ABSTRACT
Penelope Mathew portrays refugee law as a response to a private actor who crosses sovereign boundaries. Her chapter explores some state responses that seek to deflect responsibility for refugees and to reassert sovereign control. It then turns to examine two examples of refugee cases that involve non-state actors and in which refugee status may be wrongly denied: domestic violence cases and exclusions from claiming refugee status. She uses these examples to show how these refugees tell us something about what they are not, i.e. the state. She concludes that a state’s border is a site where national identity is constructed, often in opposition to those seeking entry. As a result, border control consists of strategies of exclusion and containment that play out in many ways in law and jurisprudence.
