Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

Oxford Handbooks Online

Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions
Katy Long
The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies
Edited by Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, Gil Loescher, Katy Long, and Nando Sigona

Print Publication Date: Jun 2014

Subject: Political Science, International Relations, Comparative Politics
Online Publication Date: Aug 2014 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199652433.013.0013

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter argues the need to rethink ‘durable’ solutions to displacement, with
emphasis on facilitating refugees’ mobility to enable them to come up with their own
transformative solutions. More specifically, it considers whether migration might offer a
‘fourth solution’ to complement the conventional solutions of repatriation, local
integration, and resettlement. The chapter suggests that it is important to recognize and
contest the inherent ‘sedentary bias’ that characterizes state-centred responses to
migration during conflict and crisis. It also highlights the failure to ‘solve’ forced
migration by framing the ‘refuge problem’ in terms of physical dislocation, rather than
focusing on the denial of the political rights of refugees and internally displaced persons
as citizens. Finally, the chapter looks at attempts to implement mobility-focused solutions
in West Africa and Afghanistan and the prospects for successful implementation of such a
mobility-centred strategy in the face of political hostility towards migration.

Keywords: displacement, refugees, mobility, migration, forced migration, refuge problem, physical dislocation,
internally displaced persons, West Africa, Afghanistan

Introduction
The international refugee regime was designed not just to protect refugees, but to solve
refugee crises. However, in recent years researchers, policymakers and practitioners
have become increasingly concerned about the failures of traditional ‘durable solutions’.
This has prompted a new drive to develop innovative approaches to solving refugee
crises. In particular, there has been a surge of interest in the role that migration and

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Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

mobility might play in improving life in exile and resolving displacement (UNHCR 2008a;
Long 2009, 2010, 2013a).

This chapter examines why conventional solutions to refugee and IDP crises can be said
to have failed, and asks whether migration might offer a ‘fourth solution’ to complement
the conventional trinity of repatriation, local integration, and resettlement. Can refugees
become migrants—and does this offer a novel solution for those otherwise trapped in
protracted displacement?

This chapter argues that to escape the trap of protracted displacement, we must first
rethink the problem, recognizing the inherent ‘sedentary bias’ that shapes state-centred
responses to migration during conflict and crisis (see Bakewell 2008). The failure to
‘solve’ forced migration reflects in part the deliberate construction of the ‘refuge
problem’ in terms of physical dislocation, rather than focusing on the denial or refugee
and IDPs’ political rights as citizens. Yet in fact, freedom of movement may offer
important opportunities for the displaced (and other poor citizens in underdeveloped
states) to obtain access to the full set of rights, goods, and services (especially social and
economic) that are needed to live a good life. Far from being ‘the problem’, migration
may actually be part of the solution.

The chapter is divided into five parts. It first considers how conventional
(p. 476)

solutions—repatriation, local integration, and resettlement—have failed to unlock

protracted crises. It then argues that to rethink solutions, we must first understand how
the international community has chosen to frame the ‘refugee problem’. Third, the
chapter considers recent developments in both research and policy that have argued for
an incorporation migration and mobility into the international community’s framing of
‘solutions’. The fourth part of the chapter considers how a migration-centred approach to
durable solutions might help to reframe long-term displacement as a development, and
not just a humanitarian challenge. The fifth section of the chapter then explores attempts
to implement official mobility-centred solutions strategies in West Africa and Afghanistan.
The chapter concludes by considering the prospects for successful implementation of
such a mobility-focused strategy given contemporary political hostility towards general
migration flows.

The Failure of Conventional Solutions

Resolving refugee crises—restoring the ‘normal’ order of things after the disruption of
sudden, traumatic displacement—is in the obvious interests of both refugees and states.
When appointed High Commissioner for Russian refugees in 1921, Fridtjof Nansen’s
primary task was (alongside determining their legal status) to facilitate the resolution of
the refugee crisis by securing the refugees’ ‘emigration or repatriation’ (League of

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Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

Nations 1921). UNHCR’s statute mandates the agency to seek ‘permanent solutions for
the problems of refugees’ (UNGA 1950).

