Refugee Policy Structures: Promoting or Undermining Belonging?

Abstract

Despite the many challenges that refugees face in finding spaces for belonging in exile, refugees and other displaced persons show incredible resourcefulness in carving out spaces for belonging—spaces that are critical to their ability to be safe and have access to livelihoods. Yet refugee policies, and the ways in which these have translated into humanitarian structures on the ground, have rarely reflected these complex processes of inclusion. Rather than allowing for people to negotiate their way through the terrain of multiple forms of belonging and legitimacy and prioritise accordingly, humanitarian categories tend to ‘fix’ belonging into rigid categories that are not only inefficient but can create harm for those they are supposed to protect. Hovil, therefore, argues for a realignment in refugee policy that promotes rather than undermines multiple forms of belonging.