A Well-Founded Fear: The Social Ecology of 21st Century Refugees
Harvard International Review › Vol. 31 Nbr. 3, October 2009
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Summary
In 1951, the United Nations defined a refugee as a person who owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country. While hackneyed, these phrases indicate an unconscious attempt to use the social-ecological paradigm to understand refugee crises. This paradigm explains social conflicts by analyzing how power and resource allocation mediate humans' ability to sustain themselves from nature. We explicitly use social ecology to argue that the violent development of natural resources is the distinctive feature of 21st century refugees. There are some 200 territorial nation-states on earth. But fewer than ten of these geo-political units account for most of the world's 13.6 million refugees. Two-thirds of all refugees are Afghani, Palestinian, Iraqi, Burmese, Sudanese, and Somali.
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Extract
A Well-Founded Fear: The Social Ecology of 21st Century Refugees
In 1951, the United Nations defined a refugee as a person who "owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country." Given this emphasis on nationality and country, research on 20th century refugees focused on states, revolutions, and international relations. Among the many legacies of this literature are ecological metaphors-uprooting, flow, wave, boat people-to describe forced migration from political violence.
While hackneyed, these phrases indicate an unconscious attempt to use the social-ecological paradigm to understand refugee crises. This paradigm explains social conflicts by analyzing how power and resource allocation mediate humans' ability to sustain themselves from nature. We explici...See the full content of this document
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