ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief historical overview of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCRs) engagement with Refugee Status Determination (RSD) and explores, on a macro level, how mandate RSD has been progressively incorporated into a wider regime of accountability with the development of procedural standards. It examines the every-day work of RSD and looks at how eligibility officers struggle to turn the localized, situational, and relational nature of their decision-making process into purely legal and objectified decisions, in a continual quest to balance the global principles of fairness, quality, and impartiality with the need to consider the network of actors and the local political context in which they operate. It focuses on the narratives of eligibility officers in Ankara to explore how they critically reflect and make sense of this struggle. The most important socializing effect of RSD work was in fact that RSD officers came to embrace the conviction that refugees should be sorted out from migrants.
