WHAT IS THE POINT?

I have argued that any form of forced displacement should be seen as political, calling for a political response; a political conception needs to be extended across the whole range of displacements. This requires a different conception of political protection than the one that dominates at present, as surrogate membership of a sanctuary state may not be relevant to some forms of displacement (although it remains relevant for a great many), and it is not part of the argument that we need to arrive at a one-size-fits-all model. What matters is that the responses to displacements should aim at permanent solutions, and should be significantly informed and determined by displaced people themselves, recognising their political agency. However, an objection which could come from both the political and humanitarian conceptions of refugeehood is that, whatever political protection looks like, extending it across the range of displacements is radically implausible. The numbers of displaced people are vast, and the international community is already reluctant to see refugee displacement as a political issue, pushing towards a more humanitarian framework to temporarily shelter them until they achieve some form of ‘resilience’ wherever they happen to be. Indeed, it might be suggested that the arguments I have put forward lead us to such unrealistic conclusions that I could have better devoted my time to the more realistic project of proposing achievable reforms of the international protection regime, something more like Matthew Lister’s progressive conservativism approach (Lister 2014: 629 n.9).

The question, then, is: what is the point of a political conception of forced displacement? There are two reasons why I think it is worth arguing for such a position. First, its implication is that stronger political solutions are needed across the range of displacements, and the fact that the global order of sovereign nation states is incapable of delivering these solutions exposes its inadequacy – it is, as it stands, incapable of arriving at anything that looks like an answer to the injustice of forced displacement. This is surely worth pointing out. What follows is that we need to rethink our conception of the global order and imagine a global system which has genuine answers for forcibly displaced people.