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ID:
106867
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Publication |
2011.
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Summary/Abstract |
Since the close of the Cold War, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has undergone a fundamental mutation, reinventing itself as a humanitarian actor, extending its activities into "countries of origin" and, most recently, providing increasing assistance to internally displaced persons. Mainstream narratives present this expansion of UNHCR activities as the realization of a humanitarian potential previously curtailed and a signal improvement in the organization's work. This article offers a critical reassessment of UNHCR's evolution and, in doing so, questions the orthodox account. It traces the curve of UNHCR's recent development to the early 1990s and argues that the use of a humanitarian discourse masks what is fundamentally a shift to policies of containment-and the pursuit of State, not refugee, interests-which have undermined UNHCR's protection mandate.
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2 |
ID:
116901
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Publication |
2013.
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Summary/Abstract |
Development thinking in the past two decades has explicitly embraced law as an engine of development. This legal turn has been accompanied by a dramatic expansion of efforts to measure and quantify legal systems. Against claims that legal indicators are neutral, technical descriptions of the legal world, this article argues that legal indicators do not merely reflect legal reality; their construction and deployment are central to the continuing diffusion of neoliberalism as development common sense. The article considers the two most prominent projects to quantify law in the service of economic development-the World Bank's Worldwide Governance Indicators and Doing Business indicators-and argues that these reproduce a narrow neoliberal conception of law as a platform for private business and entrepreneurial activity, and institutional support for a system of laissez faire markets.
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