Conventional accounts repeat the mantra that there are three ‘durable solutions’ that can
bring refugees’ exile to an end. These are repatriation (return to the country of origin),
local integration (permanent residency or naturalization in the first country of asylum)
and resettlement (ordered migration to a third country). However, as the following
chapters by Hammond (repatriation), Hovil (local integration), and Van Selm
(resettlement) make clear, all three solutions face serious challenges.

Repatriation—which remains the ‘ideal solution’ for many policymakers, is often neither
possible—due to continuing conflict and instability—nor desirable—especially for younger
and second generation refugees who may often not know the ‘home’ to which they are
returning (see Long 2013a). States’ continued support for repatriation as the best solution
arguably reflects their own political interests in retaining a ‘national order of things’,
rather than a concern with refugees’ welfare (Malkki 1995). As Hovil argues, local
integration is not so much the ‘forgotten solution’ as the forbidden solution: a reality
which occurs between and beneath laws which are deliberately intended to prevent
refugees mixing with host communities and restrict access to citizenship. Van Selm
underlines that resettlement numbers are tiny—UNHCR estimates only 1 per cent of
refugees will benefit from a resettlement place.

The result, as Milner’s chapter in this Handbook underlines, is that today some seven
million refugees—over two-thirds of all registered refugees—are trapped in a ‘long-lasting
(p. 477) and intractable state of limbo’ (UNHCR 2004). These protracted refugees’ lives

are not necessarily at risk: but their access to more than ‘bare life’ beyond a
humanitarian space of exception is strictly curtailed. Quite clearly, the traditional
‘solutions’ are not enough.

In addition, any new twenty-first-century approach to ‘solutions’ needs to consider the

particular challenges involved in solving internal displacement. A durable solution for
IDPs is usually described as ‘when internally displaced persons no longer have any
specific assistance and protection needs that are linked to their displacement and can
enjoy their human rights without discrimination on account of their displacement’ (UNGA
2009). This can involve return and reintegration in their place of origin, sustainable
integration in a host community, or resettlement to a new location (within the state). As
with refugees, however, the numbers of IDPs trapped in prolonged displacement are
indicative of many IDPs’ inability to access these solutions and states’ interests in
prioritizing return over integration. The non-discrimination benchmark focuses attention
on the need to secure equal citizenship, but also raises new questions about the role of
the international community and in particular the interface between humanitarian and
development actors in brokering sustainable solutions for displaced populations. Can the
international community talk of durable solutions if these only return IDPs to an level of
suffering in extreme poverty and insecurity endured equally by all citizens?

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Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

Rethinking the Problem

It seems clear that conventional solutions are failing to free the majority of refugees and
IDPs from protracted displacement. The question that must be asked is: why? At least
three potential obstacles can be identified: an excessive focus on repatriation as the only
viable solution; a failure to engage with broader development issues in refugee-producing
and refugee-hosting regions, and a tendency to focus on the physical symptoms of
displacement rather than the political causes.

The claim that the existing durable solutions framework is in urgent need of revision is
not new. In the late 1980s and 1990s, the shift to prioritize refugee repatriation over
resettlement provoked a set of critiques from experts (see e.g. Chimni 2004). These
commentators warned that the new push for ‘durable solutions’ was in fact intended to
open up the space for the practice of early repatriation and even containment, in order to
reduce Western states’ physical burden-sharing responsibilities. Most researchers,
however, have tended to critique the specific dynamics of repatriation, local integration,
or resettlement separately, rather than focus upon the concept of ‘durable solutions’ as an
integrated whole (for an account of these critiques, see Van Selm, Hovil, and Hammond,
this volume).

In recent years, however, academics have returned to question once again the structures
of the durable solutions framework, in particular arguing that the continued fixation on
three separate solutions by today’s policymakers fails to recognize a fundamental need to
move away from understanding all solutions simply in terms of ‘fixing’ people in places.
As early as 2003, Van Hear argued for a shift in policymaking to encompass (p. 478)
transnational diaspora, and a new language of ‘enduring solutions’ to better capture the
continued fluidity of displacement and migration:

If transnational activities across locations at home and in exile are [this]

pervasive...does the continued use of the categories home, country of first asylum,
and resettlement country, which accompany the notion of ‘durable solutions’,
make sense?

