THE REFUGEE AND MIGRATION COMPACTS: COOPERATION IN AN ERA OF NATIONALISM

Description

Please join the Global Migration Lab for another event in its speaker series examining contemporary issues and challenges in global migration governance.

A live stream of this event will be available shortly before the panel begins. 

Anne Staver: “Of two minds: reasserting national control while negotiating global migration governance”

James Milner: “Collective action in a time of populism: Everyday politics and the implementation of the Global Compact on Refugees”

Discussant: Jennifer Hyndman, Director of the Centre for Refugees Studies, York University

Moderator: Randall Hansen, Interin Director, Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy

Signed in December 2018, the Global Refugee and Global Migration Compacts are an admission that the challenges of migration are best approached through cooperation and collective action.

The Compact on Refugees recognizes the unequal burden placed on Global South states, which host refugees, and rich Global North states, which pay to keep them in regions of origin. Recognizing that most refugees will not return home or be resettled, the Compact proposes new solidarity, development, and finance mechanisms to foster the inclusion and development of displaced people and host populations alike. While promising, displacement crises continue to proliferate, host states remain under-funded, and programming faces major delivery challenges.

In terms of the Migration Compact, scholars have long argued that state interests are largely incompatible with attempts at global migration governance. Yet, in 2016 the International Organization for Migration became a UN agency, and the vast majority of states supported the Compact with a goal of facilitating safe, orderly, and legal migration. At the same time, right-wing parties in liberal democracies rallied against the Compact, arguing it would erode state sovereignty, and several prominent states “pulled out”.

This panel will unpack the potential for global migration governance, responsibility-sharing, and addressing collective action problems in the face of burden-shifting, populism, and a growing desire to assert control.

James Milner is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Carleton University. He is also currently Project Director of LERRN: The Local Engagement Refugee Research Network, a 7-year, SSHRC-funded partnership between researchers and civil society actors primarily in Canada, Jordan, Kenya, Lebanon and Tanzania. He has been a researcher, practitioner and policy advisor on issues relating to the global refugee regime, global refugee policy and the politics of asylum in the global South. In recent years, he has undertaken field research in Burundi, Guinea, Kenya, India, Tanzania and Thailand, and has presented research findings to stakeholders in New York, Geneva, London, Ottawa, Bangkok, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam and elsewhere. He has worked as a Consultant for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in India, Cameroon, Guinea and its Geneva Headquarters. He is author of Refugees, the State and the Politics of Asylum in Africa (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), co-author (with Alexander Betts and Gil Loescher) of UNHCR: The Politics and Practice of Refugee Protection (Routledge, 2012), and co-editor of Protracted Refugee Situations: Political, Human Rights and Security Implications (UN University Press, 2008).

Anne Balke Staver is a senior researcher at the Oslo Metropolitan University, focusing on migration and integration policies. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto and an MSc in Forced Migration from the University of Oxford. She is formerly a research fellow at the Institute for Social Research (Oslo), and has extensive experience from migration policymaking and implementation in the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration, Norwegian Police Immigration Service and the Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Consultations on Migration, Asylum and Refugees (igc).

This speaker series is supported in part by Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada in the lead up to the 2019 International Metropolis Conference.