Borders, territories, and mobilities: Conceptualizing protective frameworks for refugees from convention to compact
Date
2025
Authors
Nielsen, Julianna R.C.
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Abstract
This thesis presents an approach to understanding of how access to protection through international refugee law continues to be challenged and reshaped as border governance technologies intended to manage migration transform where and how states exercise control over territories and mobilities. My approach first brings into focus the generative relationships between borders, territories and mobilities that function to define and structure the key organizing principles of international refugee law and governance. By drawing on interdisciplinary insights and exploring borders as disaggregated practices of differentiation and relations management, I advance a conceptual terrain for analyzing approaches to refugee protection. The theoretical foundations established in the first section of this thesis functions to expose the interconnected claims and conditions dis/enabling international legal frameworks and approaches to protection.
By situating a series of approaches to articulating universal standards for refugee protection within the context of the expansion of an international state system through the 20th Century, I identify the historical and spatial particularity of early efforts to establish a rights framework for refugees. First, I examine how the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees established the legal responsibilities of state signatories towards those seeking protection under the terms of its first article, which defined the meaning of the refugee. Then, this thesis examines the extent to which the 1967 Protocol and a range of regional agreements within the Global South replicated or sought to innovate those key organizing principles with respect to distinct contexts and experiences of the colonial state and participation in a nation-state system. I conclude with an assessment of how contemporary efforts to establish a collaborative approach to refugee governance continue to reflect rigidly-territorialized assumptions about how and where states affirm and enact their responsibilities to refugees, despite implementing border governance techniques that increasingly extend migration controls beyond the cartographic boundaries of individual states. By examining how the relationships between borders, territories and mobilities form a conceptual terrain for envisioning and enacting protective systems for refugees, this study aims to offer a genealogical and systemic approach to analyzing the protective gaps within international refugee law and governance efforts.
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Keywords
Refugee law, Migration, Borders, Governance