The Politics and Global Governance of International Protection

This course aims to provide a novel, comprehensive understanding of the politics and governance of political asylum and refugee protection.

The course focuses on the norms, governance, and recognition of the right to international protection. Regarding norms, it offers multiple notions of "refugee" and discusses the legal grounds deployed in determining access to the right to international protection in different jurisdictions. Regarding governance, it outlines the opportunities and limits of action regarding refugee protection. It assesses the roles of different actors, focusing particularly on the dynamics of collaboration between key refugee-protecting actors operating at different levels of the global governance system. Attention is paid to the legal grounds, institutional architectures, and procedures of refugee protection foreseen by (i) the United Nations' Geneva Convention of 1951, (ii) the United Nations' Global Compact on Refugees of 2018 (GCR), and (iii) the European Union's Common European Asylum System of 1999-2020 (CEAS) and its new Migration and Asylum Pact (2020). Regarding recognition of the right to international protection, the course takes a public sphere approach by looking at support for international protection in citizen attitudes and traditional and social media. Further, the course assesses empirically the role of politics, institutions, procedures, discourses and public opinion in delivering policies that provide worthy protection and dignity to refugees and asylum seekers. The course curriculum stitches together refugee-protection related academic knowledge deriving from comparative politics, international politics, international law, political theory, and media studies.

A student who has completed the course should have the following learning outcomes defined in terms of knowledge, skills and general competence:

Knowledge

This course will give the students:

• Comparative-empirical knowledge of the global governance of international protection
• The roles of non-state organizations, states, and intergovernmental organizations in refugee protection and political asylum
• The global political context around refugee protection and political asylum
• Different theoretical and conceptual approaches to refugee protection and political asylum in legal theory, political theory, and normative theory

Skills

Students who successfully complete this course will be able to:

• assess how the international society functions around problems related with refugee protection and political asylum
• recognize/identify global governance- and policy-networks in the field of refugee protection and political asylum
• evaluate policies and their implementation in the field of refugee protection and political asylum

General Competence

This course aims to equip the students with the following skills:

• Hands-on knowledge of how to do policy analysis and use policy evaluation tools at the global, European and national levels
• Hands-on knowledge of policy implementation assessment tools at the global, European and national levels