a
deadline later extended to the end of 2012.
Like Pakistan, Iran has seen centuries of labour migration from Afghanistan.
Afghan workers add to the workforces of the oil and gas sector, agriculture
and construction. Afghan refugees had the right to live, work and travel any-
where in the country. This welcoming attitude changed gradually during the
1990s, when Afghans were no longer understood as religious refugees fleeing
Soviet occupation. But since Afghans in Iran, whether refugees or economic
migrants, were viewed from a labour migration perspective, attitudes against
them hardened in step with the faltering economy in the latter half of the 2000s
due to a combination of the global economic downturn and international eco-
nomic sanctions against the Teheran regime.
The interest of the government of Iran in the 2000s can be summed up as
the wish to benefit from Afghan labour, while controlling the influx in a man-
ner commensurate to its labour needs. To achieve this goal, Iran has on several
occasions deported Afghans—but only those deemed illegal immigrants, not

those holding refugee registration cards. A stronger, more cohesive state than
Pakistan, Iran has been able to assert relative control over its border regions
with Afghanistan, and has voiced fewer security concerns over the presence of
Afghans on its territory.
The Interests of Afghanistan’s Government: Not That

Interested?
The new government of Afghanistan after the 2001 invasion, led by President
Hamid Karzai, shared with the US government the view that refugee repa-
triation was a potent symbol of the success of Afghanistan’s post-Taleban rule.
In practice, the Afghan government was slow to address the fate of returnees
once they had crossed the border, despite setting up a separate Ministry of
Repatriations and Refugees (MORR). Beyond the registration and repatriation
packages received at UNHCR repatriation centres on the border, and the lim-
ited work of UNHCR and other aid agencies targeting returnees and the com-
munities receiving them, the millions of returning refugees were neglected.
Afghanistan has long benefitted from remittances from the vast Afghan
diaspora abroad, whether in neighbouring countries or further afield. While
the Afghan government wanted refugees to return, they also wanted opportu-
nities for Afghans to stay and work abroad. For the refugees who returned, the
Afghan government generally wanted them to go ‘home’ to the village from
which they, their parents or grandparents had originally fled, years or decades
earlier. Refugees themselves often preferred to move to urban areas, some-
times out of choice, sometimes because village life offered them neither secu-
rity nor livelihood. In some cases, their village no longer existed, having been
destroyed in one of Afghanistan’s many wars. Many headed to Kabul, which
became one of the fastest growing cities in the world, sprouting large informal
settlements. Although estimates vary, the city at least doubled in size between
2001 and 2010, from 2 million to 4.5 million (Metcalfe and Haysom, 2012: 7).
The Afghan government’s response to urban migration was neglectful at
best, hostile at worst. One government official was quoted as saying that ‘the
best thing for the wellbeing of Kabul is to clean the IDPs from the city’ (ODI,
2012: 28). Arguing that to build housing, schools and healthcare facilities for
the new urban arrivals would tempt even more people to come, the govern-
ment put few efforts into urban planning. This strategy had little effect other
than contributing to a growing humanitarian crisis among Afghanistan’s
urban poor. A US diplomatic cable, released by Wikileaks, confirmed the
general concern that the Afghan authorities neglected returnees. Discussing
the lack of land allocation to returnees, the cable commented that those land
allocation sites that had been designated by MORR for returnees ‘are remote
and lack infrastructure, potable water, and economic opportunities, thus mak-
ing it difficult to support returnees’.2 Another cable quoted UNHCR’s country
representative at the time, Salvatore Lombardo, as telling the US ambassa-
dor ‘that there was a “sad lack of capacity” within the GOA [Government of
Afghanistan] to deal with refugee issues’ and that ‘MORR had been consist-
ently unfortunate in the selection of ministers’.3
Humanitarian and development aid distribution in Afghanistan has been
plagued by corruption and abuse at all levels of government. MORR is one of
the more notoriously corrupt ministries. UNHCR auditors, in an unpublished
report, singled MORR out in a warning that ‘[f]‌unding of material and cash
assistances with this partner should be limited to the maximum extent pos-
sible’ (OIOS, 2004). MORR also had a reputation for ineptitude and lack of
planning.4 Considering the pervasiveness of corruption, the aim to cream off
humanitarian funds earmarked for returnees must be included as one of the
‘interests’ of many Afghan government actors.
The Afghan repatriation

operation: A sliding scale of
voluntariness
When summing up the main interests of state actors affecting UNHCR’s

repatriation programme for Afghan refugees, a contradiction becomes clear.
While all the central actors—the governments of the US, Pakistan, Iran and
Afghanistan—wanted the repatriation of Afghan refugees, their interests at the
same time worked to some degree against UNHCR’s aim of achieving sustaina-
ble and voluntary return in safety and dignity. In the case of the US, the billions
of dollars spent on reconstruction and humanitarian action in Afghanistan
dwarfed the relatively modest sums earmarked for refugees and returnees.
There was no grand strategy for the reintegration of returnees, more a hope
that once you have encouraged refugees to return, they would disappear as a
problem—or their needs would become identical to those of other Afghans.
The Afghan government encouraged return but neglected urban development
2
Cable 09KABUL3912_a, Kabul: 7 December 2009.
3
Cable 07KABUL2324_a, Kabul: July 19 2007.
4
This is clear from US diplomatic cables released on Wikileaks and a host of NGO and
research reports.
and internal displacement challenges. Iran’s interests were perhaps most

straightforward; the government wanted refugee repatriation, while keeping
open a channel for seasonal or shorter-term labour migration on demand.
Pakistan was more ambivalent. There was strong domestic pressure to repat-
riate all Afghan refugees, who were suitable scapegoats for the lawlessness
and violence of the country’s tribal and frontier regions. At the same time the
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, took
advantage of the refugee situation. ISI has long been accused of supporting
the Afghan Taleban, and the refugee camps could be used in recruitment and
planning of militant activity across the border. For instance, in one instance in
2009, militants camouflaged as returnees were arrested by Afghan police at a
border crossing when it was found that their truck was filled with explosives
rather than belongings.5
In this climate, the challenge for UNHCR was to oversee a repatriation
operation where returns were voluntary, timely and sustainable while manag-
ing the great—and exaggerated—expectations of host states and donors of a
speedy return of the entire Afghan refugee population.
UNHCR was immediately enthusiastic about the prospects for mass vol-
untary repatriation. In December 2001, only a month after the Taleban was
ousted, UNHCR re-established its offices in Afghanistan and began working
towards tripartite repatriation agreements between the newly established gov-
ernment of Afghanistan, the two main host states, Iran and Pakistan, and itself
(Lumpp et al., 2004: 150). The tripartite agreements (signed in April 2002 in
the case of Iran, but taking another year in the case of Pakistan) helped reduce
conflicts and misunderstandings between Afghanistan and its neighbours
over repatriation issues. Both tripartite agreements promised to uphold core
principles of refugee protection: the voluntary nature of return in safety and
dignity; a guarantee that UNHCR would have access to refugees and return-
ees; and the establishment of a tripartite commission to oversee the operation.
There was no question within UNHCR’s leadership whether the refugee
agency should take charge of the repatriation operation. Repatriation move-
ments and returnees are core to its mandate as well as popular with donor
states. UNHCR had long advocated repatriation as the preferred solution for
refugees, and did not want to miss the opportunity to take charge of this vast
return operation. Furthermore, large numbers of Afghans were already return-
ing spontaneously, with or without the intervention of UNHCR. The agency
acted quickly to establish some measure of order to the repatriation flow.
5
See US diplomatic cable from the Kabul office, released on Wikileaks, cable
no. 09KABUL838_a, Kabul: 3 April 2009.
UNHCR’s leadership added clear value for host governments, the US and its
NATO coalition, and Afghanistan’s transition government alike. That the guard-
ian of the international refugee regime was in charge added legitimacy to the
repatriation process. All Afghans repatriating through the agency’s voluntary
repatriation centres were registered and counted, thus providing better infor-
mation on the numbers, nature, needs and destination of returnees. The volun-
tary repatriation packages and cash handed out at the repatriation centres were
incentives for refugees not just to return, but to do so in an orderly manner. The
Voluntary Repatriation Forms issued by UNHCR at the border had the added
benefit of functioning as travel and ID documents (Lumpp et al., 2004: 165).
The refugee agency itself was in need of an operational success story after
years of criticism, specifically of its performance during the Kosovo crises, but
also general accusations of having stretched itself too far and overstepped its
mandate. UNHCR needed to show itself as quick, efficient and useful in its
service both to refugees and states. When millions of Afghans returned, they
showed that the ‘preferred’ durable solution of voluntary repatriation could
become a reality even for the most protracted of refugee situations. Afghan
returns were the largest contributor to the drop in the global refugee popula-
tion from 12 million in 2001 to 9.5 million in 2003. Thus, UNHCR was enthu-
siastic in its decision to take charge of what it called the largest repatriation
operation in its history.
The operation boosted UNHCR’s donor relations. In a period where ‘donor
fatigue’ and hostility to asylum was widespread, the returning Afghans could
be celebrated by both donor states and UNHCR as a major achievement. Over
two million refugees returned in 2002 alone, 1.8 million of them assisted
by UNHCR (Lumpp et al., 2004: 150), leading to accolades for the refugee
agency. Summing up the 2002 annual EXCOM meeting, the Chairman noted
that ‘[t]‌here was broad recognition and commendation of UNHCR’s efforts
to assist Afghan refugees and displaced persons to return over the past year.
The UNHCR team was credited as being “arguably the most effective for any
refugee crisis at any time in the past”’ (UNHCR, 2002d: 36).
Because of this convergence of interests in refugee return among host states,
donors, and UNHCR itself, the refugee agency was reluctant to come across as
a brake on the speed of returns. The refugee agency asserted officially that, ‘[i]‌n
Afghanistan, UNHCR’s voluntary repatriation strategy is that of “facilitating”
(as opposed to “promoting”) the voluntary repatriation of Afghans upon their
fully informed request, as conditions—in the current transition period and
within areas in which military action involving the use of force are ongoing—
are not yet considered fully conducive for most refugees to return’ (Lumpp
et al., 2004: 162). In reality, the distinction between facilitating and promoting
was harder to make. UNHCR itself may not have directly urged refugees to
return, but its repatriation centres and cash handouts unavoidably added to
the many different incentives and pressures on Afghan refugees.
In the first two years after the invasion, the distinction between promotion
and facilitation was largely academic. Returns were happening so fast, and in
an atmosphere of optimism, that there was little concern about its voluntary
nature, despite continued insecurity and lawlessness inside Afghanistan. But
problems were in the offing from the start. In a study of return patterns in
2002–3, at the height of the mass repatriation movement, UNHCR acknowl-
edged that ‘the numbers returning to urban areas (Kabul, Jalalabad, Kunduz)
was much higher than anticipated’, with 34 percent heading to Kabul (Lumpp
et al., 2004: 150). The same study also highlighted that 61 percent of this early
flow of returnees were refugees from the Taleban period who were relatively
recent exiles, and that 70 percent were landless (Lumpp et al., 2004: 150–1).
Insecurity within Afghanistan was also worsening. An editorial in Refugees
Magazine from 2003 revealed tensions between UNHCR’s wish to celebrate a
much-needed repatriation success story and its recognition of the dire situation
awaiting returnees. Optimistically entitled ‘Going Home . . . The good news’,
the editorial went on more ambiguously to quote High Commissioner Ruud
Lubbers as describing ‘the continuing return of civilians to Afghanistan amidst
economic ruin and a worsening security situation as a “remarkable achieve-
ment”’ (Refugees Magazine, 2003: 3). It was indeed remarkable that so many
continued to return, considering the conditions in Afghanistan. So remarkable
that it began to raise concern whether refugees were returning voluntarily and
in conditions of safety and dignity, as the tripartite agreements stipulated.
The quote from High Commissioner Lubbers reveals his personal position
on Afghan repatriation. In interviews, UNHCR staff working on Afghanistan
said Lubbers saw the repatriation as a ‘flagship operation’ and that he was ‘very,
very keen’, ensuring resources were available and the best people deployed.6
The diversion of resources towards Afghanistan was not sufficiently matched
by increased donations, which meant that UNHCR operations in other parts
of the world suffered (Lubbers, 2002).
Soon after the ousting of the Taleban, Lubbers advanced the idea of work-
ing towards cessation of refugee status for Afghan refugees by 2005. An inter-
nal UNHCR debate during 2002 ended in the conclusion that this would be
premature, which indeed it was. Where the idea had originally come from is
unclear, but there is no doubt that a declaration from UNHCR of cessation
of refugee status for Afghan refugees would have been highly popular with
regional host states, the US and its European NATO allies (countries that, in
6
Interview with UNHCR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008C.
addition to deploying troops in Afghanistan, also hosted many Afghan asylum

