With negotiations for the Global Compact on Refugees in full swing, the question of responsibility sharing—and the place, if any, for regional arrangements—is of greater relevance than ever. While consensus on a future path may be difficult to achieve, there seems to be growing agreement among all observers that the current international refugee regime is neither effective enough, nor equitable enough, in providing protection to those who need it.
In the light of this ongoing discussion on the future of refugee protection, Mathew and Harley’s contribution on regional arrangements provides for fascinating reading. As contextualized in their “Introduction”, this book is informed by the authors’ observance of what they characterize as failed attempts at regional arrangements, in Australia’s offshore detention programme and the international community’s response to the Syrian refugee crisis (pp. 2–15). According to the authors, each of these lacked appropriate responsibility sharing, leading to inequitable outcomes and a poor level of protection. The authors’ subsequent analysis questions whether past attempts at regionalism have been more successful.
The book is divided into two parts. The first fleshes out the basic concepts that form the background of the authors’ analysis, by introducing the idea of regionalism, justifying refugee protection, and discussing the alternative ways in which responsibility can be shared among states in the refugee context. This section is useful as background, especially for readers who are not familiar with the critical refugee studies literature.
The second part reviews five regional arrangements for refugees: the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indochinese Refugees; the International Conferences on Assistance to Refugees in Africa; the International Conference on Central American Refugees; the Common European Asylum System; and the Mexico Declaration and Plan of Action and Cartagena+. This section is consistently enlightening, especially those chapters pertaining to the Latin American and African arrangements, which are relatively infrequent subjects of scholarly analysis.
The final chapter reviews lessons learned from the preceding analysis, concluding that, while previous regional initiatives have a mixed record, they have shown some success in protecting refugees and providing durable solutions, especially when the initiatives received support from extra-regional states (pp. 234–42). The authors suggest that responsibility-sharing lies at the heart of successful regional initiatives (p. 242) and propose four practices that could assist management flows, namely: more resettlement; increased funding for UNHCR; greater sharing of “in-kind” resources; and offering “alternative migration paths” to provide refugees with more lawful means of movement (pp. 244–50). These proposals make eminent sense; the difficult part is convincing states to implement them.
Although similar comparative analyses of regional arrangements have been published in recent years, this book is more comprehensive than other article-length approaches and is more coherent than edited volumes on the subject.Footnote 3 As such, it is a valuable and timely contribution to the field.
