ABSTRACT
In the modern age, the space of asylum has been subsumed within law and the state. Thus, the focus has shifted from demarcating and protecting the space of asylum, to delineating the subject of asylum, i.e. the refugee. Beyond the use of the word 'refugee', a variety of circumstances have given rise to the need for asylum. Nergis Canefe argues that international refugee law has essentially comprised two different stages. The first was inaugurated by the Treaty of Westphalia and ended around the time of World War I. There then followed an interregnum where the international regime was in crisis and flux. Hathaway opens his discussion of the origins of international refugee law by laying out the common sense definition of a refugee. As the system of nation-states developed and spread from the seventeenth century onwards, along with a theory and practice of international law as the law of states, so the concept of asylum was turned inside out.