(Van Hear 2003)

More recently, Long has also argued that ‘host and donor states have remained
excessively fixed on permanent physical returns of the displaced as “the” solution to
exile’ (Long 2011). She argues that this imbalance must be redressed: first by recognizing
the possible roles migration and mobility can play in securing rights for the displaced,
and then by considering how the international community can work to ensure the
protection of freedom of movement. For Long and Van Hear, as well as a growing number
of other researchers, addressing the failure of the traditional durable solutions

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Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

framework therefore requires not just a rethinking of the solution, but also a rethinking of
the ‘refugee problem’.

Policy instruments frequently refer to the need to solve ‘the refugee problem’ (e.g.
ECOSOC 1958). Yet in fact, this turn of phrase is misleading, because it implies that
displacement can be viewed as a single, structural problem. In fact, we should ask more
questions: which structures, and whose problem? Refugee and state perspectives on the
problems displacement creates are often very different: it follows they are likely to
demand very different solutions.

For host states, refugees are beyond all else foreigners on their territory, threatening to
disrupt political and social order by competing with existing citizens for (limited)
resources. Host states therefore understand their ‘refugee problem’ as a physical
problem, requiring the removal of refugees—and ideally, their return to their state of
origin, restoring the ‘normal’ order of nation states. Yet as the seminal work of Arendt
(1967) reminds us, to focus on the physical symptom of displacement distracts us from
recognizing that the refugee’s or IDP’s problem is fundamentally one of political
exclusion. Physical dislocation may result in very real suffering, but it is only a reflection
a broader inability to access the rights of citizenship. Refugees’ views of their ‘problem’
underline that, for the vast majority of the displaced, any ‘solution’ is best understood in
terms of realizable rights, providing the possibility of leading a dignified and autonomous
life: physical security, a livelihood, opportunities for education and development. The
solution to refugees’ problems, then, is political inclusion, rather than physical removal.

Any successful reimagining of durable solutions—assuming success is to be measured in

the number of refugees able to escape protracted exile—must therefore wrestle with
these two very different understandings of the ‘refugee problem’, one physical and one
political. Yet these approaches are perhaps less far apart than might initially be
considered the case. Both suggest a need to reframe ‘durable solutions’ not just as the
end of humanitarian action, but an integral part of a continuing long-term and imperfect
development and peace-building process. How, then, might this be achieved? One
(p. 479) possible answer—which has been the focus on increasing interest from both

policymakers and researchers in recent years—is to consider the roles that migration and
mobility might play in allowing refugees to move between places, building their own
solutions.

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Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

Refugees and Migration: A New Policy Arena?

Recent Developments: A New Approach?

Policymakers’ interest in the contribution migration and mobility-centred approaches

could make in the search for durable solutions has grown significantly since 2007, in part
because of increasing concern with what are termed mixed migration flows (see Squire
and Scheel, this volume). These shifts can be traced in part through a study of UNHCR
policy documents. In 2008, a discussion paper prepared for that year’s High
Commissioner’s Dialogue on protracted refugee situations noted that:

Refugees...could perhaps be admitted to the migrant worker and immigration

programmes maintained by states that are unable to meet their own labour
market needs. Many of these programmes, it should be noted, also offer
opportunities for long-term residence and naturalisation, and thus offer the
prospect of a durable solution as well as an interim one.

(UNHCR 2008a)

Earlier that year, UNHCR’s new Return and Reintegration Policy had also stressed that
post-return migration—often from a rural to an urban setting—should not be viewed in
itself as proof of the failure of return (UNHCR 2008b). A year later, UNHCR’s
Resettlement Service, with Sweden as co-chair, presented a paper at the Annual
Tripartite Consultations on Resettlement in Geneva, suggesting that resettlement states
should consider opening up parallel migration channels for suitably qualified refugees. In
September 2012, UNHCR and ILO held a joint two-day workshop to further consider the
possible engagement of refugees as labour migrants. Moving from migration-friendly
policy words to mobility-centred active practice, however, has proved far more difficult.