seekers and refugees). NATO pushed early on for closure of the refugee camps
in Pakistan, considering them a source of instability. The idea of cessation
met with strong resistance within UNHCR, however, and the agency adopted
instead the more credible position of facilitating but not encouraging return.
Disagreement within UNHCR on how to handle repatriation to an impov-
erished, chaotic and increasingly violent country continued. Its Pakistan and
Afghanistan offices held differing views. This was understandable considering
their very different vantage points: Afghan based staff saw the problems of reinte-
gration, inability to monitor the fate of returnees, and the dangers of mass returns
leading to social, economic and political instability. Pakistan based staff noticed
the mounting lawlessness and violence in Pakistan’s border regions, and the pres-
sure from Pakistani, US and NATO officials to repatriate all Afghan refugees.
By 2005, the period of ‘easy returns’ (of recently arrived refugees who had
retained strong links to Afghanistan) had come to an end. A 2002 census of the
refugee population in Pakistan, conducted by UNHCR and the government of
Pakistan, revealed the difficulties ahead. First, it showed that there were many
more Afghans in Pakistan than the Pakistani government had thought. Second,
the refugees had remained in exile so long that ‘return’ would entail a painful
and difficult process of establishing a new life in an almost foreign country. The
census revealed that ‘the vast majority of Afghan families in Pakistan arrived
in the first years of the refugee crisis; over 50 percent arrived in 1979 and 1980
alone’, and that ‘a very substantial number of the Afghans remaining in Pakistan
were in fact born in Pakistan—not Afghanistan’ (Margesson, 2007: 4).
As returns were slowing down, and the prospects of future mass returns on
a par with the period from 2002 to 2005 looked slim, host states’ impatience
with remaining Afghan refugees mounted. UNHCR’s stance on where volun-
tary repatriation ended and forced repatriation began was ambivalent. On the
one hand, it made it clear that any deportation of Afghans with refugee ID
cards would constitute refoulement and would be unacceptable. On the other
hand, agency staff quietly acknowledged that it could be a matter of chance
whether a particular Afghan became registered as refugee or declared an ille-
gal immigrant. As one UNHCR staff member explained: ‘Iran is deporting
a lot of unregistered Afghans. UNHCR cannot call it refoulement since they
are unregistered. We can help them to return in dignity and get help on the
Afghan side of the border. But we cannot call it refoulement without getting
the registration system in trouble’.7 The refugee agency seemed reluctant to
pursue the issue of refugees falling through the registration cracks, in fear of
7
Interview with UNHCR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008J.
damaging working relationships with Iran. UNHCR reckoned that most of the
unregistered Afghans in Iran, and almost all deportees, were in the country
primarily in search of work. The same could probably be said about many of
those with refugee status, since most Afghans who chose not to repatriate did
so out of a mix of economic and security motivations. UNHCR focused its
efforts on facilitating controlled and staged returns, protecting vulnerable ref-
ugees through resettlement programmes, and slowing deportations and return
flows in order to avoid harmful effects on Afghanistan’s stability and economy.
UNHCR had a similar pragmatic attitude to forced returns in the case of
Pakistan, although the agency viewed the government there as pursuing a
more aggressive, hostile and intemperate policy towards Afghans. It criticized
the scapegoating of refugees and viewed Pakistan’s declaration that all refugees
must return by 2009 (a deadline later pushed back to 2012) as unworkable and
counterproductive. To call returns ‘voluntary’ sometimes took a leap of imagi-
nation, as in the early 2007 repatriation drive for undocumented Afghans in
Pakistan, headed by UNHCR. Many of the returnees gave as their reason for
returning the ‘threat of arrest, detention and deportation’ in Pakistan. The
account of this repatriation drive in a cable from the US embassy in Kabul
showcased the prevailing ambiguous understanding of the status of Afghans in
Pakistan. The returnees in question were undocumented, but the cable implic-
itly agreed that at least some were ‘genuine refugees’:
There are some indications that many of these ‘returnees’ are not genuine refu-
gees but regular border-crossers eager to take advantage of a generous UNHCR
repatriation package. The 2007 UNHCR repatriation package is $100 per returnee
verses [sic] an average of $23 per returnee in 2006.8
As conditions in Pakistan deteriorated, both politically and economically,
it was clear from interviews with returnees that UNHCR’s encashment cen-
tres, providing returnees with cash grants, served as repatriation incentives,
somewhat undermining UNHCR’s official position of facilitating rather than
encouraging return:
Most said poor economic conditions in Pakistan were the main factor in decid-
ing to return. A few said they feared spreading insecurity could eventually reach
them in Pakistan. They chose to return sooner rather than later, reckoning that
the international community would turn its attention to the humanitarian crisis
in Pakistan and withdraw its support for Afghan returnees. In particular, they
wanted to take advantage of the cash assistance provided to returnees (approxi-
mately $100 per person) while they thought it would still be offered. 9
8
Cable no. 07KABUL1744_a, Kabul: 24 May 2007.
9
Diplomatic cable from US embassy in Kabul, 17 May 2009. Cable no 09KABUL1257_a.
For UNHCR, maintaining the often fictional distinction (in terms of expe-
riences and reasons for flight) between registered refugees and unregistered
illegals enabled it to avoid some difficult questions regarding the sliding
scale of voluntary return: The agency decried (most cases of) refoulement of
registered refugees, but otherwise remained quiet about forced return and
deportations of non-registered Afghans in refugee-like situations—indeed
facilitating forced return through registering and assisting those forced back
to Afghanistan. UNHCR adopted this approach partly because of realities on
the ground. To do otherwise, and to come across as against repatriation, could
mean that the refugee agency lost what influence it had and its good relations
with donors.
But many within UNHCR also felt that the status of Afghans in Pakistan and
Iran, whether registered as refugees or not, fell into a grey zone. Monitoring
and research showed that returnees were not specifically targeted for per-
secution or discrimination. They were experiencing the same kinds of (not
inconsiderable) hardships as other Afghans were. The refugee agency could
not be entirely sure about this conclusion, though, since staff were not able
to monitor the fate of returnees in the most violent and volatile regions of
Afghanistan. At the same time, the situation for Afghans in Iran and Pakistan
was getting worse, both economically and politically, including harassment,
beatings, arrests and summary deportations. The question arose: were Afghan
refugees better off in their host states or back in Afghanistan? The answer was
not entirely obvious. For camp dwellers in the increasingly lawless and violent
frontier regions of Pakistan, return might be a better option. For urban refu-
gees with jobs and livelihoods in their host states, return meant in most cases a
deterioration of living conditions. In 2012, the UN Secretary-General reported
that ‘recent UNHCR studies show that up to 60 percent of returnees are con-
sidered to be living in worse conditions and experiencing significant problems
rebuilding their lives in Afghanistan’ (UN Secretary-General, 2012: 6). Such
findings led UNHCR to urge a slow pace of returns, but not to abandon the
overall aim of repatriation.
Great Expectations, greater

frustrations
UNHCR had to contend with great, and increasingly unrealistic, expec-

tations of refugee returns. The initial enthusiasm with which host states,
donors, and indeed High Commissioner Lubbers himself, had foreseen the
end to one of the world’s largest and longest standing refugee populations
did not last long. UNHCR surveys of refugees and returnees showed already
in 2002 that the pace of return could not last. Too many refugees had estab-
lished deep roots in their host countries; too few opportunities awaited the
majority of the returnees who did not own land or possess the labour skills,
education, or economic resources to re-establish themselves in Afghanistan.
Adding to the frustration of host states, censuses of the remaining Afghan
refugees after the first mass repatriation movement showed hardly any dent
in the remaining refugee population. Before the 2001 invasion, Pakistan
had estimated its Afghan refugee population at around two million. ‘Almost
everyone was caught off-guard, when subsequently 2.15 million Afghans
returned in 2002, and yet most of the camps in Pakistan (and to some extent
the cities in Iran) continued to house large numbers of Afghan refugees’
(Margesson, 2007:3). Pakistan’s encampment policy had led many Afghans
to slip unnoticed into urban centres rather than opt for registered life in the
camps. The 2002 census revealed that around half of all Afghans in Pakistan
lived, previously uncounted, in urban areas. In March 2005, UNHCR and
the Government of Pakistan conducted a new census of all Afghans (not
just registered refugees) in Pakistan. This time the number had increased to
just over 3 million (UNHCR, 2006f: 304).
Fast forward to 2009, after the return of five million Afghans, and there
were still around two million refugees in Pakistan and one million in Iran
(plus around another million unregistered ‘illegal’ migrants estimated by the
Government of Iran) (UNHCR, 2009k). The stubborn numbers had many
explanations. Most important was the host governments’ and UNHCR’s cen-
sus and registration drives, providing a more accurate picture of the Afghan
population in exile. Births and population growth among the Afghan refu-
gee population also contributed to the increase. And fluid borders, particu-
larly with Pakistan, led to much informal cross-border movement in both
directions. Worsening conditions within Pakistan and Iran, with fewer jobs
and more harassment (including large-scale police raids on informal urban
refugee settlements in Pakistan), also led previously unregistered refugees
to come forward in order to qualify for repatriation assistance for returning
to Afghanistan. Finally, there was suspicion of some fraud, where the same
returnees re-crossed the border in order to acquire more than one cash grant.
This may have inflated return figures, although UNHCR instituted more rigor-
ous repatriation registration practices early on.
Whatever the reasons, great expectations turned to greater frustration,
particularly in Pakistan. The perception of Afghans as drug runners, bandits
and terrorists became widespread, and were combined with economic wor-
ries as the country’s economy struggled. In 2006 and 2007 the Government
of Pakistan closed several refugee camps due to security concerns. Since in
reality, refugees had nowhere to go but back to Afghanistan, this constituted

forced repatriation (Margesson, 2007). Mostly, though, Pakistan abided by the
Tripartite Agreement, at least formally, by offering residents of camps des-
tined for closure the option of moving to other (not necessarily appropriate or
safe) camps. Iran also deported hundreds of thousands of Afghans from the
mid-2000s onwards.
Despite this environment, UNHCR did not distance itself from the Afghan
repatriation operation. It retained its ambiguous stance on the question of
forced return of Afghans who did not have refugee documentation. But even
if the agency refused to call the many forced returns refoulement, it saw it as its
duty to convince host states to slow down the pressure on Afghans to return.
The aim was to ensure a return process that was as voluntary as possible.
The diplomatic role of managing the expectations of host states and donors
became central to UNHCR’s strategy in the Afghan repatriation operation.
UNHCR’s approach to managing expectations is exemplified in a diplo-
matic cable from 2007, which describes a meeting between UNHCR’s coun-
try representative, Salvatore Lombardo, and the US ambassador in Kabul.
The UNHCR representative did not criticize the aim of continued substantial
repatriation, but warned against politicization, inflammatory statements and
unrealistic expectations. The aim was to get all parties—including the US—to
see the benefits of accepting that repatriation would be slow:
Lombardo noted that, while repatriations of Afghan refugees were proceeding,
GOP/GOA [Governments of Pakistan and Afghanistan] ‘politicization’ of the ref-
ugee issue and, particularly, the camp closings was souring the bilateral dialogue.
Afghan refusal to acknowledge their lack of capacity to absorb large numbers of
returns, coupled with unreasonable Pakistani return targets and the GOP’s broad
brush characterization of the refugees and the camps as ‘security threats’, made for
a difficult working environment. Both sides, he suggested, need to reduce their
rhetoric and set reasonable expectations if progress is to be achieved. Returns are
going to continue to be slow.10
The refugee agency coupled such private advice with public statements
aimed at convincing hosts and donors that some Afghans needed to remain
in exile:
The upsurge in violence in Afghanistan since 2006 has rekindled refugees’ con-
cerns not only about security and the political stability of their country, but
the viability of supporting their families in their homeland under current con-
ditions. The gap between the living conditions and economic opportunities in
Afghanistan and the neighbouring countries is considerable. (UNHCR, 2009k: 2)
10
See Cable 07KABUL2324_a, Kabul: 19 July 2007.
UNHCR managed to convince Pakistan to extend its ‘deadline’ for the return
of all Afghans from end of 2009 to the end of 2012, and then by increments of
6 month extensions in 2013. It could not convince the government to abandon
such deadlines altogether, but considering the intensity of distrust between
Pakistan and Afghanistan’s governments, the lawlessness of the refugee host-
ing areas, and Pakistan’s deteriorating economic and security conditions, it
was an achievement for UNHCR (of course together with other actors) to
avoid mass refugee deportation.
The refugee agency also managed to convince key donors, including the US,
of the need to continue providing aid for Afghans in Pakistan and Iran, not
just for returnees. This made it easier for UNHCR to urge host states to allow
refugees to stay who did not want to repatriate. A turning point took place
around 2006, when the US and its NATO allies had to accept that security
conditions were worsening in Afghanistan. From the perspective of military
strategy—the perspective that carried most weight with the US government—
UNHCR’s arguments against mass forced return were convincing. If hundreds
of thousands of people who had been in exile for decades and who had few
resources or links to the country were forcibly repatriated, it would surely add
to instability. Employed and productive Afghans sending remittances home
from Pakistan and Iran were more conducive to reconstruction than unem-
ployed and impoverished returnees sheltering in Kabul’s informal settlements.
Speaking in 2008, a UNHCR staff member involved in the Afghanistan opera-
tion said that the ‘[b]‌uzzwords now are peacebuilding and post-conflict recon-
struction: Why it is important to include refugees in peacebuilding. They have
a positive role to play. Refugees come back, bring skills, often more access to
education’.11 But they could only play a positive role if their return was man-
aged, voluntary, and sustainable.
To some extent this strategy worked. UNHCR struggled to obtain funding
for its refugee programmes in Pakistan and Iran in the early 2000s (interna-
tional assistance had been greatly reduced already in the mid-1990s, contrib-
uting to the growing hostility towards refugees in host countries (Margesson,
2007: 6)). As late as 2005, the agency warned how the ‘significant reduction of
the operational budget [for its refugee operation in Pakistan] had a negative
impact on the quality of assistance delivered in camps’ (UNHCR, 2006f: 305).
By 2008, the agency was generally happy with donor relations and funding
flows for its Pakistan operations, emphasizing the need to support refugee
hosting areas as much as camps themselves. This said, funding for refugee and
returnee operations were a drop in the ocean compared to the vast military
Interview with UNHCR official, Geneva Headquarters. Interview no. 2008C.

