Ali, Perveen
(2012)
States in crisis: sovereignty, humanitarianism, and refugee protection in the aftermath of the 2003 Iraq War.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
Although the refugee protection regime is grounded in principles of international
human rights and refugee law aimed at protecting individuals from abuses of state
power, in practice it still privileges and produces state sovereignty. Principles of
protection can become subverted to serve state interests, normalising the
increasingly exceptional treatment of refugees. The tensions that result from this
paradox, however, may also present opportunities for contesting and denaturalising
such exceptionalism. This thesis explores this phenomenon as it emerged in the
post-2003 Iraqi refugee crisis. Grounded in Agamben’s work on sovereignty and the
“state of exception”, it considers how sovereignty and exceptionalism were
expressed through biopolitics and governmentality in the governance of refugees.
Using methods of critical legal geography, it maps and analyses how state,
institutional, and individual practices reproduced, intersected with, or contested
sovereignty and exceptionalism in four spaces of the Iraqi refugee crisis: the Iraqi
state, host states in the region, camps in the borderlands, and resettlement. This
thesis argues that Iraqi refugees, their legal status, and the spaces they occupied
came to embody the contests for identity, power, and authority lodged between
states, local actors, and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. In the
process, the technologies of power deployed in the governance of these spaces
revealed the persistence and proliferation of the logic of sovereignty. Yet at the
same time, they also created opportunities to expose and un-work sovereign
violence and to envision forms of protection beyond the state
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