Rebecca Hamlin's "Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move"

Rebecca Hamlin is Associate Professor of Legal Studies and Political Science at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the author of Let Me Be a Refugee (2014).

Hamlin applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move reveals a lot about the book’s overall message. The page discusses the process through which the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) supplemented the basic framework of international refugee law laid out in the 1951 Convention by adding a Protocol to the Convention in 1967. During the process of drafting the Protocol, representatives from many states in the Global South, some of which were newly independent former colonies, spoke out against it. These states objected for procedural reasons (their perspectives were not included in the drafting of the Protocol) and substantive reasons (the Protocol did not go anywhere near far enough to address the limitations of the 1951 Convention).

On page 99 I call these objections “troubling,” particularly because similar objections had been raised in 1951, and it seems that “despite sixteen years of decolonial struggle and its professed desire to draw newly postcolonial states into the fold, UNHCR, led by European states, repeated its mistakes almost exactly.” Drawing on the excellent archival work of a scholar named Sara Davies, I conclude that just as in 1951, Global South states were not consulted or respected, but were expected to adopt these instruments of international law once they were written.

My account of UNHCR’s blindness to Global South concerns is designed to counteract the dominant narrative about the 1967 Protocol, which is that it fixed the problems of the 1951 Convention by opening up the definition of a refugee to the entire world, instead of limiting it just to people who had been displaced in Europe in WWII. I argue that such assessments of the Protocol ignore the fact that it leaves the 1951 definition of a refugee untouched. That definition is highly individualistic, liberal, has no conception of decolonization, and excludes many of the most common reasons for displacement in the Global South, then and now.

One of the central messages of my book is that the migrant/refugee binary is used to privilege particular forms of suffering, and particular reasons for border crossing, over others. Another core argument is that the sovereignty of people in wealthy Northern states has always been given more weight than the sovereignty of people in the Global South. Page 99 provides just one example of these key points.

Follow Rebecca Hamlin on Twitter.

The Page 99 Test: Let Me Be a Refugee.

--Marshal Zeringue