The Rise and Decline of a Global Security Actor: UNHCR, Refugee Protection and Security

This book investigates the rise of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as a global security actor, following the refugee agency through some of the past two decades’ major conflict-induced humanitarian crises and complex emergencies, including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo and eastern Zaire/Congo. It analyses UNHCR’s momentous transformation from a small, timid legal protection agency to the world’s foremost humanitarian actor playing a central role in the international response to the many wars of the tumultuous last decade of the twentieth century. Then, as the twenty-first century set in, the agency’s political prominence waned. It remains a major humanitarian actor, but the polarized post-9/11 period and a worsening protection climate for refugees and asylum seekers spurred UNHCR to abandon its claim to be a global security actor and return to a more modest, quietly diplomatic role.

The rise of UNHCR as a global security actor is placed within the context of the dramatic shift in perceptions of national and international security after the end of the Cold War. Prominent among ‘new’ security issues were the perceived threats posed by refugees and asylum seekers to international security, state stability, and societal cohesion. This book investigates UNHCR’s response to this new international environment; adopting, adapting and finally abandoning a security discourse on the refugee problem.