New Books In National Security

When we talk about people crossing borders, policy makers, advocates, journalists, and academics often distinguish between “refugees” and “migrants.” Is this a useful legal fiction? Shorthand for an important distinction? Dr. Rebecca Hamlin argues that employing this binary limits protection for vulnerable people who are not protected by the rarified category of “refugee.”  In Crossing: How We Label and React to People on the Move (Stanford UP, 2021), Dr. Hamlin confronts the binary -- and the effect it has on our study, policy-making, and conversations about border crossers. Her book traces the emergence of the concept of refugee in the context of sovereignty and colonialism, pushing back on notions of essentialism in favor of a constructed binary. The logic of the migrant/refugee binary obscure power imbalances by focusing on internal explanations for why people are leaving countries in the Global South (corruption, war, poverty) rather than externalist forces such as globalization, postcolonialism, and neo