These policy developments have been mirrored by growing evidence from researchers
regarding the normative, empirical, and political value of reconsidering the relationship
between refugees and migration (e.g. Monsutti 2008; Chatelard 2010). In particular,
ethnographic studies of the ways in which refugees and IDPs already use migration to
secure income (particularly through trade), attend schools, and lay the foundations for a
gradual and sustainable repatriation from Afghanistan to Somalia to Sudan have helped
to reinforce these policy shifts, and underlined the extent to which distinctions between
refugee and migrant are policy constructions rather than observed realities.

However, just as critiques of durable solutions are not new, this recent interest in
(p. 480)

rethinking durable solutions by adopting a migration-centred approach is not as new or

radical as is sometimes claimed. In fact, early international efforts to solve Europe’s
interwar refugee crises were centred on facilitating refugees’ migration. Arguably the
greatest achievement of the pre-1950 refugee protection regime, the Nansen passport

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Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

system was devised to furnish otherwise stateless refugees with a legal identity, in order
to allow refugees to move across borders in search of employment. At the outbreak of the
Second World War, Nansen passports were recognized by 52 states and had been issued
to some 450,000 refugees. It was in fact only in the 1960s that ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’
identities were definitively separated, in part to ensure refugees’ humanitarian protection
(see Long 2013b).

There is today general agreement that the Convention Travel Document system that
succeeded the Nansen passport is now both out-dated and ‘dysfunctional’ (Author’s
interviews, 2012 and 2013). Yet the inability of the modern refugee to protect rather than
constrain real prospects for refugee mobility should be seen as a serious failing of the
modern refugee protection regime and a political choice, rather than an inevitable side-
effect of offering humanitarian assistance.

Mobility and Migration: Towards Development-

Centred Durable Solutions?
Defending freedom of movement in the abstract is one thing: considering how freedom of
movement can contribute in concrete terms to mobility and migration-centred solutions
to displacement crises is another. Why might these sorts of mobility and migration-
centred approaches offer a viable alternative? Recognizing that displacement is a political
and not a physical problem, and that conventional approaches to solving displacement
have failed because of this is one thing. It does not immediately follow that continued
movement is the solution.

Clearly, as the following chapters in this Handbook demonstrate, in the right

circumstances, repatriation, local integration, and resettlement can provide a durable
solution.

Arguably the crucial difference with a mobility-centred approach is that instead of

equating a solution to a displacement crisis with the end of movement (as is the case with
traditional approaches to repatriation, local integration, and resettlement), advocates of a
mobility-centred approach explicitly couple the undertaking to end forced movement with
a different parallel commitment: that individuals should be free to move. If we consider
repatriation, local integration, and resettlement in turn, we can begin to see that mobility
and migration could help to address some of the difficulties faced today in trying to solve
protracted displacement.

First, let us take repatriation. As Hammond shows, the most serious obstacle
(p. 481)

preventing the use of refugee repatriation as a means of ensuring political inclusion is the
chronic weakness of many states of origin. These states—even when early peace has been
brokered—are often insecure, with poor infrastructure and limited socio-economic

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Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

absorptive capacity. Even when persecution has ended, poverty may prevent a
sustainable return. In other words, repatriation is above all a development (and usually a
peace-building) challenge.

This helps to provide some insight into why a migration-centred approach to solving
displacement might unlock some protracted crises. The potential for migration to play a
role in fostering development is well recognized (Nyberg-Sørensen, Van Hear, and
Engberg-Pedersen 2002). The fruits of migration, then, could actually help to strengthen
peace-building initiatives and make return more sustainable by providing capital and
skills to be transferred back to a country of origin, and by allowing refugees to choose
when to return (see Hovil 2010; Kaiser 2010).

