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ABSTRACT
The global compacts on refugees and migration are expressions of what I call “humanitarian hubris”. This hubris is manifested in at least three ways. The first is the global compacts’ confidence in the need to manage migration and asylum in the first place, along with the hubris that governments and international agencies are capable of managing global movements in a “safe, orderly, and regular” manner. The second source of hubris concerns the desire for good information, data, and analysis of emerging situations, but only along strictly defined “problem-solving” paths. Third, there is the assumption that questions of sovereignty have been settled, all the while ignoring the active contestations of sovereignty by refugees, migrants, and other marginalized groups, such as indigenous peoples. Taken together, these examples of hubris project a kind of global confidence that makes them blind to other ways of framing the challenges and opportunities represented by contemporary migrations.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Peter Nyers is University Scholar and Professor of the Politics of Citizenship and Intercultural Relations in the Department of Political Science at McMaster University. His research focuses on the social movements of non-status refugees and migrants, in particular their campaigns against deportation and detention and for regularization and global mobility rights. He is the author of Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation (Routledge 2019) and Rethinking Refugees: Beyond States of Emergency (Routledge 2006). He is also a Chief Editor of the journal Citizenship Studies.
Notes
1 The formal name of the two compacts are the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees. In this essay, I will refer to these agreements as the global migration compact and the global refugee compact, respectively.
2 The panel was organized by Chizuru Nobe-Ghelani, Brenda Polar, Sangyoo Lee, and Anh Ngo as part of the CARFMS 2019 conference “Interrogating Integration”, held at York University, Toronto, Canada on 14–16 May 2019.