SO44CH19 Annual Review of Sociology
Annual Review of Sociology
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SO44CH19
Annual Review of Sociology
The Sociology of Refugee
All rights reserved
Keywords
asylum, citizenship, integration, migration, refugee, violence
Abstract
Theorization in the sociology of migration and the field of refugee studies
has been retarded by a path-dependent division that we argue should be
broken down by greater mutual engagement. Excavating the construction of
the refugee category reveals how unwarranted assumptions shape contempo-
rary disputes about the scale of refugee crises, appropriate policy responses,
and suitable research tools. Empirical studies of how violence interacts with
economic and other factors shaping mobility offer lessons for both fields.
Adapting existing theories that may not appear immediately applicable, such
as household economy approaches, helps explain refugees’ decision-making
processes. At a macro level, world systems theory sheds light on the inter-
active policies around refugees across states of origin, mass hosting, asylum,
transit, and resettlement. Finally, focusing on the integration of refugees in
the Global South reveals a pattern that poses major challenges to theories of
assimilation and citizenship developed in settler states of the Global North.
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THE SOCIOLOGY OF REFUGEE MIGRATION
Refugee status opens doors closed to many other migrants, as states increasingly try to filter who
can cross international borders (Shacknove 1985). Along with many scholars, the United Nations
HighCommissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) insists that “refugees are not migrants” (Feller 2005,
p. 27). TheUNHCR’s goal is to safeguard the refugee exemption from restrictive policies (Betts &
Collier 2017). Skeptical media and political entrepreneurs in turn dismissively label people trying
to get in as “migrants”—not “genuine refugees” with legitimate claims to enter and be protected
(Crawley & Skleparis 2018).
The notion that migrants and refugees are distinct extends throughout the academy for histor-
ical and contemporary political reasons. The great wave of transoceanic European immigration
to the New World in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries took place at a time when
there was not a separate track for refugee admissions nor an international refugee regime. As a
result, foundational theories of immigration typically ignored the refugee question even if many
of those early migratory movements, from Russian Jews fleeing pogroms to Irish escaping the
Great Famine, can be reconceptualized as forced migrations (Zolberg et al. 1989). Immigration
studies in the United States, Canada, and Australia address post–World War II refugee admis-
sions, but they easily conflate all people who moved to settler states as “immigrants,” regardless
of why they came ( Jupp 2002, Kelley & Trebilcock 2010, Portes & Rumbaut 2014). Research
on US immigration has been especially influential on the broader field of international migration
studies, whose foundational theories generally assume labor migration (FitzGerald 2014, Massey
et al. 1998).
The field of refugee studies is a more recent scholarly endeavor with its own research centers,
journals, professional associations, and research paradigms that focus on the concerns of refugees,
their advocates, and legal scholars. In the 1980s, academics based primarily in theUnitedKingdom
shaped the field around the assumption that refugees are fundamentally different from migrants
because of the push factors that impel their movement and of the states’ unique legal obligations to
protect refugees in the post–WorldWar II regime (Black 2001, Richmond 1988, VanHear 2012).
There is surprisingly little overlap between refugee studies and the sociology of international
migration (Scalettaris 2007, Stepputat & Sørensen 2014, Van Hear 2012). A review by Mazur
(1988, p. 45) claimed that “whether sociology has a contribution [to refugee studies] distinguishable
from that of geography, anthropology, economics or political science. . .remains to be proven.”
Castles (2003, p. 14) lamented that “there is little sociological literature on forced migration and
one certainly cannot find a developed body of empirical work and theory.”
This review argues that the sociology of international migration and refugee studies can mu-
tually enrich each other and push theorization in both directions. A sociology of knowledge
approach illuminates the classificatory struggles that created and sustain the refugee category and
shows how predominant frames in the field limit scholarly understandings (see Bourdieu 1991).
Breaking out of the constraints of the statutory refugee label allows social scientists to bring to
bear well-developed tools from the study of international migration and integration that can help
explain refugee experiences across countries of origin, transit, and destination. World systems
theory and a refugee household decision-making model are particularly productive.
The insights of refugee studies can benefit the sociology of international migration in three
ways. First, migration theories explain a subset ofmobility: labormigration. Expanding the inquiry
to include people who flee violence challenges theorists of international migration to define their
scope conditions and to consider interacting factors that explain movement as well as decisions
to stay. Second, in contradistinction to many underpoliticized theories of international migration
(Piore 1979, Stark 1991, Todaro 1969), refugee studies rightfully focuses on the role of states in
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shaping the flows and life chances of mobile persons (Greenhill 2010, Zolberg et al. 1989). Finally,
attending to refugees expands the range of cases to be considered when analyzing other concerns
in the sociology of international migration, such as integration, transnationalism, and citizenship.
The migration literature’s tendency to investigate labor flows to Western states disregards most
refugeemovements, which take place between neighboring countries in theGlobal South (Chimni
1998). Investigating a broader set of cases enables a better specification of scope conditions for
existing theories, introduces fresh research questions, and develops a systemic understanding of
international mobility and its constraints.
WHO IS A REFUGEE?
Sociologists of migration rarely define who is a migrant (FitzGerald 2014). By contrast, debates
have raged about just who is a refugee ever since exceptions for refugees were created in restrictive
immigration laws. The refugee label confusingly blends categories of everyday usage, law, and
social science (Hamlin 2017). The definition is consequential, potentially amatter of life and death,
when governments decide whether to admit certain individuals or groups. The construction of
the categories also matters analytically because the categories deployed shape explanations of why
refugeesmove, the opportunities and barriers to integration in their places of transit or destination,
and eddies of circular movements along the way.
Constructivist Approaches
The term “refugee” first entered English to describe the Huguenots expelled from France in
the seventeenth century. During the early twentieth century, governments applied the label on
an ad hoc basis to many groups such as White Russians, Armenians, and German Jews, amid
an emerging sense in Europe that refugees deserved protections that other mobile persons did
not (Gatrell 2013). During World War II, as in the present day, stakeholders debated whether
particular groups and individuals were refugees or “merely” immigrants. The open deterrence of
refugees was becoming less politically legitimate, even as the criteria for selecting them in settler
states continued to be deeply embedded in the economic and ethnoracial preferences of existing
laws (FitzGerald & Cook-Martı´n 2014, Neumann 2015).
After WorldWar II, the victorious Allied powers negotiated the 1951 Convention Relating to
the Status of Refugees, whose Article 1(A)(2) defines a refugee as a person who,
owing to a 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
or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country; or who, not having
a nationality and being outside the country of his former habitual residence as a result of such events,
is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.