11
spending in Afghanistan, and much of humanitarian and development aid

funds were distributed according to military-strategic needs.
How did UNHCR fare?
UNHCR spent much of the 2000s reasserting its role and reputation as a
protection agency. In the case of Afghan repatriation, however, the agency’s
pragmatism and willingness to work with host and home states despite their
shortcomings were more on display. While many returns were voluntary, many
were not. Particularly after 2005, returning Afghans were pushed as much as
they were pulled, with fewer job opportunities, camp closures, and harassment
in their host countries. Threats from Iran and Pakistan to revoke refugee status
for all Afghans led many to take advantage of UNHCR’s repatriation offers,
worried that the generosity of the cash grants would not last. Whether this
can be called voluntary repatriation is doubtful. It is also doubtful whether
UNHCR’s role could be described as merely facilitating. The ambiguity regard-
ing the status of many Afghans was not questioned by UNHCR. By leaving the
distinctions unclear between refugees, registered refugees, registered Afghans,
people in refugee-like situations, economic migrants or illegals, the agency
could avoid having to call forced returns refoulement—unless the deportations
involved Afghans with refugee documents. Host governments on their side
mostly honoured the refugee documents and did not deport those carrying
them. UNHCR could thus continue cooperating with governments, while
working behind closed doors to reduce forced returns. It did so with consid-
erable skill, but nevertheless leaving a sense that it took part in a repatriation
operation with sliding standards for what constituted ‘voluntary return in con-
ditions of safety and dignity’.
The Afghan repatriation operation was far from perfect from the point of
view of voluntariness. It was even more questionable from the point of view
of sustainability. The buzzword may have been refugees’ contribution to
peacebuilding. The reality looked rather different, as admitted in a moment
of undiplomatic honesty by Peter Nicolaus, UNHCR’s representative in
Afghanistan at the time. He told the news agency AFP in December 2011 that
the way the refugee agency handled Afghan refugee repatriation had been ‘the
biggest mistake UNHCR ever made [ . . . ]. We thought if we gave humanitar-
ian assistance then macro-development would kick in’ (IRIN, 2012). Instead,
many returnees became internally displaced, and the growing population of
IDPs was neglected. The UNHCR-led Afghanistan Protection Cluster (APC,
2011: 15), discussing protection needs for returnees in the Northern and
North East Regions of Afghanistan, noted that many ‘have returned to a situ-
ation of internal displacement due to their inability to return to their villages
of origin, while many others have chosen to remain in urban centres due to
their inability to resume life in their demolished and isolated villages of origin’.
Those who went to urban centres mostly fended for themselves, as an ODI
study of Kabul’s informal settlements made clear:
Help from government or international actors has largely been absent, and dis-
placed and longer-term residents interviewed in this study overwhelmingly relied
on themselves and their communities for support and demonstrated little faith
in formal governance, judicial and law enforcement systems and institutions in
Kabul. For displaced populations, the reluctance of the authorities to recognise
the right to locally integrate in Kabul is the principal obstacle to the achievement
of a durable solution, affecting both recently displaced and longer-term residents
alike. (ODI, 2012: 39)
Conclusion
UNHCR’s room for manoeuvre in the crowded humanitarian and political

landscape of refugee emergencies was always limited, and became more so
in the post-9/11 security environment. In the case of Afghans in Pakistan
and Iran, host states, home state and major donors all wanted the refugees to
return, as did many of the refugees themselves.
In such an environment, there are two different yardsticks with which
UNHCR’s performance could be measured. One would be the high standards
of core principles of refugee protection, voluntary return in dignity and safety,
and sustainability of return, set out in UNHCR’s mandate. On that score,
the Afghan repatriation operation was highly flawed, and it would be hard
to imagine the possibility of success. Considering the enormous challenges
of peace building and reconstruction in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s descent into
economic and political turmoil, particularly in the border regions, and Iran’s
economic problems, the repatriation operation could not be anything but
politically fraught and full of uneasy compromises for UNHCR. Considering
the limited budget and presence UNHCR had inside Afghanistan, its ability to
safeguard the sustainability of returns was limited.
The other yardstick would be to take the political limitations to what
UNHCR could achieve—state interests and conditions on the ground—as the
baseline and ask whether the refugee agency added value by its handling of the
refugee repatriation operation. Were fewer Afghans pushed back because of

UNHCR’s involvement? Was the repatriation process more orderly, more sus-
tainable? Were tensions and conflicts between host and home states defused
due to UNHCR’s interventions and efforts, including the negotiation of tripar-
tite agreements? The answer, as this account has shown, is yes, but at a price.
The refugee agency had to maintain the fiction that the difference between
registered refugees and other Afghans in exile was meaningful from a protec-
tion point of view—a formalistic position that made for easier relations with
host countries and relatively good protection standards for those Afghans who
were registered as refugees. But there is little evidence, particularly in Pakistan,
that Afghans who had made their way to urban centres, and thus were not reg-
istered as refugees, had very different reasons for flight than those who went to
camps and were given registration cards.
UNHCR’s leadership of the Afghan refugee operation added value for host
states, donors (particularly the US and its NATO allies in Afghanistan) and
home state, as well as for many of the Afghan refugees and returnees, par-
ticularly those registered as refugees and those willing to go back. But the
operation also undermined the agency’s claim of being first and foremost a
protection agency, confirming again that the pragmatic aim to remain rel-
evant took front seat in the refugee agency’s operational choices. From this
perspective, the Afghan repatriation operation was a moderate success, but
too problematic in nature for UNHCR to promote it publicly. The time when
the refugee agency boasted its role as a global security actor had well and truly
passed, but the sliding scale of voluntariness and the limited protection role
UNHCR could play for Afghanistan’s displaced, both inside and outside the
country, was a reminder of the tensions between the refugee agency’s declared
status as the UN’s protection agency and operational realities on the ground.
15
Conclusion
The Ongoing Quest for Power, Independence
and Relevance
This book has followed UNHCR’s development through the course of its
60-year history. Starting as a small and timid refugee agency preoccupied with
the advancement of refugee law in 1951, the agency went through decades
of operational expansion until becoming the world’s leading humanitarian
agency in the 1990s, suggesting that its work (only some of which was pro-
tection tasks) on behalf of the displaced (only some of whom were refugees)
contributed to international peace and security. In the 2000s, this was followed
by reduced political ambitions, a pragmatic field approach and a return to
describing itself as a protection agency. This trajectory, particularly from the
end of the Cold War onwards, can also be described as the rise and decline of
a global security actor.
Part One described how the concept of security was broadened after the
end of the Cold War, and how early on forced migrants were advanced as one
of the main ‘new’ security issues of the post-Cold War period. This created
unprecedented challenges as well as opportunities for UNHCR. Part Two fol-
lowed the evolution of UNHCR’s official discourse. It showed how the refugee
agency’s reinterpretations of its mandate, including of key concepts such as
‘security’ and ‘non-political’, were used as tools with which to respond to chal-
lenges in its environment. Its official discourse was its main tool with which
to attempt to influence donor and host states. Discursive changes and con-
ceptual readjustments were also used to justify UNHCR’s expansion into new
areas of humanitarian politics, a wider range of displacement situations, and
Conclusion 291
new kinds of operational approaches. At any point in history, if asked, the

refugee agency’s leadership would have declared that UNHCR’s mandate and
Statute have always been unchanged, but that it remains as relevant as ever.
The analysis of UNHCR’s intellectual history shows otherwise: the agency’s
interpretation of the refugee problem and its own role in addressing it has
changed remarkably over the decades, and this is a key reason why UNHCR
has managed to ‘remain relevant’ in international refugee politics. If it had not
done so, the refugee agency would most likely have remained ‘the Office of the
High Commissioner’, in life as well as in word; an ombudsman for refugees in
charge of not much more than the ‘three empty rooms and a secretary’ that
Gerrit J. van Heuven Goedhart, the first High Commissioner for Refugees, had
found at his disposal when taking on the job (UNHCR, 1971b: 28).
Having followed this remarkable discursive evolution over the course of
six decades, the analysis turned to how discursive changes interacted with
UNHCR’s experiences in the field during some of the many humanitarian
emergencies to which the agency has responded over the past two decades.
Part Three’s chapters on emergency operations focused particularly on two
issues: the constraints and opportunities in UNHCR’s environment affecting
its choices and decisions; and the ongoing cycle of mutual influence between
discourse, actions and experiences. The aim of this combination of intellec-
tual and operational history has been to discuss two interlinked dilemmas.
First, the practical UNHCR dilemma of relevance versus independence—the
latter often described in the 2000s as a matter of credibility. And second, to
what extent the adoption, adaption and finally abandonment of the language
of security achieved its aim of acquiring both. Why did UNHCR take on a
language of security in the early 1990s? How did this contribute to the agen-
cy’s rise as the world’s foremost humanitarian agency and a global security
actor during that decade? If its adoption of a security discourse contributed
to UNHCR’s remarkable growth in the 1990s, why did it abandon this dis-
course in the 2000s? How did this abandonment affect the refugee agency’s
ability to pursue a reasonable interpretation of its mandate and Statute? Did it
reduce UNHCR’s relevance to the needs of states, and if so, how did this affect
humanitarian access or its funding and staffing levels?
The remainder of this chapter provides a glimpse of the road ahead for
UNHCR. I begin by summing up what it gained from becoming a global
security actor in the 1990s and discussing the consequences of abandoning its
security discourse in the 2000s at a time when states seemed to infuse forced
migration with security logic at an unprecedented level. I then turn briefly to
the agency’s most recent attempt at operational expansion, into environmental
and climate change induced displacement, in order to show how UNHCR’s
discourse and mandate continue to evolve in tandem, and how adopting a
security discourse can still remain a tempting strategy with which to put new
issues on state agendas.
Power of persuasion: Securit y discourse

as a to ol for leverage
Part One showed that the concept of security was gradually widened during
the Cold War period, and that this process accelerated in the period around
the end of the Cold war as academics and policy makers drew up new secu-
rity agendas for the post-Cold War world. Although migration and refugee
issues have always had security dimensions, the awareness and discussion of
this became much more acute around the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s
refugee and asylum seeker flows became regular items on the security agen-
das of developed and developing states, regional organizations such as the
Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and interna-
tional organs such as the UN Security Council.
Thus, the emergence of a security discourse within UNHCR did not take
place in an intellectual vacuum. The refugee agency was not alone in chang-
ing its perception of refugee movements, but contributed to a trend that was
discernible both in academia and among state policy makers.
Part Two showed that UNHCR went quite a way to reinvent itself at the end
of the Cold War, using the opportunities of the post-Cold War environment
to lift itself out of its financial and leadership crisis. The agency developed
an international security based rationale for its work, describing its efforts as
contributing to international peace and security. This security discourse was
a 1990s innovation. However, many of the ideas contained within this dis-
course began to develop before this time. Thus, contrary to the argument of
High Commissioner Ogata’s critics at the time, the emergence of a security
discourse cannot be explained only by referring to the preferences of the new
High Commissioner when she took office in January 1991.
UNHCR’s security discourse in the post-Cold War period did not displace
one coherent and constant earlier official discourse. The refugee agency never
had a ‘golden age’ when its discourse revolved around principles of interna-
tional refugee law and human rights and when the agency would staunchly
defend the rights of the individual rather than the interests of states.1 UNHCR’s
1
Several UNHCR critics argued in different ways that UNHCR once had a strong sense
of identity and principles which it lost sight of in the 1990s. See Chimni (1998b: 285) and
Goodwin-Gill (1999: 235 and 240).
Conclusion 293
preoccupation with human rights is a relatively recent phenomenon, growing

