Over the past several years, refugee studies have witnessed what many now describe as the ‘decentring turn’ a current of thought that challenges the epistemologies that have long dominated the field. This turn is grounded in earlier traditions of decolonial thinking, for example Aníbal Quijano’s seminal work on the coloniality of power. At its core, decentring urges us to reconsider where we direct our gaze and how we frame the geopolitics of knowledge.
The first angle of this turn has been a move away from policy‑driven approaches that reduce refugees to aid recipients. Scholars invite us to focus instead on geopolitics from below and subaltern power. Refugees are not merely docile subjects. They unsettle bureaucracies and transgress borders.
The second angle involves a deliberate move beyond Western- and Eurocentric narratives and conceptions of governance. For too long, refugee governance has been framed through the lens of Western geographies and epistemologies. Decentring calls for attention to other ‘centres of gravity’. Host states such as Bangladesh, Lebanon, Jordan, Colombia, Uganda, Mali, and Ethiopia have not simply acted as warehouses for refugees. They have actively shaped refugee norms through practices of guesthood, open borders, and hospitality. They have also negotiated and contested the terms of humanitarian aid. A growing body of scholarship has shown how both the modern humanitarian system and the contemporary refugee regime are rooted in precursory histories. These histories function as living legacies, yet they remain obscured in mainstream policy debates.
The third angle has been to destabilize our understanding of the international refugee regime itself. Scholars have disrupted categories such as “refugee” and “asylum seeker,” as well as the distinctions between states that signed the 1951 Convention and those that did not. Decentring has meant rethinking the Convention by highlighting the role that non-European states played in shaping its scope. As Maja Janmyr shows, states such as Lebanon actively engaged in negotiating the 1951 Convention yet later underscored its mismatch with their own contextual realities. States ‘co-create’ the international refugee regime not merely by signing or implementing treaties, but through complex and reflexive forms of engagement—from contesting power asymmetries to exposing the imperfections of global responsibility-sharing. They also diffuse norms and learn from one another, not only in north–south directions but across and within diverse regional refugee systems.
Taken together, these three angles highlight important attempts to decentre our understanding of the international refugee regime: First, by diversifying the constellation of actors we examine; second, by widening the geographies and worldviews we engage; and third, by rethinking the premises that underpin the global refugee regime.
Yet challenges remain. Even when the gaze shifts to alternate viewpoints, Eurocentric paradigms continue to shape prevailing research puzzles. Calls to include refugees in policymaking and to localize refugee governance produce and reproduce colonial and neoliberal notions of empowerment. The challenge, then, is how to reimagine the international refugee regime as multi-centric and pluriversal. The decentring agenda raises a set of enduring questions that will animate research in the years to come. Instead of categorizing states as either norm takers or norm shapers, how might we foreground the complexity, circularity, and fluidity of norm regimes? How to generate knowledge on non-Western refugee spaces as ‘subjecthoods’ and ‘reference points’ in their own right?
Finally, the global refugee regime today is confronted not only with the task of acknowledging diverse forms of ‘worldbuilding,’ but also with an epoch that scholars struggle to comprehend. The United States’ retreat from multilateral treaty-making, the return of violent geopolitical rivalries, and the emergence of ‘new geopolitics’ from the geopolitics of trade wars to the geopolitics of Artificial Intelligence raise pressing questions not only for strategists but also for refugee studies and critical migration research. The U.S. recent decision to halt asylum applications, the growing reliance on containment as a response to massive waves of displacement amid lethal conflicts, and the externalization of migration governance as a model for international partnerships are illustrative examples. Today, the challenge lies not merely in recognizing the international refugee regime’s plural genealogies, but in halting the erosion of the very foundations of refugee protection. This erosion started long ago, but it is now accelerating.
Tamirace Fakhoury is Associate Professor of International Politics and Conflict at the Fletcher School at Tufts University in the US. Her research explores the politics of power-sharing as a central framework for conflict resolution after war. Her work also engages with the politics of refuge and migration in complex conflict environments. She also studies the role of multilateral actors such as the European Union and the United Nations in shaping global responses to conflict, cooperation and responsibility-sharing amid protracted conflicts. Before joining Fletcher, she was Associate Professor at Aalborg University in its Copenhagen Campus (Denmark), and a visiting Professor as well as the Kuwait Chair at Sciences Po in Paris. Prior to this, Tamirace was Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, and the Director of the Institute for Social Justice and Conflict Resolution (ISJCR). Her work has been published in Ethnopolitics, The international Journal of Middle East Studies, International Studies Quarterly, Geopolitics, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Migration Studies, Third World Quarterly, Current History among others. She is the author of Power-Sharing and Democracy in Stormy Weather (Springer, 2009) and the co-author of Resisting Sectarianism: Queer Activism in Post-war Lebanon(Zed Books, 2022). She is the co-editor of the anthology on Refugee Governance in the Arab World: The International Refugee Regime and Global Politics (I.B. Tauris/Bloomsbury Academic in collaboration with Sciences Po, 2025).
The author would like to thank the IMISCOE editorial team for their valuable comments and for the opportunity to publish this editorial.