More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization
![handle is hein.journals/jrefst20 and id is 176 raw text is: Journal of Refugee Studies Vol. 20, No. 2 © The Author [2007]. Published by Oxford University Press.
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doi:10. 1093/jrs/fem011
More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking
the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization
ROGER ZETTER
Refugee Studies Centre, Department of International Development,
Oxford University, 3 Mansfield Road, Oxford OX1 3TB
roger.zetter@qeh.ox.ac.uk
This paper revisits the concept of refugee labelling I elaborated nearly two
decades ago. In radically different conditions, the contemporary relevance and
utility of the concept are re-examined and re-established. Formulated at a time
of regionally contained, mass refugee migration in the south during the late
1970s and early 1980s, the paper argues that the concept still offers vital insights
into the impacts of institutional and bureaucratic power on the lives of refugees
in a globalized era of transnational social transformations, mixed migration
flows, and the continuing presence of large scale refugee migration. The core
of the paper argues that the 'convenient images' of refugees, labelled within
a co-opting humanitarian discourse in the past, have been displaced by a
fractioning of the label which is driven by the need to manage globalized
processes and patterns of migration and forced migration in particular. The
paper re-evaluates the concept using the three original axioms-forming,
transforming and politicizing the label 'refugee'. The core argument is that in
the contemporary era: a) the formation of the refugee label reflects causes and
patterns of forced migration which are much more complex than in the past,
contrasting with an essentially homogeneous connotation in the past;
b) responding to this complexity, the refugee label is transformed by an insti-
tutional 'fractioning' in order to manage the new migration; c) governments,
rather than NGOs as in the past, are the pre-eminent agency in the contem-
porary processes of transforming the refugee label, a process driven by northern
interests; d) the refugee label has become politicized by the reproduction of
institutional fractioning and by embedding the wider political discourse of
resistance to migrants and refugees.
Keywords: labelling, refugees, political discourse, globalization
Introduction
This paper revisits the concept of labelling which I presented in 'Labelling
Refugees: Forming and Reforming a Bureaucratic Identity' in 1991 (Zetter
1991). This paper is one of the most extensively cited papers in the literature
on refugees'; but it is now 20 years since I conducted the research on which](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/jrefst20&div=16&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization
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