Former UN High Commissioner for Refugees Speaks on Forced Displacement

As the complexity of global conflict increases, so too does the complexity of caring for those individuals fleeing conflict, said António Guterres, the former United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, in remarks at SIPA on April 21.

“I had the impression when studying history that the battles and the wars in the past had a winner and a loser,” said Guterres. “And now we are seeing more and more wars in which nobody wins.”

He said this scenario—coupled with an unprecedented shrinking of the global asylum space caused by the closing of national borders—makes it much less likely that those fleeing conflict will have a safe and stable place to go.

Guterres, who served as high commissioner for 10 years, spoke at at an event called “Present Trends of Forced Displacement.” He was joined by Michael Doyle, a professor at SIPA who directs the Global Policy Initiative, and Alex Aleinikoff, a visiting professor at Columbia Law School who is also a Huo Global Policy Initiative Research Fellow.

In his discussion, Guterres also addressed the key issue of people who are displaced because of issues linked to climate change.

“We see more and more people displaced because of these natural disasters [caused in part by climate change] and the slow onset of the degradation of living conditions in different parts of the world,” Guterres said.

Climate change “accelerates” and “intensifies” the effect of factors that often lead to armed conflict, such as food insecurity and water scarcity, he noted.

“It is high time for the international community to come together and think seriously about a mega program of resettlement,” Guterres said.

While Guterres suggested it is “impossible to define a perfect system” on a practical level, he added that it is essential for civil society and academia to think through just what these global institutions might look like.

Aleinikoff questioned whether such a program would be possible without massive structural change in the way global actors approach the problem of refugees. He pointed out the disjunction between the efforts of humanitarian actors and development actors who have “no way to coordinate these efforts and no accountability.”

This becomes a problem, Alenikoff added, because the average length of time an individual will be a refugee is 17 years. “The programming to serve refugees has always been left to the humanitarians, but after 10 years, you need a different kind of program.”

Guterres agreed that the international community needs to change how it works together in order to serve refugees better.

“Things need to be put together,” he said. “The institutional mechanisms to do it are up for discussion, but you need to have some way to link programming, funding, and accountability,” he said.

It’s also vital “to preserve humanitarian principles and the autonomy of the humanitarian space.”

Dean Merit Janow provided introductory remarks at the event.

— Lindsay Fuller MPA ’16

Please note: Photo of António Guterres is not from SIPA event.