ABSTRACT
Drawing upon research that I have published elsewhere on ‘survival migration’, 1 this chapter engages directly with this book’s central themes within the African context. First, by developing the concept of survival migration, it examines a conflict between the dominant legal–institutional category of the ‘refugee’ as defined by the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (‘the 1951 Convention’) and the contemporary reality of cross-border displacement. 2 Second, it suggests that this gap between legal–institutional identity and empirical reality is in some cases filled by adaptation of the refugee regime at the national and local level. Far from being static or global, ‘who is a refugee’ is defined by the encounter of international law with a national and local political context. Drawing upon six case studies from sub-Saharan Africa, it explains why the refugee identity sometimes stretches to incorporate people at the margins of the formal legal definition and at other times it fails to adapt, leading to desperate people being rounded up, detained and deported.
