Alexander Betts > Quotes

“But when norms and interests come into tension, most states will side with their own interests. And yet pro-refugee rights advocacy and policy-making is dominated by a dogmatic insistence that reciting international law is the most effective way to influence state behaviour.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Humanitarianism may be appropriate during an emergency phase but beyond that it is counter-productive.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“In other words, people are morally lazy. Unfortunately, wisdom is sometimes demanding.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“The attempt to stabilize Afghanistan is estimated to have cost American taxpayers $3tn to date.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Creating opportunities for self-reliance is not in itself a long-term solution for refugees, but it is an important step towards all of the main long-term solutions: repatriation, local integration, or resettlement. This is because offering people autonomy and economic opportunity is likely to empower them to better contribute to whichever society into which they are ultimately assimilated. It can make refugees' eventual return more sustainable because they will return with the skills and motivation to rebuild their country of origin. It can make people better equipped to contribute to a new society once resettled. And it can make them a more desirable resettlement prospect because of their ability to find work and live autonomously.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“The imagined needs of refugees have almost universally been reduced to two basics - food and shelter - and it has become assumed that the most viable way to provide such rights is through camps.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Globalization offers a variety of ways to bring economic opportunity to people, irrespective of geography. The internet in particular offers the chance to create footloose and highly mobile livelihoods.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Historically, on average international wars have lasted only six months. In contrast, the average civil war has been much longer, with estimates ranging from seven to fifteen years. If a family are going to be refugees for over a decade, their priority is not emergency food and shelter. It is to re-establish the threads of normal famiy life, anchored materially by a capacity of whoever is the breadwinner to earn a living. The camps run by UNHCR met the basic material needs of refugees, but they provided few opportunities to earn a living. Consequently, they left families bereft of autonomy.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Refugees are not a homogeneous group of people. Some are attracted by the prospect of succeeding in a high-income society; others, a majority, hope to return to Syria.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“The conferences convened to 'do something' about the refugee crisis - from the World Humanitarian Summit to the UN High-Level Meeting on Addressing Large Scale Movements of Refugees and Migrants - are ritual re-enactments that changed times have drained of real consequence.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Development' means many things to many people but it can be broadly understood as an approach that attempts to enhance long-term human welfare, whereas 'humanitarianism' is simply about the short-term alleviation of suffering. The humanitarian toolbox offers food, clothing, and shelter; it focuses exclusively on refugees and their vulnerabilities. The development toolbox offers employment, enterprise, education, healthcare, infrastructure, and governance; it focuses on both refugees and host communities, and it builds upon the capacities of both rather than just addressing vulnerabilities.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“UNHCR staff numbers grew from 500 to over 9,000 between 1950 and 2016. Camps provided jobs: just not for refugees.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Around the world, refugees are effectively offered a false choice between three dismal options: encampment, urban destitution, or perilous journeys.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“From a refugee's perspective, long-term encampment has described as a 'denial of rights and a waste of humanity'.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“The current system for refugees who remain in their region of origin is a disaster. It is premised upon an almost exclusively 'humanitarian' response. A system designed for the emergency phase - to offer an immediate lifeline - ends up enduring year after year, sometimes decade after decade. External provision of food, clothing, and shelter is absolutely essential in the aftermath of having to run for your life. But over time, if it is provided as a substitute for access to jobs, education, and other opportunities, humanitarian aid soon undermines human dignity and autonomy.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“The world simply has not created a refugee assistance model compatible with a world of global cities.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“For the period that refugees are in limbo, we should be creating an enabling environment that nurtures rather than debilitates people's ability to contribute in exile and when they ultimately go home. This should involve all of the things that allow people to thrive and contribute rather than merely survive: education, the right to work, electricity, connectivity, transportation, access to capital.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Today, the world spends approximately $75bn a year on the 10 per cent of refugees who moved to developed regions and only around $5bn a year on the 90 per cent who remain in developing regions.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Living and working alongside host nationals, refugees can make a positive economic contribution to the national economy.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“One way of grounding how we should identify refugees in a changing world is through the concept of force majeure - the absence of a reasonable choice but to leave. More specifically, the threshold for refuge would be: fear of serious physical harm. And the test would be: when would a reasonable person not see her- or himself as having a choice but to flee? In other words, if you were in the same situation, what would you do?”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Indefinite dependency on aid has gradually become the default long-term response to refugees.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“The humanitarian silo model is increasingly out of touch. It fails against almost any metric. It doesn't help refugees, undermining their autonomy and dignity. It doesn't help host governments, transforming potential contributors into a disempowered and alienated generation in their midst. It doesn't help the international community, leaving people indefinitely dependent upon aid, less capable of ultimately rebulding their countries of origin, and with onward movement as their only viable rout to opportunity.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“To achiveve this vision, host communities must share in the benefits.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Although UNHCR has an Urban Refugee Policy, it offers very little assistance in practice, with most urban refugees receiving no tangible help. By moving to cities, most refugees relinquish all formal support but also end up locked out of the formal economy.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“There is a striking correlation between the levels of fragility and levels of displacement. Fragile states are those that have no defence against mass violence. They are not invariably beset by mass violence: but each state is a house of cards.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“As we have seen, the geographical reality is that the overwhelming majority of the world's refugees are in countries that neighbour conflict and crisis. These 'countries of first asylum' in developing regions today host 86 per cent of all refugees, up from 72 per cent a decade ago. In consequence, it is the countries with the least capacity to host refugees that bear the greatest responsibility.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Since the Syrian refugee situation was just one of many, the approach was completely unfeasible. Financially, the only reason it did not break down earlier was itself a devastating critique: refugees overwhelmingly bypassed the camps. Since the Syrian refugee situation was just one of many, the approach was completely unfeasible. Financially, the only reason it did not break down earlier was itself a devastating critique: refugees overwhelmingly bypassed the camps.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“International responses to refugee crises cannot get by on being well-intentioned: they need to be smart, too.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Refugees - as refugees - need and should be entitled to expect three things: rescue, autonomy, and an eventual route out of limbo. Currently, the majority of refugees are not getting any of them.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System

“Today, most countries fail to comply with the 1951 Convention. Signatory states in the developed world find ever more elaborate ways to disregard or bypass the principle of non-refoulement, adopting a suite of deterrence or non-entrée policies that make it difficut and dangerous for refugees to access their territory: carrier sanctions, razor wire fences, interception en route. Signatory states in the developing world do tend to admit refugees more because of geoghraphical necessity and international pressure than law, and when they do, they still almost universally fail to implement the socio-economic rights in the Convention. And, yet, paradoxically, many of the most generous host countries in the world are not even full signatories: Jordan, Lebanon, Thailand, Nepal, and Turkey, for instance.”
― Alexander Betts, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System