alongside the refugee agency’s concern with the political and security dimen-
sions of refugee movements. UNHCR’s ‘traditional discourse’ of the 1960s and
1970s was not a human rights one, but a relatively timid and state-centric dis-
course, focusing on the rights and obligations of states according to interna-
tional refugee law, but rarely confronting individual states when they did not
live up to their legal obligations. The strength of this legalistic approach was to
provide the refugee agency with clear guidelines for behaviour. For instance,
had UNHCR allowed the principles of international refugee law to prevail in
the case of the Rwandan refugee crisis, it would have felt obliged to withdraw
from the militarized camps in eastern Zaire.2 Instead, the more pragmatic
security discourse pointed the agency in several directions at the same time.
UNHCR’s preoccupation with the security dimensions of refugee move-
ments in the immediate post-Cold War period was part of a general trend
among policy makers and refugee experts, and hence reflected the fashion of
the time. It must be understood in the context of the High Commissioner’s
aim to remain relevant to states in the post-Cold War world. However, while
the interests of states and general intellectual trends were important factors
in bringing about UNHCR’s adoption of a security discourse, the content of
this discourse cannot be explained solely by referring to state preferences.
UNHCR created its own particular interpretation of the concept of security
and attempted to persuade states that it was in their security interest to pro-
mote and support the goals of refugee protection, assistance and solutions.
Part Three examined the dynamic between UNHCR’s discourse, actions
and operational experiences over the past two decades. UNHCR’s security dis-
course went through a process of constant evolution during the 1990s, as the
refugee agency re-evaluated its ideas and strategies in light of its unfolding
experiences on the ground. In the first half of the decade the lessons learnt
from its humanitarian operations tended to confirm and reinforce its secu-
rity discourse. The emergence of the concept of human security in the latter
half of the decade showed how the refugee agency then began to doubt and
reconsider its discourse after the protection disaster in the Great Lakes, its
leadership failure in Kosovo, and the suggestion from some EXCOM members
that the UN Refugee Convention had become obsolete. Thus, the evolution of
UNHCR’s security discourse was not only driven by an aim to remain relevant
to and popular with donor states. It was also shaped by how well the refugee
agency was able to pursue its principles of refugee protection and solutions. As
the 1990s wore on, it was UNHCR’s relatively poor record in defending its core
2
This is forcefully argued in Goodwin-Gill (1999).
principles of refugee protection that led the agency to tone down its security
discourse and turn ‘security’ into a humanitarian concept. When the fall-out
from the terror attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 led to a
sharply deteriorating protection environment for many refugees and asylum
seekers, particularly when coming from Muslim states, UNHCR responded by
abandoning its security discourse altogether and rebranding itself as the UN’s
protection agency.
UNHCR’s discourse is not merely a reflection of donor state interests or a legit-
imizing veneer that disguises a refugee agency beholden to state agendas. Its secu-
rity discourse in the 1990s was a strategy with which to entice and convince states
to protect refugees, not with which to undermine the principles of protection. In
this sense, the agency was doing in the 1990s what it had always done. It balanced
its position as an inter-state agency that depends on states for funding and politi-
cal support with its mandate to protect and assist refugees and find solutions to
their plight. Displaying a strong belief in the power of ideas, the agency’s strategy
for furthering the goals of its mandate was to take on the language of states—the
language of security—and adapt it to include the security of refugees and human-
itarian operations. As long as this strategy seemed to bring results—although
somewhat ambiguous results from a protection perspective—in northern Iraq
and Bosnia, UNHCR stuck to it. When the agency began to suspect that speaking
the language of security was counterproductive to its own interpretation of how
best to respond to refugee crises, it abandoned this strategy.
Many International Relations scholars will argue that in the end both the
discourse and the actions of an international organization such as UNHCR
will reflect the interests of states, in this case particularly the interests of
UNHCR’s powerful US and EU donors. The fact that UNHCR’s discourse
corresponds well with the agency’s actions would then demonstrate that the
discourse serves a purely legitimizing function, rationalizing decisions whose
outcomes were already determined by the interests of powerful actors outside
the agency. Discourse would thus be an unnecessary object of study.
While it is true that the role of discourse in determining practical action
should not be exaggerated and is difficult to gauge, to dismiss the role of dis-
course is to establish an excessively simplistic relationship between interests
and outcomes. The former are usually too broadly or too vaguely conceived
to pre-determine a particular course of action. If this were not the case, the
notorious difficulty in predicting events in International Relations would be
hard to explain. Ideas are important, both in shaping perceived interests and
as an intermediary between interests and outcomes, like Max Weber’s famous
‘switchmen’. According to Weber, material and ideal interests provide the
dynamics for action, while the ideas—the switchmen—determine the range of
possible directions this action can take (Weber, 1948: 280).
Conclusion 295
Discourse and ideas do not determine UNHCR’s actions regardless of the

interests of powerful states. Instead, the agency’s discourse evolves, adapts and
changes both as a result of pressures from states and, more importantly, as a
response to this pressure. In the 1990s, the agency attempted to shape the inter-
ests of states in directions more conducive to refugee protection and assistance
by appealing to a refugee-friendly interpretation of their security interests. It
attempted to set itself up as a Weberian switchman in international refugee
politics, guiding states to interpret their interests to include the welfare and
rights of refugees and displaced persons. The question was whether this strat-
egy succeeded. Did UNHCR’s security discourse provide the leverage needed
for the agency to function as a switchman, or did it pander too much to the
interests of states—according the refugee agency the role of train passenger
rather than switchman?
Relevance and credibilit y
The goal behind UNHCR’s strategy in the 1990s of taking on the language of
security was a sensible one. The agency’s aim was not ‘steering clear of politics,
but . . . deliberately engaging political actors to shape their perception of interest
so that it allows more space for principled humanitarian action’ (MacFarlane,
2000: xiii). However, was the adoption of a discourse of security the right strat-
egy with which to pursue this goal? This question must be elaborated. There
is little doubt that UNHCR succeeded in remaining relevant to states in the
1990s. This was an important achievement, and one that is underestimated
by some of the agency’s critics at the time, particular those trained in refugee
law (Barutciski, 1996; Hathaway, 1995). If powerful states, be they donors or
refugee hosts, did not deem UNHCR to be a relevant and useful actor to turn
to when displacement problems arose, the refugee agency would not be able to
influence the direction of international refugee policies. Remaining relevant,
then, was a precondition for UNHCR’s ability to influence the actions of states.
In the period around the end of the Cold War, the crisis-ridden refugee agency
would have paid a high price if it had pursued a strategy of legalistic isolation
from politics.
However, although a precondition, relevance is not enough to ensure influ-
ence. To restate the question with which this book started: Were the changes
and modifications of UNHCR’s discourse over the decades a demonstration
of the agency’s subservience or its effectiveness in navigating competing inter-
ests to service the goals of assisting and protecting refugees? The answer to
this question is not straightforward. I will first discuss some positive aspects
of UNHCR’s strategy—and particularly its strategy to employ the language of

security—and then turn to some negative ones.
First, there is no reason to believe that the emergence of a security discourse
in the 1990s was dishonest or insincere—an attempt by UNHCR to conceal
the fact that powerful states hostile to refugee and asylum seeker flows partly
bribed (with generous funding), and partly forced the refugee agency into dis-
carding its principles of asylum and refugee protection.3 Although some mem-
bers of the organization were sceptical, UNHCR’s leadership, and particularly
Ogata herself, believed that the end of the Cold War opened up new opportu-
nities for solving, not just alleviating, refugee problems. They were convinced
that for the agency to seize these opportunities it had to be innovative and
pragmatic and, not least, it had to understand the political and security dimen-
sions of refugee problems. That UNHCR then used its discourse strategically
to elicit the support of states by speaking ‘their language’ does not mean that
it was dishonest. If it is to prosper as an inter-governmental agency it has con-
stantly to seek ways in which to co-operate and find mutual benefit with those
states.
Second, the success of UNHCR’s strategy must be considered in the light of
what the agency can realistically achieve. UNHCR’s environment in the late
1980s and the 1990s placed considerable constraints on the agency’s ability to
pursue its goal of refugee protection. In this period, hostility against asylum
seekers in the North and against refugees in the South reached unprecedented
levels. It is impossible to argue with certainty what UNHCR could have achieved
if it had chosen another strategy, but it is unlikely that the refugee agency—
regardless of strategy employed—could, for instance, have secured asylum in
Turkey for Iraqi Kurds or Convention Refugee status in Western Europe for all
refugees fleeing ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. Instead of insisting
on strict adherence to the principles of the Convention and its own Statute,
UNHCR adapted its approach to the circumstances. This was not a new strat-
egy. For instance in the 1960s and 1970s, when the refugee agency expanded
its work to cover refugees in the developing world, it successfully changed
its emphasis from legal protection to material assistance despite the fact that
UNHCR’s Statute did not count assistance among the agency’s functions. Seen
as part of UNHCR’s history of growing with and adapting to its environment,
its adoption of a security discourse was relatively successful. In the 1990s, it
became the UN’s foremost humanitarian agency, it gained a higher profile in
international refugee politics, it contributed to keeping refugee problems on
3
Barutciski, Chimni and Hathaway all emphasize the weakness of UNHCR in the 1990s in
giving in to the demands of Western states.
Conclusion 297
the international community’s agenda, and it secured more generous funding

for its operations than ever before in its history.
However, with hindsight, UNHCR was excessively optimistic about the
possibilities and promises of a new world order of multilateral co-operation
and conflict resolution after the end of the Cold War. The agency overesti-
mated its own influence. It also overestimated the degree to which the new
humanitarian language of Security Council resolutions, such as resolution 688
on northern Iraq, reflected a real shift in the commitment of the international
community to intervene in sovereign states to aid refugees and displaced per-
sons. As a consequence, UNHCR pushed its strategy of appealing to the secu-
rity interests of states and the international community too far. By the end of
the Rwandan refugee crisis this had become obvious also to UNHCR.
Although UNHCR is still loath to admit openly that it should be counted
among the actors who handled the Rwandan refugee crisis badly, the disas-
trous protection failure in the Great Lakes showed the agency the negative
side of depicting itself as a global security actor. The Kosovo crisis (1999)
also revealed the problems of appealing too openly to the security interests of
states. In Kosovo, NATO member states saw it as in their interest to show their
own commitment to Kosovo-Albanian refugees, since the war they waged on
Serbia was widely perceived to have contributed to creating the refugee cri-
sis. Thus NATO countries aided the refugees directly through the efforts of
their own troops, or by funding national NGOs, undermining UNHCR’s lead
agency role. By the mid to late 1990s, a string of unsettling experiences led
UNHCR to lose its faith in the will of states to find just and humanitarian solu-
tions to refugee problems in the name of international security. Instead, the
agency focused on the insecurity of refugees and humanitarian staff in hostile
environments.
A second negative effect of UNHCR’s security discourse can be found
within the concept of security itself. To name a problem a security issue is to
infuse it with urgency and necessity. UNHCR appealed to the security inter-
ests of states in order to convince state policy makers to spend sufficient time
and resources on finding solutions to refugee problems. For UNHCR, it was
self-evident that for solutions to refugee problems to be durable they must
respect the rights and dignity of refugees. The agency did not seem to con-
template that some states would understand the security imperative of solving
refugee problems very differently. Humanitarian and human rights considera-
tions played little part when Turkey decided it was in its security interest to
seal its borders against Iraqi Kurdish refugees in 1991. Rwanda’s ‘solution’ to
the refugee problem in eastern Zaire, also in the name of national security,
was to support its Banyamulenge allies in dismantling the refugee camps by
force and massacring thousands of refugees. In 2007, the US wanted UNHCR
to declare Iraq safe for repatriation against its better judgment, as ‘proof ’ of
the success of the US troop surge. The security interests of states, then, were
often at odds with the protection needs of refugees, and there was no discern-
ible trend towards a genuine comprehensive or human security understanding
pervading state thinking on displacement.
In Kosovo and Afghanistan, the results of state security interests were less
pernicious for the protection of refugees, returnees and IDPs. The welfare
and safety of displaced populations were considered important to the US and
its allies, but as parties to the conflict they also wanted to use humanitarian
aid strategically to further war aims. This meant the sidelining of UNHCR
and the continuing demolition of humanitarian space. The provision of aid
and protection to vulnerable civilians in the midst of war in a non-political,
needs-based and impartial manner became near impossible in the post-9/11
international climate. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US-led coalition and local
insurgent groups in effect conspired together to force UNHCR and other
international humanitarian organizations to take sides in the conflict. The US
did so by the blatantly political and strategic use of humanitarian assistance in
‘hearts and minds’ campaigns; the insurgents by brushing all humanitarians
with the same Western-tainted tar. In this environment, there was no need for
UNHCR to use security language to bring the plight of the displaced onto the
agenda of states. The opposite was the case: UNHCR perceived that the inter-
est of the displaced—as well as its own interest—would be better served if it
could convince states to take humanitarian aid out of their security equations
and leave it to humanitarian professionals.
This was not an achievable aim in Iraq, where US stakes were too high and
distrust of international humanitarian actors among local populations could
not easily be mended. As a result, UNHCR did not attempt to become a lead
humanitarian agency, opting instead for low-key presence inside Iraq while
concentrating its efforts on quiet diplomacy and fundraising, coupled with
discreet assistance to host states, in order to keep borders open for Iraqi refu-
gees to seek safety in neighbouring countries. In Afghanistan, UNHCR had
more—but not much—room for manoeuvre and judged that, taking together
the conditions in host states and inside Afghanistan, it could take on respon-
sibility for the Afghan repatriation operation. Apart from in the first couple of
years, when UNHCR flagged the success of mass return to Afghanistan, the
repatriation operation raised too many questions of voluntariness, safety and
sustainability for the refugee agency to tell a success story.
Taking these operational experiences together—and adding the harsh
asylum policies of Western states to the mix—it became clear to UNHCR
that security language would not aid the refugee agency in its core aim, to
remain relevant to donor and host states while staying true to a reasonable
Conclusion 299
interpretation of its refugee protection and assistance mandate. In the post-9/11

