The pandemic is simply exposing the ongoing precarity of the displaced rather than disrupting their ‘normal’ lives, and so there is much to learn about what international protection should look like.
When it comes to military action to prevent mass atrocity crimes, it seems that key players in international politics have abandoned the Responsibility to Protect (R2P).
What I want to draw attention to here are the not-refugees, especially those we classify as ‘economic’ migrants but who are fleeing places in search of basic survival.
Trump’s presidency represents a radical break in international politics. Under Trumpism rules are for losers. Realism has returned, and liberal internationalism is, for now anyway, dead.
Unless citizens are willing to problematize their own position, power and safety, they must accept that they are not willing to take the Refugee Question seriously.
If Britain abandons reason and principle, we will not be able to reclaim them and we will end up back in a place which we thought Europe had left behind forever.
The UN Refugee Convention and the rights and obligations which flow from it are inadequate and need to be fundamentally revised.
The very idea of who counts as a refugee is at stake due to new political discourse, and that may have dangerous consequences for all those seeking asylum around the world.
Recent EU responses should make us wonder whether the political atmosphere around migration in Europe means that the continent has journeyed to the heart of darkness.
Global warming’s last-chance saloon will soon be upon us. Yet, far from acting together, we have various gangs ready to shoot each other in the back while the piano-player plays on.
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