Dismantling humanitarian pathways leaves displaced people with even less options for secure livelihoods. The result will be the acceleration of interconnected precarities, where displaced people must simultaneously navigate legal exclusion, political persecution, social stigma, and economic exploitation.

A changing paradigm

Humanitarian aid has never been as neutral as it pretends, but the politics and conditions governing its provision have become increasingly evident in recent years. Western donor countries, driven by right-wing populism, are becoming more insular and less altruistic overseas. When the UK merged its Department for International Development with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 2020, it was explicitly justified as a way to better “promote the UK’s national interest around the world”.

Meanwhile, the countries in the Global North and South that provide displaced people with (supposedly) temporary protection are struggling to grapple with the long-term reality of refugees residing in their territories, and the unfeasibility of managing their needs exclusively through the provision of aid.

One way to reduce the costs of caring for a protracted refugee population is to allow access to labour markets. The 1951 UN Refugee Convention and its follow-up 1967 Protocol foresaw this. They state that refugees have a right to access local labour markets in the places where they have sought asylum. But for most of the 20th century, both signatories and non-signatories of the convention have largely excluded asylum seekers from the workforce.

This ban on work becomes more difficult to maintain the longer a population remains displaced. When displacement turns into a years or decades-long ordeal, as it is increasingly doing, it becomes wholly unfeasible to rely on international and local humanitarian organisations to sustain them long-term.

Acknowledging this reality, the model of humanitarian aid as a response to protracted displacement is being increasingly replaced by a model that encourages self-reliance. This seeks to ‘empower’ refugees to develop sustainable, independent livelihoods through strategic integration into local labour markets.

While these policy shifts have been applauded in many quarters, they also come with risks. The empowerment model of humanitarianism has exposed refugees to new forms of vulnerability and exploitation while removing safety nets. It has also angered local populations, who perceive the inclusion of refugee (and migrant) labour in certain industries as an economic threat.

In 2013, I conducted ethnographic research with refugees living in Uganda whose experiences demonstrated these points. In 2007, Uganda implemented a “self-reliance strategy” to address the needs of refugees. This essentially meant that humanitarian aid tapered off after refugees were provided with the resources to establish sustainable livelihoods.

One of the problems with the model was that it was very narrowly conceived. It generally required refugees to live in a designated settlement, and limited their livelihood options to small agricultural businesses. But not every refugee wants to farm.

I worked with refugees in Kampala, the capital city, who felt unsafe living amongst other refugees in the settlements. But they didn’t have sufficient resources to establish their own businesses in the city. So they became part of the urban, informal labour force in order to survive.

One of the people I met worked in construction, and more than once returned home with visible injuries. He explained that, as a Congolese refugee, he was paid far less than his Ugandan counterparts. His injuries were the result of being assaulted on the jobsite by other workers, presumably Ugandan. They had retaliated against his inclusion, which they felt was replacing other Ugandan workers who had to be paid more.

Despite the violence, he said he could not change jobs because many Ugandans discriminated against hiring refugees. He also could not report his assaults to the police, who might try to force him to return to one of the settlements – or worse. He had little choice but to remain exploited and abused, even as outside commentators praised Uganda for its reconfiguration of humanitarianism from dependency to self-reliance.

Migrant agency, and the backlash

Many of the refugees I worked with saw formal resettlement in the West as the only way to escape the gruelling poverty and exploitation of displacement. But another option was emerging too. While in Uganda, I began to hear whispers of refugees thinking about leaving the camps, leaving Africa all together, to travel north and seek a boat to go to Europe.

In the ten years since I first heard these whispers, increasing numbers of migrants have rejected their immobilisation, choosing instead to journey towards what they envision as a more secure future for themselves.

The political backlash to this temerity has been swift. In Uganda, as in many other countries, the political climate towards refugees has become more hostile. The result has been a significant second shift from policies of humanitarianism to anti-migrant securitisation. Such measures are increasingly being implemented not only because of hostile national policies toward migrants, but also because of demands from countries in the Global North that the nations that host refugees – overwhelmingly located in the Global South – must do more to contain them or risk a reduction in international economic support.

Development funding, for example, is increasingly dependent on recipient nations introducing measures to intensify border controls and prevent onward migration. Displaced people are no longer to be protected – they’re to be guarded against with seemingly all the power the state can muster.

More and more people are being prevented from legally seeking refugee status, which also absolves states of any legal obligation to provide them with humanitarian aid. The move from humanitarianism to securitisation has vastly expanded a private militarised border security industry that profits from government contracts to create ‘effective’ – that is, often lethal–systems of migration monitoring and intervention.