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57 Va. J. Int'l L. 539 (2017-2018)
Refugees Misdirected: How Information, Misinformation, and Rumors Shape Refugees' Access to Fundamental Rights

handle is hein.journals/vajint57 and id is 553 raw text is: ARTICLE Refugees Misdirected: How Information, Misinformation, and Rumors Shape Refugees' Access to Fundamental Rights MELISSA CARLSON, LAURAJAKLI, KATERINA LINos* The global refugee regime represents one of the few generous commitments governments offer to outsiders. Indeed, few persons fleeing armed conflict actually claim international protection upon first arriving in Europe, even though the benefits of legal protection are signficant. Displaced persons' decisions to remain informal is particularly puZ<ling in lght of the risks it entails; these include lack of access to food and housing and possible abuse by smugglers. Existing theories hbli ht bureaucratic obstacles and push-pull factors, such as attractive onward destinations, to explain the signficant gap between formalprotections and actual rzghts access. However, in environments of hih uncertain y, decisions to appy for asylum and exercise rzghts depend criticaly on information, misinformation, and rumors. We argue that asylum seekers underutilie legal pathways because limited and biased information leads them to distrust government authoriies and aid organizations, and increasingly trust smugglers. To assess these claims, we use mixed methods, and combine ethnographic and interview-based research with data drawn from anonymous online rumor trackers.1 * University of California, Berkeley. I Acknowledgements: We are incredibly grateful to all of the participants who agreed to be interviewed for this project, and to two NGOs-Prolepsis and Internews-that assisted with data collection. For extensive comments and suggestions on earlier drafts, we thank Kathy Abrams, Catherine Albiston, Irene Bloemraad, Daniela Caruso, Adam Chilton, Kevin Cope, Grainne de Burca, Elias Dinas, Maria Echaveste, Tom Ginsburg, Jill Goldenziel, Alisha Holland, Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, Kate Jastram, Aila Matanock, Hiroshi Motomura, Akasemi Newsome, Vlad Perju, Margaret Peters, Alison Post, Jaya RamjiNogales, Ayelet Shachar, Sarah Song, and Katherine Young. We also thank the participants of the December 2016 U.C. Berkeley Institute of European Studies/Social Science Matrix Seminar, the Berkeley Law Faculty Workshop, the Berkeley Migration Law and Policy Workshop, the APSA 2017 Immigrants, Migrants, and Refugees Panel, and the Boston College/Boston University EU Law meeting. We thank our two anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their insightful feedback. For their generous support, we thank the U.C. Berkeley Human Rights Center, CITRIS (The Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society), the Carnegie Foundation, the EU's Jean Monnet Program, the Institute for European Studies, and the Miller Center for Global Challenges and the Law. The project has been approved through U.C. Berkeley IRB protocol 2016-07-8979. We have a complementary paper entitled Rumors and Refugees: How Government-Created Information Vacuums Undermine Effective Crisis Management, forthcoming in International Studies Quarterly.

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