Between Protection and Harm Negotiated Vulnerabilities in Asylum Laws and Bureaucracies

This open access book dissects the current narratives of ‘vulnerability’ in asylum laws and policies, by unpacking the meanings, productions, and performances, of ‘vulnerability’ in different contexts, from countries of first asylum in the Global South to Europe and Canada. It discusses how the increased reliance on ‘vulnerability’ to guide states’ replies to refugee movements improves refugee protection, while also generating contestations and exclusionary effects that may cause harm. Based on data collected as part of the EU Horizon 2020 VULNER project, the book examines existing legal and bureaucratic approaches to refugees’ vulnerabilities, which it confronts with the refugees’ experiences and understandings of their own life challenges. It analyses the perspectives from state actors, humanitarian organisations, and social and aid workers, as well as the refugees themselves. By emphasizing how these perspectives relate and feed into each other, the book unpacks the humanitarian replies from states and the international community to refugee movements – including in their implied exclusionary dimensions that generate contestations and implementation difficulties which, if not tackled and understood properly, risk exacerbating and/or producing vulnerabilities among refugees.

INTRODUCTION. Between Protection and Harm. Negotiated Vulnerabilities in Asylum Laws and Bureaucracies.- Part 1. ‘Vulnerability’ Between Legal and Empirical Conceptualisations.- 1. The Travels and Transformations of ‘Vulnerability’: From an Ethical and Analytical Concept to a Legal and Bureaucratic Label.- 2. Positionalities in Research and the Question of Migrants’ Vulnerability.- Part 2.Vulnerability and Refugee Protection in First Countries of Asylum.- 3. Negotiating Multiple Meanings of Vulnerabilities in Lebanon’s Compounded Crises: Refugees’ Encounters with Frameworks and Institutions.- 4. A Whole-of-Society Approach to Vulnerabilities: Contestations and Unintended Effects.- 5. Selecting Refugees for Resettlement to Norway and Canada: Vulnerability, Integration and Discretion.- Part 3. Vulnerability and Asylum Processes in Europe and Canada.- 6. A Place to Live: Views from Protection Seekers and Social Workers on Accommodation Issues in the Italian System.- 7. Time(s), Space(s) and Shapes of vulnerabilities in the Belgian Asylum System.- 7. Accommodating Vulnerable Claimants in the Refugee Hearing: The Canadian Example.- 9. Interdependencies of Vulnerability and Asylum Law within the German Federal System.- 10. Reinforcing or Obscuring Refugee Rights? The Roles of Vulnerability in Norwegian Asylum Practices.

Dr. Luc Leboeuf is a Head of Research Group in the Department of Law and Anthropology at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Germany, and an Adjunct Professor in the law faculty at the Catholic University of Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium, where he teaches courses in EU and migration law. He holds a PhD in EU law from the UCLouvain (2015). Before engaging in interdisciplinary research at the Max Planck Institute, which he joined as a postdoctoral researcher in 2017, he taught, researched, and practiced EU and Belgian migration law as a researcher at the UCLouvain, a visiting Professor at the University of Antwerp, and a lawyer (‘Avocat’) at the Bar of the Walloon Brabant. His main research interests and publications are in human rights law, EU law, and international law. He was the coordinator of the VULNER project.

Prof. Cathrine Brun is the Deputy Director for Research at the Centre for Lebanese Studies (CLS), Lebanon and the UK. She is a human geographer and her research-interests concern forced migration and conflict, housing and home; practice, ethics, theory and knowledge production in humanitarianism. She has worked with forced displacement, disasters and urban development in Lebanon, Jordan, Sri Lanka, India, Georgia, Malawi, Uganda, United Kingdom and Norway. Prior to joining the CLS, she was a Professor in Geography at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (till 2015) and the Director of the Centre for Development and Emergency Practice (CENDEP) at Oxford Brookes University (UK).

Prof. Hilde Lidén holds a PhD (dr. polit.) in social anthropology and is research professor at the Institute for Social Research, Oslo, Norway. Her research interests are transnational migration, national minorities, childhood and family research, including the life chances and integration of children of immigrants. In the last few years her research has mainly been on rights dilemmas in international and national policies on migration management, family life and citizenship. 

Prof. Sabrina Marchetti is Associate Professor in Sociology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. She is mainly specialised on issues of gender, racism, labour and migration, with a specific focus on the question of refugee rights and migrant care work. In the past, she has worked at the European University Institute, Italy, as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellow and Jean Monnet Fellow. She has been post-doctoral fellow at the Gender Excellence Programme of Linköping University in Sweden. She holds a Phd from the Graduate Gender Programme of Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

Prof. Delphine Nakache is a Full Professor at the Faculty of Law, University of Ottawa, Canada. Her research focusses on the most precarious groups of refugees, temporary migrants (such as migrant workers and undocumented migrants), and immigrants. She regularly engages with government representatives and civil society on those topics. She is currently leading five-year SSHRC-funded research onpathways into and out of precarity for temporary migrants in Canada. She is also leading the SSHRC-funded Canadian portion of the VULNER project, an international research initiative which has received funding from the European Union‘s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 870845. She is as well a Co-Investigator in SSHRC-funded research (Partnership Grant, 2018-2025) titled "Civil society and the global refugee regime: understanding and enhancing impact through the implementation of global refugee policy (LERRN)”. In this research, she is leading the working group on "Protection".

Prof. Sylvie Sarolea is a Professor at UCLouvain, Belgium, where she teaches refugee law, international migration law, private international law and human rights law. She is also a lawyer at the bar of the Walloon Brabant. She founded the EDEM, a research group which she has been coordinating since 2011. She is a member of the Odysseus academic network. She coordinates and/or participates in several interdisciplinary research projects (LIMA, GLOBMIG, VULNER, ISEMI). She participates in privileged partnerships in Canada, Morocco and South Kivu.