Resident Fellow Mauro De Lorenzo

Mauro De Lorenzo reviews Refugees and Forced Displacement: International Security, Human Vulnerability, and the State, edited by Edward Newman and Joanne van Selm.

The purpose of this unwieldy book is to put refugees at the center of the international security agenda--an improbable ambition in this era of nuclear proliferation and suicide bombs. To make the task easier, the editors have re-defined security: no longer is it about sovereignty, military operations, or 'high politics.' Security is rather 'human security' and its indices are poverty, disease, and human rights.

But this sleight of hand is of questionable utility. It might make the work of scholars seem more important or 'hard,' but the 'securitization' of refugee issues can have the uninteded consequence of making refugees seem more threatening than they are. Of all the contributors to this book, only Astri Suhrke and Gregor Noll question the validity of the security analogy endorsed by the editors.

The verbose and undisciplined introduction by Edward Newman is the book's core. He posits a supposed tension between "human security" and "national security," and argues that refugees should be an "integral part" of security policy because they are both a "cause and consequence of conflict." The book, he says, is not about "explaining the reasons for patterns of refugee flow," but about "the legal, political/normative, institutional, and conceptual frameworks through which the international community addresses refugee and displacement issues" (p. 5). He illustrates his vision wtih nine (often overlapping) "propositions," the most important and valid of which are that refugees can cause conflict as well as be produced by it, and that the impression that civil conflicts have gotten more numerous and more violent--a constant refrain in UN and human rights reporting--is an artifact of our ways of analyzing and speaking, not a measure of objective reality.

Given the book's declared aims, the selection of contributions is bewildering. In the two pages of high U.N.-ese that constitues Sadako Ogata's foreword, nothing very precise is said. The chapters by Julie Mertus on gender, Erin D. Mooney on IDPs, Peter Mares on the media, Mervyn Frost on "thinking ethically" about refugees, B. S. Chimni on repatriation, William Maley on refugee assistance policy, Patricia Weiss Fagan on reconstruction on Bosnia and Haiti, and Mark Raper on NGOs, whatever their own merits, do not address the book's theme. Their inclusion markedly dilutes the coherence of the volume. Susanne Schmeidl's excellent history of the "early warning" concept also falls in this category, as does Khalid Koser's exceptionally revealing portrait of human smuggling and the moral dilemma that ensues because refugees often have no choice but to make use of smugglers--at whose hands they suffer abuse.

This collection is solid and workmanlike. There is nothing here to surprise or excite, but it is now the major collection on an emerging intersection in refugee studies. Edward Newman's introduction will serve as a reference point for the next endeavor.

It is unfortunate that there is no obvious link amongst most of the contributions, a number of which are valuable on their own. A smaller, more focused book would have been preferable. Edward Newman emphasized that refugees can be both a "cause and a consequence" of war. It was the "cause" part that was supposed to make the security argument stick. There are myriad case studies--Rwandan refugees in Congo and Uganda, Afghan refugees in Pakistan--but no contributor takes it up. The focus is on agencies and helpers, not on refugees and their embeddedness in local politics. That would be worth a book.

Mauro De Lorenzo is a resident fellow at AEI.