<p>The thesis examines the international refugee protection system in order to discover whether or not the system constitutes an international regime, as defined by international relations literature. To do so, it formulates a theoretical framework combining neoliberal and constructivist approaches to regime theory. It closely examines the legal documents that provide the normative and procedural framework of the protection system (such as the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, various regional agreements, as well as certain human rights documents) and discusses the legal, political, and moral obligation that these documents instill upon the member states of the protection system. It evaluates the principles, norms, rules, and decision- making procedures provided by the system, and compares them to the necessary criteria of an international regime in neoliberal theory. The purpose of trying to discover whether the refugee system constitutes an international regime is to show that if it is a regime, states are no longer afforded the full freedom of action and decision-making under the doctrine of sovereignty and that they have a certain level of obligation to abide by regime rules and help in the upkeep of the regime. After showing that the system constitutes a ‘strong promotional’ international regime, it discusses the importance of the regime within the international state system. It evaluates how it brings about cooperation and increasedstability within the regime, and lowers the costs of bargaining in order to bring about mutual gains for regime members. The thesis then examines the pre- and post-entry restrictive measures used by countries and attempts to prove whether or not the use of the measures constitutes a change in, or of, the regime, or a potential weakening of the regime. The thesis concludes that while the refugee regime itself is not changing, there is increasing incoherence between the proscribed behaviour of the regime and state action, which translates into a weakening of the regime. The regime analysis discusses the role the refugee protection regime plays within the international system as a whole and how this role is evolving through the use of restrictive measures.</p>

The thesis examines the international refugee protection system in order to discover whether or not the system constitutes an international regime, as defined by international relations literature. To do so, it formulates a theoretical framework combining neoliberal and constructivist approaches to regime theory. It closely examines the legal documents that provide the normative and procedural framework of the protection system (such as the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, various regional agreements, as well as certain human rights documents) and discusses the legal, political, and moral obligation that these documents instill upon the member states of the protection system. It evaluates the principles, norms, rules, and decision- making procedures provided by the system, and compares them to the necessary criteria of an international regime in neoliberal theory. The purpose of trying to discover whether the refugee system constitutes an international regime is to show that if it is a regime, states are no longer afforded the full freedom of action and decision-making under the doctrine of sovereignty and that they have a certain level of obligation to abide by regime rules and help in the upkeep of the regime. After showing that the system constitutes a ‘strong promotional’ international regime, it discusses the importance of the regime within the international state system. It evaluates how it brings about cooperation and increasedstability within the regime, and lowers the costs of bargaining in order to bring about mutual gains for regime members. The thesis then examines the pre- and post-entry restrictive measures used by countries and attempts to prove whether or not the use of the measures constitutes a change in, or of, the regime, or a potential weakening of the regime. The thesis concludes that while the refugee regime itself is not changing, there is increasing incoherence between the proscribed behaviour of the regime and state action, which translates into a weakening of the regime. The regime analysis discusses the role the refugee protection regime plays within the international system as a whole and how this role is evolving through the use of restrictive measures.

Large-scale humanitarian crises in foreign countries raise the question of whether or not other countries have a duty to alleviate that suffering. In extreme cases, humanitarian intervention, that is: military intervention for the purpose of alleviating human suffering, is sometimes advocated as the morally required course of action. This thesis suggests that while the international community has a general moral responsibility to prevent and ameliorate humanitarian crises there is no simple duty of military humanitarian intervention. Hitherto, the question has typically been treated as a matter of either moral or legal principle. This thesis argues that empirical factors, which affect the international community's ability to carry out interventions effectively, have not been given their due weight in the debate. On the basis of evaluations of international responses to crises in Somalia and Rwanda, 1992 - 1994, it is suggested that a range of factors undermine the efficacy of humanitarian interventions. These factors include the impact of state interests, the effects of domestic politics in intervening states and, contrary to expectations, the role of humanitarian considerations in decision making on intervention. By showing the limitations of a simplistic view of a duty of humanitarian intervention the thesis seeks to contribute to reconciling idealism with realism in international crisis-responses. Based on sound moral and political judgment military interventions in humanitarian crises would hopefully be less ambitious and ultimately more effective.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2009. / Title from PDF title page (University of Texas Digital Repository, viewed on August 5, 2009). Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 377-408).

