Bad Refugees

Bad Refugees examines a troubling discrepancy at the heart of refugee humanitarianism: some forced migrants become celebrated, welcomed, and instantly legible as "deserving," while others are cast as "bad", imposters, enemies, and opaque mysteries. Who counts as a refugee worth caring for? Who slips beneath our moral radar? Why does our attention focus on a few while the majority remain unseen? Bringing together conflict sociology, geopolitical analysis, and comparative history, this book argues that refugee recognition is far from a humanitarian response to suffering. It is a geopolitical process of exclusion and stigmatization. Dominant ideas about victimhood and migration do more than describe reality: they sort it, producing hierarchies of deservingness that repeatedly discredit and abandon vulnerable constituencies. Examining ninety-five major forced migration episodes since World War I, this book offers a fresh, critical look at the violence of displacement and its distorted moral economy in popular and elite opinion across one century and a decade. It draws on five datasets for indicators of stigmatization: inter- and intra-state international agreements, a comprehensive sample of refugee-related press coverage and opinionated commentary, extant refugee scholarship, prominent refugee-antipathy books, and public opinion polls and surveys from major destination societies. Unprecedented in temporal scope and versatility, this methodology produces original, surprising, and unsettling evidence about what we thought we knew, and who we care for.In a world of ever-increasing forced migration, the challenge of our generation becomes to understand clearly, and act ethically with, people in mortal danger. The tragedy of refugee discourse today is not indifference, but selective compassion and blindspots. Bad Refugees shows how we got here, and how to think, see, and respond differently.