Unmoored, not Adrift: Local perspectives on the politics of human rights and forced migration

Abstract

This dissertation explores the interplay between the politics of human rights and forced migration in several Dutch and German municipalities. It sought to answer the question of why and how municipal actors engage with human rights in the context of forced migration, and through which encounters and spaces human rights-based approaches to the reception and inclusion of forced migrants develop. To guide my inquiry into this twofold question, five sub-questions on themes running through the chapters of this dissertation were formulated. These five questions focus on municipal actors’ (1) motives for engaging with human rights, (2) their understandings of human rights, (3) their frames and strategies to legitimate municipal approaches in this area, (4) the spaces and encounters through which human-rights based responses develop (5) and the spaces through which their limits manifest. First of all, my PhD research shows that even in relatively hospitable environments, where international legal norms and principles are widely endorsed, municipal actors carefully weigh different strategies and navigate dilemmas when invoking human rights. They use human rights as a source of inspiration for local human-rights based approaches to the reception and inclusion of forced migrants and as a source of legitimation to justify local divergence from national policies. Secondly, I highlight how municipal actors have different understandings of the local relevance of human rights and responsibilities regarding forced migration. By focusing on institutional, rather than everyday settings, I tried to bring into focus how local engagements with human rights may centre on contesting understandings of human rights responsibilities and duty bearers, as opposed to rights holders and norm addressees (forced migrants). In the last two chapters of this thesis, I zoom in on how different (normative) understandings of arrival shape local efforts to develop rights-based approaches to the reception and inclusion of forced migrants. Third, this thesis points to different strategies to legitimate municipal involvement, and argues it is important to differentiate between discursive, discreet and discretionary strategies and to consider the implications of their application in different settings. Fourth, the thesis offers a spatially aware examination of the politics of human rights and forced migration, by examining how institutional settings and public spaces in cities, towns and rural municipalities, are more than simply a stage for encounters between forced migrants and municipal actors, because the functions, design and artefacts of these spaces also mould the local politics of human rights and forced migration. Fifth, this investigation brings into focus how municipal actors and other actors negotiate the limits of rights-based approaches to forced migration and zooms in on airports and asylum seeker centres as sites where the limits of municipal mandates and rights-based approaches are negotiated. To conclude, this thesis argues that exploring these five dimensions is essential to understanding the complexities of local human-rights based responses to forced migration and to developing a broad understanding of the local interplay between the politics of human rights and forced migration in these different German and Dutch localities.