ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how changes in the refugee theories allowed for a rethink in the way refugees are constructed and also examines how the reconceptualisation and expansion of security at the end of the Cold War enabled this. The language of threat and danger now dominates the refugee discourse whereby refugees are framed as threats to security rather than as a humanitarian issue. To understand how refugees, a non-security issue, have come to be understood and presented as a security threat, one employs the theory of securitisation developed by the Copenhagen School. The chapter describes the nature of security threats by focusing on the understanding developed by the Critical Security framework which one consider more useful in analysing African security than the understanding developed by the Realist theory. It demonstrates that the refugee problem, traditionally a non-security issue, is now increasingly perceived as a security threat by analysts and policy-makers.
