Date Published:
Jun 25, 2007
Abstract:
This essay explores the impact of the end of the Cold War on the counter-refugee-crisis
policies of the United Nations and its strongest member states. I argue that during the ColdWar, state interests were subordinated to the refugee interests for two reasons. First, refugees were fewin number and tended to be educated, skilled, and informed (valuable). Second, the WWII experience of the Holocaust in Europe led to the institutionalization
of concern for the fate of persecuted groups at the expense of state interests. After the
end of the Cold War, however, a number of the Soviet Union’s allies and successor
states began to fail, and these state failures, combined with unprecedented access to
information about living conditions abroad, led to refugee flows that impacted powerful
states. Whereas the preferred counter-refugee crisis policy during the Cold War was
resettlement, after the Cold War it shifted to repatriation: voluntary repatriation in
the best cases, and forced repatriation in the worst. The essay’s primary focus is an
assessment of the consequences of this policy shift from resettlement to repatriation
of refugees. After introducing a number of important empirical findings regarding the
frequency and scale of contemporary refugee crises, I conclude that although in some
cases the policy of supporting voluntary repatriation is a good thing, it may have the
unintended consequence of involuntary or forced repatriations as receiving states feel
little compulsion to resettle these refugees within their borders.
Notes:
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