environment, a security discourse achieved neither relevance (as security-led
assistance tended to be bilateral and circumvent UNHCR leadership) nor the
advancement of its mandate (as principled humanitarian assistance as well as
refugee protection principles, particularly asylum, were undermined). As a
result, UNHCR abandoned its aim to be a global security actor, presenting
itself instead as the world’s foremost protection agency.
In the 1950s, UNHCR and the Refugee Convention were both created in
part to take security politics out of situations that may otherwise lead to serious
conflicts between states. UNHCR’s task was to take a political problem, that of
refugees, and define it as a non-political, humanitarian one. The obligation of
states was to go along with this fiction (there is after all nothing non-political
about persecution, war and ethnic cleansing) in order to achieve two objec-
tives, one political and one humanitarian: to avoid the spread of conflict, and
to make it possible for fleeing civilian victims to receive protection and assis-
tance regardless of the nature of the conflict or the interests of conflict parties.
In both the Cold War era and the post-Cold War period, UNHCR essen-
tially argued what states wanted to hear. During the Cold War, states worried
that emphasizing the political tensions created by refugee flows could esca-
late superpower rivalry. It was safer for both sides of the Cold War divide to
portray refugee situations as if they were non-threatening humanitarian prob-
lems. In the 1990s, states wanted to repatriate, prevent and contain refugees so
that they did not need to accommodate them on their own territory. With its
security discourse, UNHCR made this aim easier to promote. From this per-
spective, the 2000s are perhaps the most interesting decade. States continued
to treat displacement as a security issue, both in terms of feeling threatened by
the influx of refugees or asylum seekers and in terms of using humanitarian
aid to promote political and military aims in conflict situations. In its aban-
donment of a security discourse, UNHCR went against this trend by attempt-
ing to defuse and alleviate security concerns and exhorting states to do the
same by adhering to international principles of refugee law.
Did UNHCR lose relevance and support from states due to this return to
the language of protection in the 2000s? As usual the answer is not straightfor-
ward. On the one hand, UNHCR became less central to humanitarian politics
in the 2000s. It had a lower media profile and fewer appearances on politi-
cal stages such as Security Council debates and international bodies set up to
address particular conflicts, like the International Conference on the Former
Yugoslavia (ICFY). The example of Syria’s civil war is a case in point. The High
Commissioner has been on the sideline of political efforts to deal with the con-
flict. When he addressed the Security Council on the humanitarian situation
in April 2013, it was not to offer to do his part in the UN’s efforts to resolve
the conflict, nor even to suggest that UNHCR could succeed in delivering an
adequate humanitarian response:
Let us be very clear: there is no humanitarian solution for the Syrian crisis. That
is why it is so dramatic that we are not even seeing an inch of progress towards a
political solution. And so we, as humanitarians, are forced to go on planning for
the impossible. (Guterres, 2013)
Ending wars was the domain of states, separate from the task of humani-
tarians. And until it could be ended, a war on Syria’s scale of destructiveness
would cause horrific human suffering however hard humanitarian organi-
zations worked to assist its victims. This message was very different from
UNHCR’s funding call for its humanitarian operation in the former Yugoslavia
in the mid-1990s, which appealed ‘to the international community to provide
full support to the inter-agency effort which we firmly believe is a contribution
towards lasting peace and stability’ (DHA and UNHCR, 1994: v).
UNHCR was unable to retain its role as humanitarian leader in the 2000s. It
retained a stronger leadership role in refugee emergencies than in IDP situa-
tions, but the high level of bilateral and government-to-government assistance
meant that it could not muster the sort of control over humanitarian opera-
tions it had during the Bosnia war. But this was not just a reflection of how
relevant UNHCR’s donors perceived the agency to be. It was more importantly
the result of the UN reform process, which constrained UNHCR through cen-
tralized funding appeals, ‘cluster’ coordination, and staff security dictates from
New York headquarters.
As several scholars have pointed out, there are ‘unavoidable conflicts between
the UN’s political and impartial humanitarian roles’ (Roberts, 1996: 56). For
most of its history—the period of the Cold War—UNHCR attempted to cir-
cumvent this conflict by keeping the UN’s political organs at arm’s length. In
the 1990s UNHCR began to embrace the political and security agenda of the
UN, describing itself as a humanitarian contributor to the Secretary-General’s
and the Security Council’s efforts to promote international peace and secu-
rity. As a consequence, UNHCR not only acquired more leverage in shap-
ing the increasingly important field of humanitarian politics, it was also hit
with a vengeance by the conflict between humanitarianism and politics. This
was particularly felt by the agency in the loss of respect for the impartiality of
relief operations. In the majority of its high profile operations over the past
two decades, UNHCR has been regarded with suspicion by some or all parties
to the conflict in the midst of which the agency operated. Its activities were
regarded as a part of the conflict dynamic, and as a result the agency’s staff on
the ground were frequently harassed, attacked and even killed.
Conclusion 301
This conflict between humanitarianism and politics came to a head in the