Turning to local integration, part of the reluctance of developing states to accept

refugees’ local integration as a formal solution is their conviction that recognizing even
long-term refugees as citizens would allow them to make new claims on limited state
resources, potentially leading to new conflicts with existing citizen groups. Underlying
hostility towards official local integration, then, is partly a response to a humanitarian
economy that characterizes and pays for refugees as ‘burdens’ in settings where local
communities are also often neglected or marginalized by underdeveloped or poorly
governed states. Again, this suggests that local integration must be viewed as a
development issue (see Long 2011; Lindley 2011).

Solving refugee crises by turning refugees into citizens is therefore highly problematic.
But if refugees cannot become citizens, could those who have already built businesses or
family links integrate as migrants? This approach could build on regional citizenship
initiatives (such as common citizenship of the Economic Community of West African
States, ECOWAS, or the East African Community, EAC) to allow self-supporting refugees
to move outside humanitarian space and work as migrants, circumventing national
politics, and laying foundations for development that would benefit both the displaced
and their host communities.

The third durable solution, resettlement, is intended to function above all as a form of
protection, offering a solution to a limited numbers of refugees selected on the basis of
humanitarian need. Yet in essence, resettlement solves displacement by offering
migration to a limited number of refugees. The value attached to resettlement by refugee
communities themselves is expressed not just in terms of safety and protection, but often
viewed above all as an opportunity to earn money, access education, and migrate legally
to the West (Author’s fieldwork, 2012). This is an option which increasing contemporary
restrictions in Europe, Australia, and North America on low and medium-skilled extra-
regional migration have otherwise removed. Yet opening up new migration pathways to
the West (to complement existing humanitarian resettlement programmes) could
establish new channels for economic and social development, helping to build
transnational networks (see Van Hear, this volume).

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Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

A migration and mobility-centred approach may therefore offer one means to

(p. 482)

unlock traditional durable solutions by circumventing political obstacles and directly

contributing to development needs. Yet arguably the most important contribution such an
approach can make is to challenge the very structure of ‘durable solutions’, imagined as
three separate and distinct options. Migration and mobility may not only enhance existing
solutions: they offer a means of connecting them, allowing refugees to build their own
composite solutions that reflect complex identities, particularly for those refugees who
have spent considerable time in exile and may have family or other social ties to their
host community, speak the language, own a business, or attend school there.

Furthermore, not only do migration and mobility break down the distinctions between
different solutions, such an approach may help to blur the lines between ‘exile’ and
‘solution’, focusing attention of the international community on the need to make
displacement itself less traumatic. Accepting mobile, complex identities as an expected
result of protracted displacement, and viewing these as an opportunity rather than a
threat allows ‘solutions’ to displacement to better reflect the coping strategies that
displaced communities establish during exile. These frequently rely upon mobility
between a place of economic production (usually the place of origin) and a place of
protection. Congolese in Uganda, Iraqi refugees in Jordan, and Afghans in Pakistan all
often practise ‘commuter’ displacement, returning frequently to check on family or
landholdings (Monsutti 2008; Chatelard 2010; Author’s fieldwork, 2012). IDPs may travel
frequently between towns (sites of protection) and rural villages (sites of economic
production). Across nearly all displacement crises, evidence from practitioners and
anthropologists is clear: movement is a normal, rational coping strategy for populations
with scarce resources and migration patterns often pre-date current conflicts, drawing on
traditional seasonal and temporary routes as well as existing transnational diaspora. This
suggests that it is international interventions in refugee and IDP crises, and international
approaches that frame durable solutions as an end to migration, that need to adapt if
such solutions are to better meet the needs of the displaced.

Mobility and Migration as Solutions to

Displacement in Practice
In the past decade, there has been greater recognition of refugees’ and IDPs’ existing use
of mobility and migration—often through informal channels—to carve out some form of
‘enduring solution’. However, it is far more difficult to identify formal programmes that
have incorporated mobility and migration. This in part reflects the fact that while
humanitarian actors have been prepared to recognize the potential value of migration in
solving protracted displacement, states have been far more cautious. Many states are
reluctant to move away from repatriation-focused strategies because of the political costs
that are seen to be associated with allowing refugees to become migrants in a host

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Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

state (widespread popular hostility and xenophobia can be observed from the UK
(p. 483)

to Kenya to Pakistan) or because the return of refugees is closely associated with the
return of peace and stability and the end of conflict.

