Refuge and Belonging: Transformations of Refugee Protection in the Federal Republic of Germany
Modern and Contemporary History
Final Report Abstract
Refugee policies are strongly contested in public debates and tend to be amended despite long standing refugee laws and definitions. Due to the contentions they create and the relevance they hold for particularly vulnerable people it is crucial to understand how and why refugee policies shift and what underlies transformations in the perception of deserving refugees. Ultimately, this project's thesis suggests that political communities discuss in refugee debates their own political belonging and refugee protection as an extension thereof. Thus, depending on how political belonging is perceived, certain migrants are considered deserving refugees and others are not. Studying refugee debates throughout the history of the Federal Republic of Germany showed that the mode of belonging, which was discussed politically and publically, shifted from a civic-political notion in the 1950s, when in the Cold War refugee protection was an affirmation of liberal principles, to a communal-identity notion by the 1990s, when refugee protection became a question of national responsibility or threat. The debates and policies regarding refugee protection were transformed as with the notion of belonging the criteria of who should be regarded a ‘refugee’ and on what grounds changed over time. In addition to providing a historical narrative of German refugee, the research project questions long-held notion of ‘trickle-down’ global refugee policy by emphasizing the domestic relevance and the political of refugee protection. However, as research showed, international politics often provided a normative framework in which refugee policies were discussed in relation to notions of political belonging. This conceptual approach provides a novel approach to studying, beyond day-to-day policy reactions, refugee debates and policies as well as the current European refugee crisis by assessing them in the context of broader socio-political organization and political contestations about belonging.
Publications
- The History of Refugee Protection: Conceptual and Methodological Challenges. Journal of Refugee Studies, Volume 30, Issue 2, June 2017
Special Issue: History of Refugee Protection: Pages 161–169 (wohl = Introduction, da 1. Artikel laut Inh.-Verz.)
Olaf Kleist
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1093/jrs/fex018) - The Refugee Regime: Sovereignty, Belonging and the Political of Forced Migration, in: Andreas Pott, Christoph Rass and Frank Wolff (eds.): Was ist ein Migrationsregime? = What Is a Migration Regime?. Migrationsgesellschaften. Wiesbaden: VS Springer, 2018. S. 167-185
Olaf Kleist
(See online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-20532-4)
