Traditionally, the world of international cooperation has been split in a binary, where refugee responses and the creation of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) were situated in the humanitarian action field, with the consequence that help provided to refugees was reduced to specific situations of short-term displacement, assuming that the initial situation would eventually resolve and refugees would be able to go back to their countries of origin. For many crises, however, this has not been the case, given their complexity and scale. These ‘protracted’ crises, despite the language of urgency, have been at the centre of the humanitarian stage for decades. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the longest protracted situation are the more than 2.4 million Afghan refugees in Iran and Pakistan, but the situation of Syrian, South Sudanese, Somalis, Sudanese, Congolese or Eritrean refugees also qualifies as ‘protracted’, according to the definition that the UNHCR has been employing since 2004. The evidence of this long-term persistence of crises has been the search for durable solutions, which have been traditionally three: resettlement in another country, voluntary repatriation to the countries of origin and local integration. Yet, these solutions have not been curated by refugees themselves, but rather from the interests of the so-called ‘developed’ nations or the Global North, who have established the policies of the UNHCR through its governing body, the Executive Committee (ExCom).

Refugees as a particularly vulnerable group have increasingly found their way into recent discussions in philosophy, public policy, law, judicial decisions, etc. In fact, the Global Compact on Refugees aims to present a preliminary version of the importance of refugees in contemporary ideas of human agency-based development. Building on this, I propose that deeper engagement through a refugee lens must underlie two interlinked conceptions that are informing law and policy on various rights issues, i.e., ‘human dignity’ and a human capability-based development theory, the Capability Approach (CA). These conceptions are relevant since they have been reifying the way development is viewed to simultaneously address global issues and promote human agency. Yet, till now, even these two ideas are confronted by a (non)citizenship blind spot, particularly in relation to refugees. Thus, I wish to emphasise that the complementary understanding of dignity and CA needs to incorporate the category of ‘refugees’ to be fully coherent as theories of development. I particularly utilise Martha Nussbaum’s foregrounding on dignity in her theory of the CA to highlight its relevance yet the need for further work to include the legally ‘non-citizen’ refugee who does not neatly fit into the idea of nation states and the closely connected citizenship paradigm.

It has been 25 years since Sen’s seminal book “Development as Freedom” was published. A lot has changed since then, also in terms of how we tend to perceive the relationship between migration and development. For one, and to paraphrase Sen, migrants have begun to be perceived as “responsible persons” who “chose to act one way rather than other”. To migrate, or to stay. This reasoning is reflected in the recent work of, among others, Hein de Haas (2021) and Kerilyn Schewel (2020), who perceive migration – or lack thereof – as a result of people’s aspirations both in terms of their right to move (de Haas) and to stay (Schewel). Importantly, as argued by the latter, a systematic neglect of the causes and consequences of immobility – i.e. of people’s staying preferences – obscures any efforts to understand why, when, and how people migrate. By developing the aspirations-capabilities frameworks to explore the determinants of (im)mobility, de Haas and Schewel have contributed a great deal to altering the status quo in migration research, which has often focused on the more easily quantifiable, economic factors underlying migration decision-making. Importantly, unlike most mainstream theories of migration, the aspirations-capabilities framework becomes even more relevant when acknowledging the highly gendered nature of migration.

The symposium brings together four contributions by four distinguished authors. The contributions articulate both the potential and pitfalls of the aspirations/capabilities model of the nexus and highlight particularities when the framing is applied together with other layers (gender, climate crisis, refugees). Two of the contributions discuss their topic using the term “migration” while others look into the issue in the context of “refugees.” Notwithstanding the importance of the distinction between “migrants” and “refugees” in current global frameworks, the purpose here is to stimulate debate that goes beyond this fluid dichotomy. In popular parlance, the term “refugees” is used to connote “migrants” or “non-citizens” in general.

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The Academic Forum on ISDS is delighted to announce their next Plenary Conference entitled "ISDS Reform: Past, Present, and Future", which will take place at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence on April 29th, 2025 in cooperation with the EUI and the University of Oslo. With this Conference, the Academic Forum aims to explore the outcomes and future of reform of #ISDS. Interested academics (including PhD candidates and early career researchers), practitioners, and policymakers are invited to submit their paper abstracts. There is no requirement of membership of the Academic Forum.

The News and Events category publishes the latest News and Events relating to International Economic Law relating to Africa and the Global South. Every week, Afronomicslaw.org receive the News and Events in their e-mail accounts. The News and Events published every week include conferences, major developments in the field of International Economic Law in Africa at the national, sub-regional and regional levels as well as relevant case law. News and Events with a Global South focus are also often included.