Rethinking refugee law through an ethnographic lens

Check out the video recording of the keynote here. 

The Refugee Law Initiative’s (RLI) 15th Anniversary Conference took place from 2–4 June at Senate House, the University of London. A key feature of the event was a distinguished keynote by Professor Maja Janmyr, who advocated for a reconsideration of refugee law through an ethnographic lens. She encouraged the audience, composed mainly of refugee lawyers, to consider how this approach could deepen their insights and improve their work.

– Because the doctrinal approach falls short of explaining how refugee law is created, developed and implemented, we need other disciplines to better capture the complexity of refugee law in action, Janmyr stated. 

Janmyr proceeded to present three ways she has utilized ethnographic methods in her research to better understand legal complexities.

How refugees interpret the law

One strand of Janmyr's research focuses on labels and categories, and she has applied ethnographic approaches to explore the social meanings of legal concepts defined in international conventions. Her research in Lebanon illustrates the complexity of labels within refugee law, where individuals fleeing the Syrian conflict were assigned various legal, bureaucratic, and social labels by humanitarian organizations, state authorities, and local government actors.

– Our study revealed how each legal, bureaucratic and social label reproduced a certain mode of ordering, each with its own set of implications for what a Syrian may do, how their presence is understood by others in the community, and what type of rights and protections they may have access to, she said. 

Another strand of Janmyr’s research concerns rights mobilization. Janmyr's ethnographic fieldwork at a protest camp outside the UNHCR office in Beirut emphasizes that the users—and makers—of international refugee law are not only decision-makers, judges, lawyers, and bureaucrats but also refugees and asylum seekers.

– An ethnographic lens allowed me to spotlight how refugees and other migrants interpret the law, which is not necessarily the same way we scholars or practitioners do. In this process, the law becomes negotiated, manipulated, tested, and contested, Janmyr explained.

The many pitfalls of interdisciplinarity 

The third example from Janmyr's research shows how ethnographic approaches have been vital in understanding how international refugee law norms are spread and adopted. As the Principal Investigator of the BEYOND project, Janmyr highlights how the project has utilized ethnographic methods to explore the relationship between the international refugee regime and non-signatory states to the 1951 Convention.

– One of our focuses is on how UNHCR promotes international refugee law (IRL). This includes everything from UNHCR's involvement in domestic legal reform to its collaboration with universities in the teaching of IRL, she said. 

Janmyr's presentation also discussed the main issues and dilemmas associated with combining legal and ethnographic approaches, particularly regarding knowledge, normativity, and objectivity. In this regard, fundamentally different starting points can complicate the work of legal scholars who wish to engage in ethnographic research.

– Understanding what knowledge production and objectivity mean in different fields, along with the complexities of empirical versus normative perspectives, requires careful thought. This reflection is important for addressing essential questions like which field we want to contribute to and which scientific debates we wish to be a part of, Janmyr said.