The Politics of Protection: The Right to Food in Protracted Refugee Situations

Abstract

This article focuses on the politics of refugee protection, with attention given to issues of the right to food and food insecurity in two protracted refugee camps: Osire in Namibia and Nakivale in Uganda. In our analysis, we identify a key tension at the heart of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and its partners’ understanding and practices of protection: between a minimalist understanding of human rights (the right to live or survive) and a more expansive one that guarantees the full and widest array of human rights, including socio-economic ones. This tension, when combined with dwindling state donor funding for humanitarian work, a market-driven system of refugee food provision, and restrictive encampment policies and practices, has dire consequences for refugees living in camps. We stress that the right to adequate and sustainable food is a core international protection issue for refugees that is often reduced to a matter of ‘assistance’ in both the scholarship and practices concerning refugee protection. We argue for a more expansive and critical understanding of the right to food and food security as this has greater implications for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and its protection mandate in the context of defining the responsibilities that governments and international organisations have towards refugees.