The Politics of Forced Displacement

The Price of Indifference: Refugees and Humanitarian Action in the New Century, by Arthur C. Helton. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). 314 pp. $20.

In the last decade, refugee crises have captured news headlines. Using graphic images of destroyed villages, orphaned children, and destitute refugee camps, the media has brought the plight of the forcibly displaced into our living rooms. Meanwhile, with the end of the Cold War, globalization has produced massive and uncontrolled human migration, human trafficking and smuggling operations, and a perceived abuse of the asylum system. In an attempt to control illegal migration, governments have implemented draconian measures that have compromised the integrity of their human rights commitments and jeopardized the ability of refugees to find safe havens. As governments seek to satisfy domestic constituents, protect their borders, and address the political realities of assuming international humanitarian commitments, they have often responded to international refugee crises haphazardly, with devastating human costs. The challenge ahead lies in developing international refugee policy that better reconciles competing agendas, better accommodates the increasing number of actors involved, and, most significantly, actively seeks to prevent refugee crises before they occur.

Arthur Helton's book The Price of Indifference: Refugees and Humanitarian Action in the New Century aptly captures the current dilemmas in international refugee policy while providing concrete recommendations to avoid repeating the reactive and ill-coordinated responses to refugee crises in the past decade. As the Senior Fellow for Refugee Studies and Preventative Action at the Council on Foreign Relations, Helton has over twenty years of experience with refugee policy. He relies on this background to open The Price of Indifference with a much-needed, comprehensive review of the new dimensions of refugee crises that have emerged since the end of the Cold War. In so doing, he identifies two primary drawbacks to existing responses to refugee crises: the lack of coordination among the myriad of actors involved and the absence of a preventative approach that actively seeks to identify and avert the sources of forced displacement. To overcome these problems, he proposes the creation of SHARE (Strategic Humanitarian Action and Research), an intergovernmental mechanism to formulate proactive strategies and to give decision makers more options for appropriate humanitarian responses. In the United States, he suggests the development of the AHA (Agency for Humanitarian Action), which would be responsible for spearheading and coordinating U.S. humanitarian efforts. The U.S. government currently lacks such an agency. These two proposals form the core of the book and distinguish it from other works on international refugee policy.

The Inadequacy of Current International Refugee Policy:
A Critique

Helton's analysis and recommendations are timely in light of the exponential increase in refugees coupled with the growing demands on international organizations serving them. ¹ In particular, he examines the impact of external pressures on the effectiveness of the international refugee regime and discusses the internal weaknesses of the system that prevent it from addressing the challenges it confronts. The end of the Cold War unleashed a number of civil conflicts that have altered the nature of "war." Forced displacement has become more than just a consequence of conflict; it is now frequently a war aim, particularly when parties engage in ethnic cleansing. In addition, the participation of the military, media, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) has complicated the dynamics of responding to forced displacement. For instance, Helton discusses how NGOs' traditional distrust of the military has resulted in uncomfortable cooperation between these groups and the armed forces, which have become increasingly involved in humanitarian interventions.

UNHCR: Pressure to expand the scope of protection

Furthermore, given the inadequate responses to recent refugee crises, the international refugee regime's capacity to protect forced migrants has become the subject of intense scrutiny. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is the UN agency mandated to protect refugees under the 1951 Refugee Convention, ² which narrowly defines a refugee as an individual who has left his...