After more than 50 years of internal armed conflict, Colombia has entered into a stage of postconflict after a peace agreement was signed in 2016. This process will be challenging for the country, as the conflict has created increased poverty and segregation as well as a lack of opportunities for those that have been affected by the conflict. This thesis collects perceptions of international humanitarian actors working in the Colombian context, and their perception on how humanitarian action can be used to strengthen the Colombian post-conflict process. Through a theoretical standpoint of Institutionalization Before Liberalization (IBL) theory by Roland Paris (2004), the findings were collected. Key findings include the need to recognize the humanitarian needs in Colombia despite the conflict ending, the importance of building knowledge in society about the peace agreement and make room for transition of experience and knowledge from the humanitarian field to the government and development actors. Analysing the findings, it shows that Colombia’s current peace transition would be furthered by strengthening the nation’s institutions and making long-term strategies on how to create electoral and societal systems that would unite and reconcile the population. It also shows that while the IBL theory is applicable to the Colombian post-conflict process, it fails to capture educational components that are deemed essential by the interviewed organizations. The thesis concludes that humanitarian organizations should be viewed as pivotal actors for the implementation of the Colombian peace agreement and that the Colombian government and international donors needs to put aside long-term resources and time to create a post-conflict society that will foster guarantees of the armed conflict not returning to Colombia.

The legal humanitarian regime, set out in the Geneva Conventions and Additional Protocols, strives to alleviate human suffering through the provision of emergency goods and services, such as food supplies, water, temporary shelter, and medical treatment. This thesis examines how international non-government organizations (INGOs) contribute to the contestation of this regime in political emergencies, the effects of this contestation, and the factors driving INGO contestation. The thesis develops an analytical framework for understanding the nature and functioning of the legal humanitarian regime, and argues that INGO contestation occurs through the two processes of regime interpretation and regime implementation. It then goes on to identify the substantive content and effects of contestation, and the factors driving INGO contestation of the regime, through a detailed study of the policies and practices of CARE, Médecins Sans Frontiers, Oxfam, and World Vision, in Afghanistan and Sri Lanka, from 1990-2010. The thesis argues that contestation has constitutive effects, as it re-defines the meaning of the formal humanitarian regime, and the underlying rules and norms that specify the regime’s function, scope, and operating principles. Contestation also has causal effects, as it can make INGOs participants in the conflict, eroding thereby the basis on which they negotiate access and their ability to respond to humanitarian needs, and the security of their staff. It has also facilitated the subordination of humanitarian assistance by donor states and combatants to their political and security objectives. INGO identity - expressed in terms of the constituent rules and norms that define INGO membership, their mandate and goals, and the manner in which they distinguish themselves from other actors - is argued to be a necessary factor for explaining INGO contestation. The focus on identity highlights the agency of INGOs in shaping the humanitarian regime and demonstrates that INGOs are not simply at the mercy of more powerful actors or external constraints.

Increasingly, we hear that the humanitarian system has exhausted its potential and is over the abyss. The volume of funds, the number of humanitarian organizations and the number of rescued people are growing year after year. Nevertheless, the gap between needs and real humanitarian assistance is steadily increasing. Traditional humanitarian actors have been unsuccessfully looking for ways to repair the system that once worked well. Attempts at financial and institutional reform fail, and the debate on humanitarian principles annoys the main actors. This work shows that the traditional humanitarian system is only a part of the larger ecosystem of humanitarian assistance, and analyzes the external influences it fails to cope with in the last decade, and why minor repairs and corrections are not enough and a new system architecture is needed. The author identifies new humanitarian actors with whom the traditional system does not count and points to spontaneous volunteers as a group with dynamic potential and ability to create a parallel system to professional disaster and emergency managers. Since it is an undervalued and overlooked actor, the author refines the definition of spontaneous volunteering. Using the case studies of the Cajun Navy in Louisiana (U.S.) and the confessions of medical rescuers...

