Realising the Right of Return: Refugees’ Roles in Localising Norms and Socialising UNHCR in Geopolitics
Megan Bradley, Lead of LERRN’s Solutions Working Group, has published Realising the Right of Return: Refugees’ Roles in Localising Norms and Socialising UNHCR in Geopolitics. Drawing on extensive material from the UNHCR archives on repatriation movements from Honduras to El Salvador in the 1980s, this article examines how refugees themselves have influenced the governance of return by serving as norm entrepreneurs, localising the right of return and socialising UNHCR to rethink and support broader interpretations of this principle.
Reinforcing and expanding on recent studies of how refugees actively shape aid efforts, peacebuilding and the resolution of displacement, this study highlights the significance of subaltern power in the refugee regime, showing how it can reverberate across different sites and scales to definitively influence not only the execution of the regime’s core functions but also the interpretation of the normative commitments underpinning it.