Negotiating Rights: The Politics of Local Integration

The current advocacy campaign against the warehousing of refugees in camps suggests the facilitation of local integration as a possible alternative policy. This paper argues that the institutions, assumptions and habits that the international refugee protection system has developed over the past thirty years hinder our understanding of local integration as a fundamentally refugee- and host-driven process. Although some targeted interventions can act as catalysts for integration, it is a process which often takes place in spite of ‘outside’ interventions rather than because of them.