post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where UNHCR’s traditional donors
and supporters waged controversial and bloody counter-insurgency wars on
foreign territory. When this combined with the onslaught on principles of asy-
lum in the North, UNHCR had little choice but to attempt to distance itself
from its traditional supporters and carve out a more independent space, even
if this meant a loss of relevance and prominence in humanitarian politics. The
question of credibility became paramount. For UNHCR to perform its task
of refugee protection and assistance it had to be credible about its commit-
ment to humanitarian values of independence and neutrality. This implied,
for the first time since Thorvald Stoltenberg took over as High Commissioner
in 1990, that the agency would sometimes choose to become less involved in
humanitarian situations than asked to by states, as the case was with IDPs and
returnees in Iraq. With an Iraqi government indifferent or even hostile to the
plight of many of the displaced (considering many to be Baathists and even
traitors) and a US coalition attempting to co-opt humanitarian work to further
its counter-insurgency strategy, UNHCR made a decision to maintain a mod-
est role inside Iraq.
Continued expansion
Despite some such acts of resistance, and its rebranding as the UN’s protec-
tion agency, UNHCR continued in practice with a pragmatic attitude both to
field operations and mandate expansion. The former was clear in the case of
the repatriation operation on behalf of over five million Afghan refugees. The
refugee agency deemed that it could add value for refugees, host states, home
state and the US-led coalition alike, and hence retained responsibility for the
repatriation operation despite the sliding scale of voluntariness and insecurity
inside Afghanistan. UNHCR’s current blend of emphasizing pragmatism with
a protection focus and concern with credibility has worked well. After a lull in
the early 2000s, the agency’s expansion has continued, both in terms of staff
numbers and annual voluntary contributions.
This pragmatic attitude, coupled with a pervasive instinct to defend its
humanitarian turf as well as expand this turf into new areas, can be seen in
the most recent development in its official discourse, that of including envi-
ronmentally displaced populations among its ‘people of concern’. In recent
years the global security climate has shifted. Afghanistan and Iraq have both
receded from the news and no large-scale audacious terror attacks have taken
place on Western territory. The terror threat no longer holds the power to
override all other concerns and priorities as it seemed to do in the first years
after 9/11. Recession and debt crises have focused attention back on the econ-
omy, including jobs and welfare, heightening in many countries an already
strong domestic opposition to immigration. Combined with this continued
concern with migration and asylum, it has become commonplace for Western
governments to raise the spectre of environmental deterioration, climate
change, resource scarcity and natural disasters as uncertain future security
risks that have the potential to wreak havoc on human communities on a scale
far beyond the capabilities of terrorist networks (Borger, 2008; Council of the
European Union, 2008; Norwegian Refugee Council, 2009). While such envi-
ronmental fears have had little impact on security practices so far, they have
been presented as part of a migration and conflict nexus, and have therefore
become a salient issue for UNHCR to address. Indeed, in the case of environ-
mental concerns, international migration and displacement have tended to be
treated as powerful negative forces exacerbating the challenges faced by sover-
eign states, contributing to (or being a ‘threat multiplier’ in) the competition
for scarce resources, communal tensions, insecurity and even violent conflict
(DCDC, 2007).
UNHCR has positioned itself centrally in the debate on climate
change-related displacement. In the run-up to the climate change summit
in Copenhagen in 2009, the refugee agency momentarily jumped on the
bandwagon of branding this new form of migration as a potentially devastat-
ing security threat. In 2008, UNHCR’s press team quoted the Deputy High
Commissioner as saying ‘that even by the most conservative predictions up to
250 million people will be displaced by the middle of this century as a result
of extreme weather conditions, dwindling water reserves and a degradation
of agricultural land. Many people will also be forced to flee their homes to
escape fighting over meagre resources’ (UNHCR, 2008d). At the Copenhagen
Summit, High Commissioner Guterres followed up by arguing ‘that climate
change will become the biggest driver of population displacements, both
inside and across national borders, within the not too distant future’ and that
‘[c]‌limate change can enhance the competition for resources—water, food,
grazing lands—and that competition can trigger conflict’ (UNHCR, 2009f).
As chapter three showed, such displacement estimates and conflict links
rest on shaky ground, but UNHCR was joining a broad campaign conducted
by a loose alliance of NGOs, climate researchers and some states. The aim
was to heighten the sense of urgency at the Copenhagen Summit by adding
fear and concern over mass displacement, and linking this to potential conflict
and instability and to other more diffuse environmental concerns. However,
as migration and refugee experts entered the debate on climate change-related
displacement, and UNHCR conducted its own fierce internal debate on the
Conclusion 303
issue, the agency’s leadership soon reconsidered its use of security language.
Instead it adopted a two-fold approach, one pragmatic, field orientated one,
and one principled, legal one.
In the legal area, UNHCR started an international consultation process
on the status of environmentally displaced people—moving away from the
more contentious term of ‘climate change displacement’. The refugee agency
rejected the terms ‘environmental refugees’ or ‘climate refugees’, fearing that
to provide refugee status for those displaced by environmental degrada-
tion or disasters would not necessarily improve their protection, but would
instead undermine the Refugee Convention. UNHCR has played a leading
role in the international efforts to develop a separate protection regime for
the environmentally displaced, but without committing to overseeing such
a future regime.
In the field, UNHCR became actively involved in several high-profile
humanitarian emergencies caused by natural disasters, such as the 2004 Indian
Ocean tsunami, the earthquake in Pakistan in 2005, and cyclone Nargis in
Myanmar in 2008. Instead of committing itself to always responding to natural
disasters, the agency reserved its right to decide whether it was well placed to
contribute. In the three cases above, UNHCR was already involved in helping
refugee or IDP populations in the area. It had access and people on the ground
and could step up and re-orientate exciting operations. At the same time as
not wanting to commit on a general level to responding to natural disasters,
UNHCR’s leadership was enthusiastic about its operational expansion into
this area.
Thus UNHCR’s operational expansion continues, coupled with a keen eye
on safeguarding its core turf of refugee protection. This combination of prin-
cipled defence of the international refugee protection regime in word and
pragmatism in the field has served the agency well from the point of view of
organizational growth and operational expansion. It has also led to criticisms
of almost all of the agency’s operations, since they invariably fall short of the
principles of non-political and humanitarian assistance and international pro-
tection standards. As this book has shown, such criticism is sometimes war-
ranted, sometimes not. Considering the political and security environment
in which UNHCR operates, conditions will never be perfect for refugee pro-
tection. The question UNHCR must ask itself is whether it can find the right
balance between relevance to state needs and independence and credibility
to pursue a reasonable (but not perfect) interpretation of its own Statute and
mandate. This will remain an ongoing task, as there are no signs as yet of the
early post-Cold War period’s promise of a human-centred and refugee friendly
conception of security pervading the security interests of states in displace-
ment situations.
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Index
AbuZaid, Karen Koning, 203 UNHCR and, 4, 39, 78, 87, 88, 95, 102,
AFDL, 215 105, 107, 113–4, 117, 118, 121, 124,
Afghanistan, 1, 4, 15, 16, 26, 29, 50, 82, 85, 95, 126,130, 132, 137, 149, 158, 160, 165,
96, 156, 177, 251, 255–60, 269, 270, 199, 204–6, 232, 243, 251–3, 256, 261,
271–89, 298, 301 270, 279, 296, 298
African National Congress, ANC, 86, 95 asylum-migration nexus, 153, 167
African Union, AU/OAU, 67, 225, 265
‘Agenda for Protection’, 165 Baathistsregime, 258, 301
‘aid-military complex’, 258 Baluchistan, 269, 275
Al Askari Mosque, bombing of, 267 Bangladesh, 79, 94, 108, 175
Al Qaeda, 258, 260 Banyamulenge, 215, 217–8, 297
Albania, 229, 231–6, 240–3, 246 Baudrillard, 20
Angola/Angolan refugees, 4, 76, 82, 156, 246 Belgian peacekeepers in Rwanda, 216
Annan, Kofi, 53, 54 Belgium, 213, 214, 216
apartheid, 95, 106 Belgrade, 198, 233–4, 239, 241
Arusha Accord, 214 Bengali refugees, 45–6, 79, 95, 101, 103,
Ashcroft, John, 26 105, 108
Austria, 42, 92 Biafra, 29
Assistant High Commissioner for Operations, Bihac, 194
189, 263, 265 bilateralism in humanitarian aid, 153, 229,
Assistant High Commissioner for Protection, 232, 235, 237, 242, 245, 255, 272–4,
91, 157–58, 166–7, 255 299, 300
asylum/asylum-seekers, Bismarck, 20
an international institution, 8, 140, 158, Blace border, Macedonia, 231, 236, 243
175, 199, 205 Blunkett, David, 58
as security problem, 1,4, 9, 17, 18, 40, 46, boat refugees,113, 122, 126
57–63, 95, 105, 107, 144, 165, 166, Booth, Ken, 25, 27, 29, 30, 35
250, 275, 292, 299, 302 Bosnia, 1, 15, 81, 91, 96, 146, 177,
‘bogus’, 60, 167 192–212, 218, 221, 222, 224, 226,
criminalization of, 57–62, 166, 171, 252 230, 234, 235, 239, 244–5, 248, 257,
keeping asylum-seekers out, 46, 47, 59, 63, 294, 300
86, 87, 88, 114, 118, 121, 127, 148, Britain, see United Kingdom
151, 153, 156–8, 161, 166, 180, 185–6, Bull, Hedley, 9
190, 196, 204–6, 212, 226, 235, 255, Burundi, 52, 100, 170, 177, 214, 218
261, 296, 298–9 Bush, George Senior, 2
principle of first asylum, 232, 243, 247 Bush, George W., 26, 250
right to seek, 9, 73, 102, 126, 153, 165, 166, Buzan, Barry, 22, 27–8, 31
184, 204, 275, 279, 301
rising numbers/asylum crisis, 57, 59, Cambodia, 50, 83, 95, 220–1
60, 78, 85–6, 113, 114, 155, 166, 206, Camp Hope, Albania, 246
251, 272 Canada, 40, 44–5, 48
temporary, 193, 248 Carr, E. H., 7
tension between states, 109, 172–3 Central African Republic, 47
terrorism, 18, 38–39, 57–62, 124, 166–7, CERP, 259, 274
171, 173, 251–3, 256, 294 Chad, 47, 80, 86
338 Index
Chalker, Lynda, 196 Dayton Agreement, 77, 193, 195, 206, 211,
China, 255 212, 226, 230, 231, 233, 234
Chinese refugees and asylum-seekers, Democratic League of Kosova, LDK,
76, 85 230, 234
Clausewitz, Carl von, 31 desecuritize, 27
climate change, 26 diaspora, 50, 230, 276
climate change induced/related displacement, discourse analysis, 13, 66, 166, 176
43, 54–6, 151, 159, 161, 169, 291, Divison of Emergency Security and Supply,
302–3 creation of, 265
‘Climate refugees’, 169, 303 Division for International Protection, 91, 185,
cluster approach, 77, 159, 160, 162–5, 169–71, 187, 199, 227, 255
222, 263–4, 287, 300 Division of Programmes and Operation
CNN, 182, 216 Support, 203
complex emergencies, 15, 34, 48, 52, 83, 164, Djibouti, 110
257, 260 Durieux, Jean-François, 185, 205
comprehensive security, 2, 18, 28, 33, 42, 58,
150, 151, 166, 170–1, 298 East Pakistan, 45–6, 79, 84, 94, 108
Concept of security, East Timor, 80, 81, 224
emancipation/survival-plus, 20, 23, 25, Easterly, William, 258
30, 33, 35 emergency preparedness, see UNHCR and
essentially contested, 18–20 English School, 8, 33
existential threats and exceptional environmental displacement, 54, 169–70, 264,
measures, 23–7, 37, 38 291, 301, 303
feminist critique, 20, 32–3 ‘environmental refugees’, 303
ineliminable features and quasi-contingent Erbil, 265
categories, 22–36 essentially contested concept, 18, 19–20
minimal definition, 19, 20, 21–7, 37 Ethiopia, 77, 82, 256
normative/ethical value of, 21, 24, 28–30 EUFOR, 195
stability and embeddedness of, 17, 26, 38 European Union, 47, 54, 67, 86, 153, 195–7,
statism, 24, 32 235, 236, 294, 302
widening, 2, 3, 14, 19–20, 24, 30, 40 exclusion clauses, 59, 71–2, 100
zero-sum/security dilemmas, 28, EXCOM, 158, 188, 223
32–4, 63 Afghan repatriation, 279
Congo/DRC, Zaire/Congo/DRC composition, role, 53, 66, 67, 69, 75,
constructivism, 7, 8, 9, 14, 18, 25, 36–8, 172 78–9, 157
Contact Group, Kosovo crisis, 239 criticism of UNHCR, 90, 115, 117, 160–1,
Convention Plus, see UNHCR and 227, 255, 272, 293
Corruption, in aid delivery, 259, 267–8, 277 refugees as security problem, 53, 123,
Côte d’Ivoire, 86 147, 248
counter-insurgency, 256–9, 270, 301 Rwandan refugee crisis, 225, 227
counter-terror, 58, 167, 251, 256, 260, 270 UNHCR transformation, 78
Copenhagen School/securitization, 24–5, 27, see also UNHCR and governing bodies
32, 37–8 Ex-FAR, 215, 217
Copenhagen Summit, 169, 302
critical (security) theory, 7, 23, 24, 27, Feller, Erika, 157, 166
32, 33,35 first Congo War, 52, 177
Croatia, 192–5, 204, 209, 230 first Gulf War, 15, 46, 52, 129
Cuba, 113 food for oil, 267
Cuttts, Mark, 201 ‘fortress mentality’, 62
Cyclone Nargis, 303 former Yugoslavia, 177
Cyprus, 101, 103 attacks on humanitarian workers, 146
Bosnia, 192–212, 234
Darfur, 47, 80, 164, 264, 266 ethnic cleansing, war crimes, 3, 49,
Davis, David, 59 83, 296
Index 339
international response, 194–6, 226, 299 UNHCR as UN’s protection agency, 160,
Kosovo, 229–49 165, 168, 253
prevention, 204, 206
refugees as security problem, 133, 139, 149, Habermas, Jürgen, 19–20
207, 300 Haiti, 45–6, 80, 113
Security Council resolutions, 80 Hartling, Poul, 108
UNHCR lead agency, 5, 80, 130, 183, ‘hearts and minds’, 229, 257, 258, 259,
187, 190, 192, 193, 198, 200, 202, 274, 298
209–10, 238–9 Helton, Arthur, 260
Foucauldian security approaches, 23, hermeneutical spiral, 176
24, 27, 33 Hill, Christopher, 235–6
France, 58, 214 Hmong refugees, 42
Frankfurt School, 20 Hobbes, Thomas, 19–20, 24
Freeden, Michael, 17, 19, 21, 22, 26 Hocké, Jean-Pierre, 90, 91, 114, 115, 120, 123,
125, 134–6, 152, 256
game theory, 7 Holbrooke, Richard, 77
Genocidaires, 53, 146, 215–9, 221 Homeland security, 58, 166, 251, 252
Germany, 42, 57, 196, 205, 206 Honduras, 50
Ghazni, 269 Hong Kong, 76
global Consultations, 249 Horn of Africa, 53
global warming, 34 human security, 2
Goedhart, Gerrit J. van Heuven, 75, 89, 291 definitions of, 34–6, 42–3, 58
Goislard, Bettina, 269 failure of approach, 62
Goma, 84, 214, 219 in the UN Security Council, 45–8, 51
Gorazde, 194 refugees/displaced as human security
Grandi, Filippo, 199, 205 victims, 41–8, 51
Great Lakes Region of Africa, 216 see also Ogata and; UNHCR and,
compared to Bosnia, 211, 222, 245 humanitarian intervention, 10, 26, 83–4, 180,
conflict and displacement cycle, 49, 86, 181, 184, 214, 216
213, 222 humanitarian leave to remain, 229, 231, 243
ethnic cleansing, 49 humanitarian marketplace/competition, 83,
humanitarian staff security, 96, 100, 224 159, 200, 229, 237, 246
human security, 222, 225 humanitarian principles, 81, 106, 108, 124,
international inaction, 217, 225, 226, 148, 171
233, 248 humanitarian recognition, 209
moral and political ‘quagmire’ for UNHCR, humanitarian reform, see UNHCR and
146, 213, 223, 227 humanitarian space, 16, 151, 158, 170–1,
protection failure, 175, 226, 227, 248, 270, 255–9, 266, 271, 273, 298
293, 297 humanitarian Issues Working Group for
refugees as security threat, 53, 144, 149, 248 Former Yugoslavia, 200, 204, 205
UNHCR as lead agency, 5, 226 Hungarian refugee exodus, 82, 94
Green Zone, Baghdad, 266–8 Hussein, Saddam, 183
Guantanamo, 30, 62
Guinea, 86, 96, 224 ICRC, International Committee of the Red
Gulf states, 253–5 Cross, 41, 92, 125, 169, 231, 263, 274
Guterres, António, 152, 157, 300 ideas versus interests, 7–11
climate change, 169, 302 IFOR, 195
defending UNHCR’s turf, 263 Igbo, 29
humanitarian space, 171, 257 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration
rejecting links from asylum to terror and Responsibility Act, 252
crime, 165, 167–8 India, 45–6, 60, 79, 84, 95, 105
renewed Southern focus, 161 Indian Ocean Tsunami, 5, 303
strengthening ties to Middle East Indochinese refugees, 82, 95, 101, 113, 122
governments, 253–4 Interahamwe, 215, 217
340 Index
International Conference on the Former Kumin, Judith, 209
Yugoslavia, ICFY, 200, 299 Kunduz, 280
international organizations, function of, 8–9 Kurdish refugees, see northern Iraq
international regime, definition, 8–9 Kuwait, 180, 182, 254–5
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), 278
Iran, 16, 85, 177, 180, 182, 255, 267, 271–8, Laos, 105