Nevertheless, a few limited initiatives suggest that a mobility-centred approach to

resolving refugee and IDP crises can play an important role in addressing residual
caseloads, in acknowledging long-term development challenges in countries of origin, and
in recognizing the particular needs of long-term (including second- and third-generation)
displaced, who may often wish to restore or maintain links with their country of origin
and a long-term host community.1

Regional citizenship structures have offered one means of putting mobility-centred

solutions into practice. Regional citizenship is most developed in the European Union, but
West and East African communities also grant the citizens of member states freedom to
move, reside, and work throughout a region. In particular, pre-existing ECOWAS freedom
of movement protocols were used between 2007 and 2010 to broker a solution for
residual caseloads of Sierra Leonean and Liberian refugees in Nigeria and the Gambia.

Following the end of the brutal Liberian and Sierra Leonean civil wars in the early 2000s,
the majority of refugees repatriated from neighbouring West African states. However a
sizeable group—some 117,000 Liberians and 18,000 Sierra Leoneans—did not wish to
return, either because they were sceptical about their potential to reintegrate, or because
they had established significant economic and social ties during decades of exile. None of
the three traditional durable solutions met these refugees’ needs. However, existing
ECOWAS citizenship law entitled these refugees to remain in the host communities, as
Liberian and Sierra Leonean migrants.

In June 2007, a quadripartite agreement was signed for the integration of Liberian and
Sierra Leonean refugees in Nigeria. Under the terms of this agreement, the Liberian and
Sierra Leonean governments issue passports to those refugees still residing in Nigeria,
who are then issued with a three-year renewable ECOWAS residence permit by the
Nigerians. A similar programme was later adopted in the Gambia. In taking up these
offers, participating refugees were asked to explicitly confirm that they were voluntarily
re-availing themselves of the protection of their country of origin (Multipartite Agreement
2007). This initiative thus used existing legislation designed to further economic
development to provide refugees with a composite solution combining local integration
with formal repatriation (but not physical return). As Adepoju, Boulton, and Levin
concluded in 2007, this initiative suggests a need to rethink the shape of ‘durable
solutions’:

Integration is a notion ordinarily associated with permanence. It is thus somewhat

counter-intuitive to suppose that integration can be achieved through greater
mobility. Yet it is precisely this possibility that the ECOWAS protocols present for

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Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

refugees who are citizens of one Community country residing in another

community country.

(Adepoju, Boulton, and Levin 2007: 20)

The other major international initiative intended to help support refugees in securing a
durable solution by protecting their mobility has arguably proved less successful. It
(p. 484) was quickly recognized by researchers and UNHCR that the sustainability of the

massive Afghan repatriation that followed the fall of the Taliban in 2002 would depend on
meeting three distinct challenges. First, the majority of Afghan refugees who remained in
Pakistan and Iran had been born there, and had a limited desire to return ‘home’. Second,
the Afghan state was extremely fragile and had limited absorptive capacity. Third,
transnational and seasonal migration networks from Afghanistan to Iran and Pakistan had
long pre-dated conflict in the region and were a normal part of economic livelihood
strategies in the region. A successful solution to the Afghan refugee crisis therefore
depended upon accepting significant continued Afghan migration in the region, and in
2003, UNHCR urged that the post-2005 Afghan refugee situation should be addressed not
simply as a repatriation exercise, but as a ‘migration and development
challenge’ (UNHCR 2003).

In the ensuing decade, various initiatives have attempted to build a platform for Afghan
migration as part of a sustainable peace in the region. This has in part rested upon
evidence that facilitating labour migration, particularly of breadwinners, may help to lay
the foundations for eventual repatriation by providing access to a sustainable livelihood.
In 2007, 2.14 million Afghans in Pakistan were registered not as Afghan refugees, but
‘Afghans living in Pakistan’ (Tennant 2008). This was seen as a significant step forward.

