Decentering Conceptions of Refugee Governance: Charting an Empirical Pathway

Abstract

Breaking away from Western-centric paradigms, the decentering approach proposes to embrace multiple ways of thinking in world politics. In this article, we chart an empirical agenda for decentering conceptions of refugee governance, a particularly contentious research terrain. We build on three interconnected scales of analysis in the decentering agenda as important gateways for our exercise: temporalities, policy orders and geographies. First, we retrace refugee hosting temporalities that predate the adoption of the 1951 Refugee Convention, considered to be the pillar of the modern refugee regime. In so doing, we destabilize the assumed centrality of a standpoint from which refugee law evolved. Second, we look at notions of governance outside of the policy-centric realm and center attention on refugee experiences. Third, we engage with non-Western geographies as actors in their own right. Inspired by the Middle East as a site for knowledge production rather than data extraction, we build on three examples: The historical refugee order in the Ottoman empire, refugee experiences in the context of the Jordan Compact, and hosting experiences of non-signatory states to the 1951 Convention. By developing this three-fold- albeit non-exhaustive -pathway we ground decentering as an empirically and methodologically relevant research strategy in refugee studies.