281–6, 287, 288 Lebanon, 56, 85, 254
Iraq/Iraqi refugees and IDPs, see also LDK, 230, 234
northern Iraq1, 3, 15, 26, 29, 80, 82, League of Nations, 42
85, 175, 180, 181, 182, 184, 251, 253– Liberia, 86, 224
5, 256–62, 265–70, 272, 298, 301 Libya, 82
‘irregular movement’, 60, 114, 156, 167 Lim, Janet, 189, 263, 264
local integration, 74, 88–9, 99, 124–5,
Jalalabad, 280 154, 156–7
Japan, 8, 255 Lombardo, Salvatore, 277, 285
Jessen-Petersen, Søren, 185–6, 188, 199, 224 London, 250
Jordan, 56, 85, 254, 261, 269 Lubbers, Ruud, 152
Afghan repatriation operation, 280–1, 283
Kabila, Laurent, 215, 218 Convention Plus, 92, 153, 156–7
Kabul, 269, 273, 275, 276, 278, 280, 282, 285, perceptions of European bias, 79, 153, 155,
286, 288 157, 160–1, 255
Kandahar, 269 reduced UNHCR ambition, 77, 90
Karzai, Hamid, 273, 276 moving from security to protection
Kenya, 49, 256 discourse, 154, 155, 158, 167, 253,
Keohane, Robert, 7–8 September 11th, 166
KFOR, 232 Lysøen group, 44
Khan, Sadruddin Aga, 102, 103, 105, 106–9,
120, 132–3, 152, 171 Madrid, 250
Khmer Rouge, 50, 95, 220–1, 223 Macedonia, 229, 231–3, 234, 235, 236,
Kibeho IDP camp, 220 240–3, 245
Kigali, 214–7, 218, 220 McNamara, Dennis, 227, 242
Kinshasa, 217 Mello, Sergio Vieira de, 153, 260
Kissinger, Henry, 46 Middle East, 253–5, 261, 262
Kivu, 96, 215, 217, 219 Milosevic, Slobodan, 192, 195, 231, 233–4,
KLA, 230, 234, 236 236, 239
Kosovar-Albanian refugees and ‘mixed flows’, 60, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 160,
IDPs,229–48, 272 165, 167
Kosovo, see also NATO and; UNHCR and, Mobuto, Sese Seko, 215, 217, 218, 219
bilateralization and politicization of aid, Mogadishu, 216
229, 255, 257, 270, 297, 298 Montenegro, 208–9,233
crisis and war, 1, 15, 229–49, 293 Morgenthau, Hans, 10
criticism of UNHCR performance, 89, 152, MOSS, Minimum Operating Security
163, 177, 229, 233, 237, 241, 245, 248, Standards, 264–5
263, 279 MORR, Afghanistan, 269, 276–7
humanitarian competition, 177, 222, 229, Morris, Nicholas, 237, 241–2
237, 244, 246 MSF pulls out of eastern Zaire, 220
humanitarian evacuation programme, 242 Mujaheddin, 50, 95
humanitarian intervention, 83 Mundo, Fernando del, 241
IDPs, 239, 240 Myanmar, 88, 164, 175, 303
refugees, 84, 240
UNHCR lead agency, 193, 225, 226, 238–9, Namibia, 50, 51
243–5, 293 NATO,
‘UN protectorate’, 81 in Afghanistan, 269, 279–81, 289
Krajina, 194 in Bosnia, 194–5, 197, 207, 226
Index 341
in Kosovo, 229, 231–6, 239–43, 245–8, 257, ‘One UN’, 259–60, 263
270, 297 ‘Operation Allied Harbour’, 236
in northern Iraq, 180, 184 ‘Operation Desert Storm’, 180
Neorealist, 2, 28, 31 ‘Operation Poised Hammer’, 181
neutrality, see also humanitarian principles6, ‘Operation Provide Comfort’, 180
15, 92, 93, 109, 120, 138, 145, 152, ‘Operation Restore Hope’, 196, 216
168, 171–2, 193, 194, 203, 242, 245–6, ‘Opération Turquoise’, 215
255–7, 259, 260, 262, 266, 301 OSCE, 126, 235, 292
‘new wars’, 34, 49, 52, 83, 170 OSCE Kosovo Verification Mission, 239
‘new world order’, 2, 15, 90, 129, ‘Our Common Future’, Brundtland
131–3, 297 Report, 32–3
New York, 4, 57,155, 166, 215, 250,
265–6, 300 Pakistan, 5, 16, 45, 50, 79, 84, 85, 94, 95, 108,
Netherlands, 40, 79 177, 258, 269, 271–8, 281–9, 303
Nicolaus, Peter, 287 Pakistani Taleban, 269
Nigeria, 29, 49 Palestinian refugees, 71, 84, 254
Nixon, Henry, 46 Pan-Africanist Congress of Azania, PAC, 95
non-political, see UNHCR and Pentagon, 258–9, 274
non-positivist, 8 Pérez de Cuéllar, Javier, 179, 181
Non-refoulement, 9, 72–73, 165, 243, 247 Petraeus, David, 258
Northern Iraq, 5, 15, 45–46, 52, 83, 84, 129, Phnom Penh, 221
138, 177, 179–91, 192, 194, 198, 199, Pinochet, Augusto, 83
200, 212, 222, 226, 239, 294, 296, 297 Political concepts, stability and
Norway, 40, 44–5, 48, 90 embeddedness of, 17, 20–1, 22, 26
Nouicer, Radhouane, 254, 262 Prevention, see UNHCR and,
Pronk, Jan, 79
Obama, Barak, 250 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees,
OCHA, 43, 264 70, 159, 180
Ogata, Sadako, protracted refugee situations, 54, 86, 89, 134,
balancing protection/assistance and state 156, 158, 167, 279
interests, 148, 187, 207
Bosnia/former Yugoslavia, 133, 138, 139, Quetta, 269
149, 198–212
establishing UNHCR as humanitarian Rambouillet accords, 242
leader, 90, 162, 187, 200, 226, 239, 263 ‘rationalists versus reflectivists’, 7
human security, 44–5, 149, 155 RPF, Rwandan Patriotic Front, 214–5, 218
Kosovo, 89, 152, 239–49 Realist, 2, 7, 9, 20, 26, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 58
northern Iraq, 138, 179–91 Refoulement, 42, 168, 175, 281, 283,
views on states’ will and ability to resolve 285, 287
refugee crises, 179, 190, 227, 296 refugee warriors, 50–2, 95, 106, 110, 214
position and power within UNHCR, 67, 89, remote control operations, see UNHCR and
91, 92, 152, 184–6, 188, 226, 256 repatriation, 82, 84, 89, 95, 100
pragmatic attitude to refugee as (preferred) solution, 72–4, 88, 113, 115,
protection/’saving lives’ motto, 138, 118, 124–5, 132, 135, 141–2, 145, 146,
187, 201–2, 220, 256, 296 150, 154, 156–7, 187, 272
prevention of refugee movement, 90, forced, 42, 88, 129, 175, 281, 285
139–40, 190, 199, 205–6 sliding scale of voluntariness, 88, 277–83,
promoting security understanding of 285, 287–8, 301
displacement, 45, 91, 131–50, 172, 185, to Afghanistan, 16, 177, 262, 269, 271–89,
203, 207, 221, 225, 239, 246, 292, 296 298, 301
UNHCR remaining relevant in refugee to former Yugoslavia, 195, 206
politics, 7, 91, 131, 179, 185, 200 to Iraq, 181, 267, 298
Rwandan refugee crisis/Great Lakes, 53, to Rwanda, 47, 88, 129, 218, 220, 222–3
139, 144, 146, 149, 218–28 to Sudan, 80, 101
342 Index
resettlement, 47, 57, 72–4, 82, 88–9, 95, 99, Syria
124–5, 156, 243, 282 as refugee host, 85, 254, 261, 262, 269
Responsibility to Protect, R2P, 48, 159, 160, security-driven aid, 255
161, 162, 164–5, 264 humanitarian emergency, 254, 264,
Rhodesia, 50 299–300
Ridge, Tom, 252 refugee crisis, 3, 84–5, 254–5, 265
‘right to remain’, 142, 168
Riyadh, 253 Tanzania, 84, 87–8, 100, 175, 216, 218
Rohingya refugees, see UNHCR and Taleban, 156, 258, 269, 271, 273, 274, 269,
Roma in Kosovo, 232 276, 278, 280
root causes of flight, see UNHCR and Teheran, 275
Rugova, Ibrahim, 230, 231, 234 temporary protection, 197, 205–6
Russia, see also Soviet Union42 terrorism, 18, 34, 38–40, 57–62, 71, 124, 155,
Rwandan genocide, 3, 15, 47, 52, 53, 84, 144, 157, 165, 167, 171, 251–3, 262, 275
177, 213–8, 220, 222, 223 Thailand, 42, 50, 95, 220
Rwandan refugees, see UNHCR and Tirana, 241
Tito, 230
Sadr, Muqtada al, 261 Turkey, 46, 52, 85, 175, 180–5, 188, 191, 254,
safe areas, 194, 197, 199, 205, 211, 248, 266 296, 297
Sarajevo, 193, 194, 201 Tuzla, 194
Saudi Arabia, 254–5
Schmitt, Carl, 27 Uganda, 86, 100, 122, 161, 214, 215, 218
security, see concept of security UN Assistance Mission for Iraq, 260
securitization, see Copenhagen School UN Baghdad headquarters, bombing of, 153,
‘secondary movement’, 153–4, 156 260, 262, 264–5
September 11th terror attacks, or 9/11, UN Charter, 47, 83, 143, 149, 154
affecting security agendas, 17, 36, 165–6, UN Covenants on Human Rights, 83
251, 258, 302 UN Department of Safety and Security, 265
affecting UNHCR, 129, 154, 163–4, 177, UN General Assembly, UNGA, 4, 66, 67,
253, 270, 288, 298–9 69–70, 72–8, 79, 95, 101, 103, 105,
erosion of asylum, 16, 57–62, 71–2, 158, 106, 155, 160, 161, 166, 264
166–7, 250–2, 256, 294 UN Office for the Coordination of
counter-terror operations and wars, 16, 29, Humanitarian Affairs, OCHA, 43, 264
57–8, 82, 250, 270, 301 UN Refugee Convention, 4, 59, 70–2, 76,
Serbia/Serbs/Serb refugees, 192, 193, 195, 82, 95, 97–9, 100, 102, 105, 106, 111,
197–8, 208–9, 211, 230–4, 236, 240, 297 118, 130, 145, 153, 156, 159, 180,
SFOR, 195 205, 206, 243, 247, 248, 249, 293,
Shabaab, Al, 256 296, 299, 303
Sierra Leone, 83, 86, 156, 224 UN reform, 151, 162–3, 256, 263, 300
Slovenia, 192, 230, UN Reliefs and Works Agency, UNRWA, 71
Solecki, John, 269 UN Secretary-General, 65, 69, 75, 76, 77,
Somalia, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 139, 146, 196, 214, 79–80, 81, 89, 103, 146, 154, 163, 165,
216, 217, 256, 257 179, 181, 183, 185, 187, 198, 201, 219,
South Africa, 50, 51, 60, 85, 86, 95, 106 235, 238, 239, 283, 300
Soviet Union, 2, 14, 40, 49, 50, 51, 70, 82, 94, UN Security Council, UNSC,
95, 143, 179, 198, 274–5 displacement as threat to peace and
Srebrenica, 194, 197, 205, 212 security, 36, 44, 45–8, 51–3, 180, 226,
stateless persons, 70, 78, 143 238, 292, 297, 300
Stoltenberg, Thorvald, 67, 90, 115, 125, humanitarian intervention/peacekeeping,
131–2, 138, 172, 184, 187, 199, 82, 180, 190, 194, 196, 207, 211, 215
256, 301 inaction, 207, 215, 222, 223, 225, 228, 248
Sudan, 47, 49, 80, 86, 96, 101 terrorism, 58, 71, 260
surge, in Iraq, 261–2, 267, 270, 298 UN reform, 162–3
Sweden, 40 see also UNHCR, relationship with UNSC
Index 343
UNAMIR, 214–5 human security, 36, 40–1, 43, 44, 47, 48,
UNDP, United Nations Development 143, 147–50, 151, 222, 248
Programme, 20, 34–5, 44, 116, 148, humanitarian evacuation programme,
238, 264 Kosovo, 231–2, 242–3, 247
UNHCR, humanitarian leader/ ‘lead agency’, 4, 5,
Afghan refugees/returns/IDPs, 15, 16, 50, 15, 75–6, 80, 90, 129, 133, 138–9,
95, 156, 166–7, 177, 251, 256–60, 269, 153, 154, 162, 179–81, 188–9, 193,
271–89, 298 198–200, 202, 213, 225–6, 229, 231,
as object of study, 12–4, 65–6 232, 237–41, 243, 244–6, 250, 251,
as political actor, 6, 37, 40, 112, 118–20, 259, 263, 264, 290–1, 297–8
123, 136, 138, 172, 176, 295, 300 humanitarian reform/coordination and
Bengali refugees, 79, 94–5, 101, 103, 108 cluster approach, 153, 162–4, 165,
Bosnia/former Yugoslavia, 5, 15, 80, 81, 91, 244–5, 256, 259–66, 300
129, 177, 192–212, 221, 226, 238–9, IDPs, 56, 77, 139, 143, 146, 161, 163–5,
244–5, 294, 296, 300 169–70, 183, 209, 230, 232, 235,
bureaucratic/institutional structure/ 239–40, 259, 264, 267–9, 270, 287,
restructuring, 3, 13–4, 65, 69, 89–92, 300, 301, 303
153, 255–6 implementing/operational partners, 75, 95,
Cold War refugees from Communist states, 99, 104, 116–7, 141, 153, 254, 267–70
4, 70, 82, 94, 95, 130 in-country protection, 138, 140, 168, 175,179,
containment of refugees, 88, 138–42, 146, 180, 188–90, 196, 198–9, 202, 204–6
150, 189–90, 196, 199, 203, 206–12 independence/autonomy/credibility of, 6,
Convention Plus, 153–4, 155–7 11–2, 16, 77, 90, 176, 186–7, 246–7,
co-operation with military, 181–3, 188–9, 251–3, 261–3,270, 290–1, 295, 301, 303
194, 203, 231, 265–6 intellectual history of, 5, 13, 14, 65–173, 291
crisis under Hocké, 11, 90, 114, 115, 117, Iraq, 15, 16, 251, 256–60, 266–9, 298, 301
184–5, 200, 292, 295 Khmer Rouge camps on Thai-Cambodian
critics, 6–7, 65, 80, 117, 152, 175, 200, 222, border, 220–1
227, 229, 233, 237, 242, 246–7, 292, 295 Kosovo, 89, 152, 225, 226, 229–49, 263
discursive power, discourse assoft power, 3, militarized refugee camps/refugee warriors,
6, 9, 11–2, 15, 292, 294–5 53, 95, 104, 121, 145, 217–9, 222, 293
discourse and practice/action, relationship militarization/politicization of aid,
between, 176, 188, 202–3, 208,213, 203,245–7, 256–9, 270, 298
222, 290–1, 293–5 ‘new world order’, new start, 90, 129, 131,
emergency response capacity/preparedness, 133, 296
182, 189, 198, 231, 240–2, 244–5, 263 non-operational, 4, 14–5, 75, 93, 98, 100,
environmental displacement/Climate 102–4, 111, 112, 116–7, 187
Change, 164, 169–70, 264, 302–3 non-political self-image/distaste for
expansion and transformation, 1, 4–5, 6, 8, ‘politics’, 7, 15, 16, 79, 93, 94–5,
15, 69, 87, 92, 113, 175, 200, 210–1 97–103, 104–9, 111–5, 119–20, 127,
global security actor, 1, 3, 5, 8, 15, 16, 39–41, 138, 152, 168, 172, 187, 246, 261, 264,
92, 93, 131–2, 154–5, 159, 161, 172, 290, 299
176, 179, 192, 211, 213, 226–7, 229, northern Iraq, Kurdish refugees, 129, 175,
238, 246, 247–8, 250, 252, 291, 299 179–91, 192, 198, 200, 212, 239,
‘Good Offices’, 76, 80, 101–3, 198 294, 296
good Samaritan model, 5, 104 operational/external environment, 16, 67,
governing bodies (UNGA, EXCOM, UNSC, 69, 78, 79, 81–9, 94, 107, 112, 142,
UN Secretary-General), 69–70, 74–81, 151–2, 156–8,167–8, 177, 185–8, 192,
103, 201, 225, 227, 248, 255 209–10, 221, 224, 232, 240, 249, 256,
holistic/comprehensive approach, 5,114–5, 259, 262, 270, 271, 285, 288,290–2,
117, 122, 123–5, 129, 130, 133–6, 141, 294, 296, 298–9, 303
150, 175 peace and security, contributor to, 3, 108,
human rights, 6, 83, 102, 106, 112, 117–20, 109, 116, 125, 129–33, 142–4, 154,
122, 135, 204 161,
344 Index
UNHCR (Cont.) security discourse/presenting refugees as
168, 177, 199, 202–3, 207, 211, 226, security problem, 3–5, 8, 12, 13, 14–8,
239, 290, 292, 300 26, 36, 39, 51, 65, 93, 94, 97, 110, 112,
prevention of refugee movement, 81, 102, 114–6, 118, 121–7, 129–52, 154–5, 164,
112, 115, 135, 138–42, 145–6, 150, 166, 168, 170–3, 175–6, 186, 188–90,
153–4, 172, 190, 198–9, 203, 206, 212 200, 202–3, 206–8, 211–2, 213, 221–8,
‘prevention and containment strategy’, 229, 239,244, 248, 250, 270, 290–9
139–40, 146, 206 September 11th, 2001, and aftermath, 11,
‘preventive protection’, 189–90, 199, 15, 16, 17, 129,154, 158, 163, 164,
202, 203–5 165–8, 177, 250–70, 288, 294, 298–9
principles/legalism versus pragmatism, staff security, 16, 81, 95–6, 100, 140–1,
6, 65, 136–8, 175, 187–8, 192, 211, 146–7, 154, 163, 171, 198–201, 208,
238–9, 247, 256, 293, 296, 301 219, 224–5, 239, 256–7, 260, 262–3,
protection discourse, 13, 15, 66, 93, 102, 265–6, 269, 271, 300
151–73, 250, 264 stafflevels, 4, 6, 89–90, 96, 152, 249, 291, 301
refoulement,175, 281–3, 285–7, 289 state (security) interests versus refugee
relationship with donors, 6–8, 11, 12, 39, needs, balancing of,18, 39, 81, 91, 107,
53, 66, 77–9, 82, 87, 89, 90, 103, 117, 112, 121, 123, 138, 144, 148, 150, 158,
123, 137, 153, 170, 176–7, 179, 183, 171, 186, 187, 190, 192, 199, 212, 223,
186–7, 191, 195–200, 207, 209, 217, 226–7, 233, 244, 245, 248, 288, 293–5,
226, 229, 233, 235–7, 240, 245, 247–8, 297–8, 303
250–5, 257, 261–2, 270, 272, 278–80, Statute, 5, 6, 12, 69–74, 78, 80, 87, 97–103,
285–6, 289, 290, 293–5, 298, 300, 301 111, 118, 131, 136–9, 146, 154, 159, 185,
relationship with host states/communities, 189, 219, 223, 228, 246, 291, 296, 303
7, 12, 39, 53, 78, 81, 82, 87, 98, 99,105, mandate, expansion of, 3, 5, 6,14, 66,
110, 111,113, 115–6,118, 120, 121, 69–77, 80, 91, 92, 98, 99, 101, 104,
123, 134, 136, 137, 144, 153, 157,160– 113, 118–9, 122–3, 127, 133, 135, 138,
1, 167, 170, 172, 176, 177, 187, 192, 140, 142–3, 148, 154–5, 159, 163–5,
209, 217, 219, 222,236, 240–1, 245, 168, 172, 179, 185–7, 190, 194, 199,
247, 250, 257, 270, 271,278–81, 283, 201–2, 204, 220, 237, 238–40, 248,
285–7, 289, 290, 295, 298, 301 250, 251, 252, 263–4, 278, 279, 288,
relationship with Middle East/Gulf states, 290–1, 296, 301, 303
253–5, 261–2 temporary protection, 197, 205–6
relationship with NATO, 226, 231–2, 233, (UN’s) protection agency,1, 16, 77, 154,
235–6, 241–3, 245–7, 257, 279–81, 159–61, 168, 202, 248, 251, 253,
286, 289, 297 261, 264, 266, 270, 287, 289–90, 294,
relationship with refugee sending countries, 299, 301
111, 120,135, 145–6, 176, 177, 217 UNICEF, 238, 260
relationship with UNSC, 67, 69, 75, 79, 80–1, United Kingdom, 38, 59, 60, 85, 196, 217
126, 133, 168, 172, 200, 203, 207, United Arab Emirates, UAE, 254–5
216–7, 219, 225, 235, 238–9, 261, 299 United States, US,26, 46, 48, 51, 60
relevance, quest for/versus independence, 4, Afghanistan war, 16, 29, 50, 82, 156, 177, 251,
7, 12, 16, 92, 131, 152, 155, 160, 164, 256–9, 260, 271–4, 276–82, 285–6, 298
179, 185, 187, 191, 238, 247–8, 250, counter-insurgency/counter-terror
253, 291, 293, 295, 299–301, 303 interventionism, 30, 58, 163, 250, 256,
remote control operations, 266–70 258, 260, 270, 301
Rohingya refugees,88, 175 Bosnia, 193, 195–7
‘root causes’, 39, 112, 113–4, 117, 119–20, Iraq war, 3, 29, 82, 180, 182–4, 251, 256–8,
124, 126, 129, 134, 136, 207 260–2, 267, 268, 297–8
Rwandan refugee crisis in eastern Zaire, 3, Kosovo, 231, 233, 235, 243, 246
5–6, 15, 47, 52, 53, 84,96, 100, 129, Rwandan refugee crisis, 214, 216–7
144–5, 148, 177, 213–27, 248, 293, 297 security interests shaping aid and refugee
‘saving lives’ rationale, 188, 201, 210–1, 218, policy, 51, 220–1, 246, 257–9, 273–4,
220–1, 223, 272 298, 301
Index 345
September 11th, 3, 14, 15, 17, 57–8, 129, ‘war on terror’, 26, 151, 160, 250, 260
250, 252, 294 Washington, 46, 57, 166, 250
Superpower, 2, 182 waterboarding, 26
UNHCR’s main donor, support/pressure Weber, Max, 10, 294–5
from, 77, 79, 87, 160, 243, 253, 261, Wendt, Alexander, 37
270, 272, 273, 286, 289, 294, 297–8 West Timor, 96, 224
United States State Department, 273–4 WFP, 238, 274
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 83 Wight, Martin, 32, 41
UNMIBH, 195 Wikileaks, 268, 269, 273, 276, 277, 278
UNMIK, 232 World Summit 2005, 160, 165
UNPROFOR, 194, 196–8, 203, 208, 211 World War Two, 32, 70, 71, 75, 192, 193,
UNSECOORD, 154 194, 230
urban migration, 62, 274, 276–7, 280,
283–4, 288–9 Xenophobia, 61, 155, 167
Vietnam, 50, 95, 103, 105, 221 Zaire/Congo/DRC, 1, 15, 47, 52, 76, 80, 82,84,
96, 100, 129, 146, 177, 202, 209, 213–
Waltz, Kenneth, 24, 28–9 28, 232–3, 245, 247, 248, 293, 297
‘war and displacement nexus’, 86 Zepa, 194
‘warehousing’, of refugees, 56, 62 Zimbabwe, 85–6

