Mobility and Migration

International refugee law provides a vision of refugee agency: refugees are understood to have a right to flee (including illegally – states undertake not to penalize refugees for illegal entry) and enjoy self-employment and work rights in their countries of asylum.

However, in practice, refugee flight is increasingly suppressed, both in refugees’ regions of origin and further afield, with the EU one of the key actors in the global suppression of refugee mobility. Refugees’ right to flee, onward movement in search of decent refuge and possible further access to migration opportunities need scholarly attention. Refugees often face more mobility barriers than other travellers and migrants and, in the absence of legal ways to claim asylum, they often must have recourse to smugglers.

Even when they are formally recognised as refugees, refugees’ travel and migration options are often curtailed with resettlement as much a containment as a mobility practice. The project’s premise, that ‘refugees are migrants’ aims to open up for scrutiny those practices that limit refugee flight and onward mobility, to examine how migration control concerns have come to permeate the refugee regime.