Zetter, Roger. "More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization". Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol.20, No.2 (2007): 172-192.

Zetter, Roger. "More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization". Journal of Refugee Studies, Vol.20, No.2 (2007): 172-192.

• 'Refugee' is not a neutral term, but a political label used by different groups to construct an idea of 'refugee' around a diverse group of people with different experiences. This label is particularly used by humanitarian agencies, governments, and NGOs to advance different political goals by including different people under the label 'refugee' (173).
• The label 'refugee' was connotations about the way that 'refugees' should act and relate to their surroundings. This places societal pressure on those labelled as 'refugees', often leading to a contrast between actually people and the idealized concept of 'refugee' (173-174).
• The author argues that, as opposed to the 1970s, when NGOs were dominant force in shaping conceptions of refugees as a uniform group to be protected and saved, the contemporary label of 'refugee' is much more fractured and contains multiple conflicting definitions. The term is now much more politicized, and its definition is being largely shaped by governments in developed countries as they respond to immigration (174).
• In the 1970s and 1980s, the majority of refugee crises were south-south movements, with people fleeing from one developing nation to another developing nation. The influence of the developed world was limited to NGOs and aid programs, who had a vested interested in portraying a helpless and sympathetic image of refugees (175).
• The label of 'refugee' has been complicated largely because refugees are now arriving in large numbers in Europe, forcing national governments and other actors to shape their own definitions of 'refugee', and because the reasons for migration are now more complex, including both asylum-seekers and economic migrants (175).
• Although the use of the word has been greatly expanded in the past few decades, the original meaning of 'refugee' stems from the Geneva Convention, used to refer to people fleeing wide-spread and violent repression. The actual nature of conflict, which is confused and disorganized, makes this definition hard to apply, as many flee without being persecuted. The actual definition of 'refugee', therefore, depends on the connotations of the term (176-177).
• Because the connotations surround the definition of 'refugee' are so linked to the idea of violent mass conflict, those claiming refugee status during peacetime struggle to convince asylum countries that they are 'real' refugees. For example, those seeking political asylum from imprisonment in Iraq or Zaire struggled to be accepted as 'real' refugees in the absence of civil war (178).
• Other characteristics also can make refugees seem less genuine, largely because they conflict with accepted normative perceptions of refugees, like retaining contact with relatives back home and sending remittances (179).
• This issue of determining the 'real-ness' of refugees has become such an issue in European countries that the government vocabulary has changed from discussions of 'refugees' to those of 'asylum seekers', the new label for those considered truly genuine (181, 184).
• Part of the difficult of defining 'refugee' comes from the existence of conflicting understanding of 'refugee-ness' by Europeans and asylum-seekers. Often economic migrants from Africa consider their poverty and oppressive political situation evidence of refugee status, despite this not fitting European requisites for asylum (178).
• Since the 1990s, there was been large increase in the scale of migration from the developing world to Europe, including both increased numbers of refugees and many more economic migrants. This has increasingly politicized the issue of migration in Europe, causing a public backlash against all forms of foreign immigration and increased conflict over the precise meaning of 'refugee' (179-180).
• One of the ways that European countries, and the Antipodes, have dealt with the increasing unpopularity of immigration was been through establishing processing centers abroad or in distant areas, which keep refugees and possible refugees separate from the general population. This also makes their status easier to deny since they are already under government control (182).
• A number of European countries have discussed rewriting the articles of the Geneva Convention on refugees, arguing that the current document is easily exploited by 'fake' refugees, making it more difficult to protect the 'real' refugees that the Geneva Convention was meant to protect (182).
• Significantly, the politicization of the term 'refugee' has led governments to turn from the general meaning of the world to a more bureaucratic and pedantic definition of precise circumstances, allowing applicants to be more easily be denied refugee status because the meaning of 'refugee' is now much more limited (184-185).
• The Global War on Terror since 2001 has provided further pressure on immigration from muslim-majority countries, as there is a low-key fear of Islamic terror being spread through the movement of refugees, a perception which goes alongside stereotypes of refugees as violent or criminal (185).
• Despite refugee status being invented for the purpose of allowing more people to claim fundamental human rights, it has been transformed in the past decade into an increasingly politicized and bureaucratic label, whose definition is used to specifically exclude certain persons from claiming those rights (188).