The impact of such policies, however, has been limited; at least in part because the
growing fragility of the Pakistani state and the increasing isolation of Iran mean that both
states have continued to insist for political reasons that return is the only option. Since
2010 there has been a renewed insistence on return, with UNHCR facilitating a
repatriation ‘surge’ despite evidence that prospects for sustainable integration are weak,
while the Pakistani government has announced plans to revoke Afghans’ status in July
2013 with the aim of accelerating repatriation. In Iran, Afghans have been offered a
series of limited work-permits (conditional upon surrendering refugee cards and
returning non-working family members to Afghanistan). Yet some observers have
concluded that this initiative has in fact contributed only to a narrowing of protection
space within Iran and turned many refugees into illegal migrants, vulnerable to
deportation. This is the direct opposite of what migration and mobility-centred strategies
were intended to achieve.

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Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

Conclusion: No Panacea, but Many Possibilities

The ECOWAS and Afghan cases illustrate both the potential opportunities and pitfalls that
mobility-centred strategies offer. Critics have certainly warned of the need to recognize
the limits of migration as a ‘fourth solution’. Migrant status is not equivalent to
citizenship, and the difficult lives faced by many migrant labourers—including (p. 485)

potential exploitation by employers and police—mean that migration is no panacea. Some

researchers have warned that advocating for refugees to ‘become migrants’ risks
diminishing much-needed protection space in host countries, allowing states to evade
their responsibilities under Refugee Law to provide access to work, education, and
freedom of movement. Others voice concerns that if migration is seen as an acceptable
alternative to sustainable return, such strategies risk substituting one type of forced
migration (political) for another (economic).

These are real risks. Yet acknowledging these risks does not mean that we should stop
considering how freedom of movement can help provide durable solutions for the
displaced. What it does suggest is that we need to not only rethink solutions, but also
rethink protection. Such strategies can make displacement itself better, by allowing the
displaced—when they are able—to move beyond humanitarian space and engage in
development, exercising choice and autonomy, even if this does not amount to an ideal
‘durable solution’.

The restrictions that existing approaches to refugee protection often place on refugees’
and IDPs’ capacity to move may in fact place those in need of protection at risk of harm.
There is little doubt that many forced migrants, faced with economic needs and
aspirations that cannot be met through humanitarian care and maintenance, chose to
‘solve’ their displacement through illegal migration, increasing vulnerability to trafficking
and other exploitation. There is also clear evidence that those with financial capital often
chose to move as migrants rather than as refugees, avoiding the constraints associated
with formal asylum protections and instead living as exiles. In attempting to address
prolonged displacement, the first step may thus be to stop talking about solutions, and
concentrate instead on making displacement better, making mobility not an end point for
displacement, but an integral component of international efforts to maximize refugees’
choices.

The real difficulty, however, lies in persuading states that the costs of protracted
displacement—of failing to solve refugee crises for generations—are not an acceptable
price to pay for the illusion of migration control. States—and their voters—remain firmly
committed to a system in which it is the citizen who has the ‘right to have rights’. Given
the global rise in hostility towards migrant flows since the economic crisis, it is likely that
the insistence that refugees should return ‘home’ will continue, and prospects for a broad
embrace of mobility as a key component of development in post-conflict settings look
bleak. This is why the best chance for encouraging states to adopt mobility-centred
refugee policy is to continue to link migration with repatriation, and to carry out further
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Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

research to map the ways in which facilitating the mobility of displaced people can
contribute to broader development and peace-building aims. For it is clear that the real
challenge is not to make a normative case for freedom of movement, but to make it
politically possible to implement such a solution in practice.

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Rethinking ‘Durable’ Solutions

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Notes:

(1) . The following case studies are drawn from Long (2009).

Katy Long

Katy Long's research examines the politics of migration in conflict and crisis affected
areas, focusing in particular on refugee movements and international "solutions" to
forced migration crises. Katy has worked extensively with the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees, particularly in considering how access to migration
channels might contribute to resolving refugees' exile. She is a Lecturer in
International Development at the University of Edinburgh, having previously been a
Lecturer at the Department of International Development, London School of
Economics and Political Sciences, and a post-doctoral researcher at the Refugee
Studies Centre, University of Oxford.

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