Refugee return without refoulement: rethinking state strategies to evade asylum norms

How do states avoid hosting refugees? Whereas scholars have documented at length the strategies that rich democracies use to avoid hosting refugees, conventional wisdom holds that states in the Global South have no choice but to host refugees. This article presents a novel typology of state strategies to evade asylum obligations, demonstrating that just as rich democracies can feign compliance with the letter of international law without upholding the spirit, states in the Global South can manipulate liberal asylum policies towards illiberal ends. Identifying how they do so, however, requires looking to the governance of refugee return. Using a descriptive typology and inductive case study, the article identifies and describes a common but under-recognized tactic that states use to avoid asylum responsibilities. I call this strategy “return-without-refoulement” because states seek to coerce refugees to return without technically violating non-refoulement, the international legal prohibition against states returning refugees to dangerous places. Conceptualizing return-without-refoulement alongside other well-studied state responses to asylum-seeking evinces the continued strength of non-refoulement in shaping state behavior—just to perverse ends. In so doing, the article advances both the research agendas on state responses to displacement and international norm compliance.