The rise and decline of a global security actor: UNHCR, refugee protection and security

In this presentation, Dr Hammerstad discusses the rise and decline of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) as a global security actor. She follows the refugee agency through some of the major conflict-induced humanitarian crises and complex emergencies of the past two decades, including Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq, Kosovo and eastern Zaire/Congo. In the 1990s UNHCR went through a 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 polarised post-9/11 period, concern over shrinking 'humanitarian space', 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.
Dr Hammerstad investigates UNHCR’s response to this new international environment, and why it adopted, adapted and finally abandoned a security discourse on the refugee problem. Her presentation is based on the findings in her newly published book, The Rise and Decline of a Global Security Actor: UNHCR, Refugee Protection, and Security (Oxford University Press).