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T h e r i se a n d d e c l i n e o f a g l o ba l

stimulating discussions with PRIO colleagues, in the summer of 2012. Elizabeth

1. Introduction: The Rise and Decline of a Global Security Actor 1

Part One: Displacement and security 17

Part Two: An intellectual history of UNHCR 65

Part Three: An actor or re-actor in international

15. Conclusion: The Ongoing Quest for Power, Independence

Change and innovation after the end of

Remaining relevant: UNHCR and the

UNHCR was founded by the UN General Assembly in 1950,2 with statutory

In the 1990s, as UNHCR became a prominent humanitarian actor and lead

of Africa and elsewhere, it also received a great deal of academic attention,

Ideas and power in the study of

Ever since its inception as a separate field of academic study, International

manner, in particular fields of international relations sometimes described as

Interests, Ideas or Both?

Students of international relations cannot ignore ideational factors in their

Individuals and groups embark on conceptual innovation in an attempt to

Discursive Power and Independence

Although employing the term discourse to describe UNHCR’s presentation of

of language. The term discourse is employed more in a practical than a philo-

One clarification is necessary concerning the unit of analysis of this

remarkably similar across the range of documents, publications and speeches

The structure of this b o ok

From Explaining to Constructing

From Hobbes to Habermas: An expanding

Realist approaches to security and advocates of various widening projects. By

static, neither can it be arbitrarily defined. Political concepts are ‘constructs

A minimal definition of securit y

Freeden (1996: 14) has devised a conceptual framework for analysing ‘those

Ineliminable Features of the Concept of Security

Buzan (1991: 19) asserts that freedom from threat to survival is security’s ‘bot-

among a large majority of security scholars.2 Scrutinizing the security debates

Do There Have to be Threats?

Do Threats Need to be Existential?

Does the Existential Nature of Threats Warrant Exceptional

sense of urgency. Returning to Freeden’s (1996: 63) framework, to eliminate

the urgency and exceptionality of security distasteful do not disagree that

The above minimal ‘definition’ of security, focusing on the existential, compel-

The Value of Security

Whose Security and Where?

the military, political, economic, societal (including identity and culture), or

ethnic groups/nations, the state, the global community or an ecosystem.

Zero-sum Game or Our Common Future?

is the result of security studies being a particularly male-dominated research

binding treaties on reducing nuclear stockpiles among existing nuclear powers

in its 1994 Human Development Report. According to the UNDP definition,

and violence. However, Suhrke (1999: 269) goes on to include all instances

The constructivist turn in securit y

So far I have attempted to dissect the concept of security in order to under-

There are numerous examples of forced migration being implicitly embed-

discourse without opening up for other, more state-centric security concep-

Refugees and IDPs as human securit y

A Political Rather than Research Agenda

Human Security, Displacement and State Practice in

Gravely concerned by the repression of the Iraqi civilian population in many

Gravely concerned by the significant further deterioration of the humanitarian

At the Forefront of a Fading Discourse

Displacement, conflict and insecurit y

as a side-effect of conflict, sometimes as a tactic (as a means of controlling

Refugee Warriors During the Cold War

The human security perspective on displacement labelled forced migrants as

The Post-Cold War Period: From Victims to Threats

Part One: Displacement and security 17

Part Two: An intellectual history of UNHCR 65