[pt] O objetivo deste trabalho é orientar criticamente organizações não governamentais e outros agentes da sociedade civil engajados na construção discursiva de mensagens para campanhas em favor do acolhimento de refugiados, por julgarem que esta é uma temática de crescente relevância para a promoção dos direitos humanos tanto no Brasil quanto a nível internacional. Para tanto, apresentará considerações acerca de duas narrativas hegemônicas amplamente utilizadas por organizações e instituições globais, a fim de identificar as suas premissas conceituais e possíveis conexões com o estabelecimento de práticas das Relações Internacionais. A primeira delas refere-se à tradição do humanitarismo, guiado sobretudo pela mobilização de uma lógica afetiva e de imperativos morais de solidariedade para legitimar a proteção emergencial de grupos em situação de extrema vulnerabilidade; a segunda, por sua vez, recorre à linguagem do desenvolvimento pautado por premissas essencialmente neoliberais para projetar uma imagem de capacidade adaptativa e resiliência sobre indivíduos acolhidos por comunidades nacionais, de modo a discursivamente convertê-los em potencial capital humano para economias de mercado do Sul Global. Publicações oficiais do site brasileiro do Alto Comissariado das Nações Unidas para Refugiados (Acnur) e o Pacto Global sobre Refugiados das Nações Unidas serão revisados para argumentar sobre o despontar de um significado discursivo comum entre ambas as instâncias textuais na contemporaneidade. / [en] This article aims to offer indepth considerations to non governmental organizations and other civil society agents engaged in the discursive construction of messages for campaigns in favor of the reception of refugees as an issue of increasing relevance for the promotion of human rights both in Brazil and internationally. To this end, it will present perspectives on two hegemonic narratives widely used by global organizations and institutions to identify their conceptual premises and possible connections with the establishment of practices of International Relations. The first one refers to humanitarianism, guided mainly by the mobilization of an affective logic and moral imperatives of solidarity to legitimize the urgent protection of groups under extreme vulnerability; the second one uses the language of development and its essentially neoliberal premises to project an image of adaptivity and resilience on individuals hosted by national communities, discursively converting them into potential human capital designed for market economies of the Global South. Official news articles published by the Brazilian website of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the United Nations Global Compact on Refugees will be reviewed to argue that a common discursive meaning emerges from both in the present time.

The question of how "humanitarianism" became possible, and whether humanitarianism is a factor of power in today's world, and possible in the future, is answered against the backdrop of the problem of the world's moral indifference, and the difficulty of mobilizing empathy and commitment to other people's suffering in humanitarian disasters. A genealogical discourse analysis examines historical breakthroughs for humanitarianism, and how humanitarianism relates to human rights, in a moral-philosophical and sociological perspective, in a historical exposition, with the aim of tracing violations and leaps in the development of conditions and possibilities, which enabled the construction of a discourse of humanitarianism. Important prerequisites for humanitarianism to become possible, and the ideas of human rights, are a changed view of man during enlightenment, and her self-understanding, as an "ethical subject", as ground to rights, and that "humanity" was imagined to be a legal community that entails a moral responsibility of universal solidarity. A discourse of humanitarianism has been constructed which has become a factor of power in international politics to meet needs, that it costs to deviate from. A danger to the future is that humanitarianism, as an active protest against the world's suffering, is politicized and abused as a pretext for power ambitions. Whether humanitarianism is possible depends on the social and moral preconditions of international cooperation and idealism, and the belief that human progression is possible, and the attitude: ”We become more fully human via the manner in which we treat our fellows”.

This thesis seeks to explore how humanitarian communication produces subjectivities for individuals. More specifically, it investigates how the innocent modern/colonial humanitarian subject is produced through appeals to emotions. To explore this phenomenon, this thesis develops a decolonial research approach grounded in epistemic disobedience. As such, it first disrupts the binary between rationality and emotions by focusing on the roles of compassion, anger and guilt in the making of the innocent humanitarian subject. Second, it presents autoethnography and storytelling as entry doors into disobeying the binary between subject and object of research. The analysis of the autoethnography is presented in different modes of analysis, between creative and more traditional social science writings. The analysis shows that guilt and knowledge permit to partially defeat the stance of innocence produced by humanitarian communication. Additionally, by recentring racism and European colonialism/imperialism as central to the study of humanitarianism, this thesis demonstrates the importance of adopting decolonial research strategies to defeat persisting structures of inequality.