Refugee Participation without Refugee Politics
Author: Associate Professor Will Jones
Historically, UNHCR and the rest of the refugee regime has not viewed restoring the political rights of refugees as their business. Today, whilst humanitarian organisations are still staying away from the language of political rights, they have a newly discovered passion for refugee ‘participation’. Participation is criterion 4 of the 2015 Core Humanitarian Standard. UNHCR has published a toolkit for participatory assessment and development, another on participatory approaches for practitioners at the local level, and another on participation in operations. This has become sufficiently ubiquitous that in 2022 the Inter-Agency Standing Committee declared a ‘Global Participation Revolution’. However, the way in which these documents define participation is curiously divorced from political rights, which means that participation for refugees ends up being understood in stark contrast to how we think about citizen participation.