The Theatre of Protection: Performing Refugee Protection in a World of Stratified Compassion
Bibliographic record
Abstract
How do temporary refugee protection frameworks reflect and reproduce broader global hierarchies of race, gender, and geopolitical belonging? What alternative frameworks could be envisioned for refugee protection that resist performativity and prioritize justice, accountability, and refugee agency? This article conceptualizes contemporary refugee protection as a geopolitical performance, revealing that mechanisms like Canada’s CUAET and the European Union’s Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) operate less as rights-based guarantees than as dramaturgical acts of statecraft. Drawing on a feminist international relations and intersectional theoretical framework, the article develops a four-part dramaturgical lens—script, staging, audience, and temporality—to analyze how refugee responses are choreographed to reaffirm state virtue while maintaining racialized, gendered, and imperial hierarchies. It situates the performative logics of CUAET and the TPD within the historical legacy of the post-WWII refugee regime, showing how moral leadership is performed through selective humanitarianism. Through close textual and policy analysis of Canadian and EU protection measures, the article reveals how states simultaneously enact compassion and exclusion, offering refuge to some while rendering others invisible. The article concludes by proposing an intersectional feminist framework for non-performative refugee protection rooted in justice, accountability, and refugee agency.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.048 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".