AbstractsLaw & Legal Studies

We have shown in our analysis that protracted encampment of refuges and lack of durable solutions to refugee issues often is caused by the chronic state of political emergency in the countries from where the refugees flee, which makes an early repatriation of refugees unlikely, while governments in both the global north and south are hesitant in providing protection to refugees and offer asylum in their countries. The reasons for the encampment of refugees and the strict asylum policies are to be found in various social, economic and political concerns in relation to the settlement of refugees. Refugees are perceived to place an environmental and financial burden on the host country, and it is argued that host countries don’t have the capacity to absorb the large number of refugees. The settlement of refugees is feared to cause social instability and to pose a threat to national security. Further, it is believed that the influx of refugees can deteriorate the values underpinning democratic systems, and governments express concerns about the ability of assimilating people. These concerns confirm that most of the reasons why states are reluctant to grant asylum to refugees are associated with fearism and the separation of politics from humanitarian concerns. The perception that refugees can threaten the well-being of a state has been normalized, and this fear justifies that the protection of refugees is not of high priority and that their rights are being violated. This notion has been confirmed in the study of Dadaab by the facts that (i) Somali refugees are being kept in unsecure camps for decades in order to be controlled politically, and (ii) western governments make further restrictions on the requirements for Somali people to obtain asylum, and promote Somali repatriation programmes even though Somalia is still highly unstable. 55 The encampment of refugees is also caused by an unwillingness of host countries to do an effort in integrating refugees, if the international society and donor states are not willing to share the burden and offer resettlement. There is an ongoing conflict between host states in the global south and donor states in the north where both parties attempt to avoid the responsibility for the protection of refugees. The possibilities of the UNHCR to provide durable solutions for refugees are affected by this extremely politicization of humanitarian aid, because the organization has to work according to its non-political mandate. Both the possibilities for the three durable solutions and the critique of the conditions in refugee camps have been questioned by the contextualization of the theory in the Dadaab case. The protracted encampment implies that the camps grow in size and density of population and normalization appears which gives the camps the characteristics of cities. Sometimes the conditions in the camps are even better than in the surrounding areas. It is suggested in the context of these large camps that the focus should be turned away from local integration, resettlement, and…