Realising the Right of Return: Refugees’ Roles in Localising Norms and Socialising UNHCR
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Refugee repatriation rests on a fundamental norm: the right of return. The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) styles itself as the chief defender of international norms on refugees, educating refugees about their rights and socialising states to respect the cardinal rules of the refugee regime. However, UNHCR initially devoted little attention to the right of return. When UNHCR began to engage more actively with repatriation in the 1980s, it had only a nascent institutional conceptualisation of the right of return: it framed the implementation of the right of return as a non-political, humanitarian undertaking, and assumed sovereign states had largely unfettered discretion in its implementation. 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. It analyzes how Salvadoran refugees envisioned the right of return as a collective and deeply political process of asserting citizenship claims, and took direct action to implement this right, compelling UNHCR and government actors to adjust to their vision. These experiences have important implications for understandings of the right of return as an international norm, and the roles of refugees themselves as actors in norm localisation and socialisation processes. 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.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it