June 20 marks World Refugee Day, which was created in 2001 by the United Nations to celebrate and honor refugees around the world as well as praise the work of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Each year has a theme, and this year’s theme is ‘hope away from home’. While we at Asylum Access have always participated in World Refugee Day in some form or another, it has always come with a certain discomfort around how this day is often used, which we wanted to finally express.
Each year’s focus on our ‘strength, resilience, and courage’ as refugees seems uncomfortably misplaced. Being forcibly displaced is often an incredibly difficult and traumatic experience. So that strength, resilience, and courage come out of a terrible, forced necessity–a necessity created by governments not providing safe routes to asylum resulting in tragedies such as last week’s deadly shipwreck in the Mediterranean. Listening to the experiences of forced displacement may be useful for non-refugees to understand us. Still, if that is not followed up by solidarity and activism toward systemic change for refugees–to ensure that no one has to go through the same–then it only amounts to our retraumatization and a kind of ‘resilience p*rnography.’
It feels like this overfixation on our resilience is because many still think of asylum as some compassionate act by nations toward ‘deserving’ individuals rather than an inalienable right in and of itself.
Moreover, it feels like this overfixation on our resilience is because many still think of asylum as some compassionate act by nations toward ‘deserving’ individuals rather than an inalienable right in and of itself. It can feel profoundly degrading to have to bear out your trauma to showcase your ‘resilience’ and, therefore, your deserving of asylum to non-refugee audiences. This continuing overemphasis on our resilience and strength also sets up an ever-higher standard not only for who ‘deserves’ asylum but how we should act once we have it: no space for our mental health struggles, our imperfections, or our frustrations at the barriers put in our way to rebuilding our lives–we should just be perfect, stoic, and grateful.
The other uncomfortable piece of World Refugee Day for refugee activists is UNHCR’s involvement and ownership of the day. UNHCR is the largest actor in the refugee protection system, both in terms of funding and the influence they hold in setting the agenda for what refugee protection ought to look like. For many non-refugees, World Refugee Day might represent their only engagement with issues affecting refugees and other forcibly displaced people. However, UNHCR’s prominence in the conversation around refugees (their Twitter handle is literally @Refugees) means that their apolitical, watered-down version of activism for refugees might be the only one that non-refugees ever see. Indeed, this year’s theme is meant to ‘focus on the power of inclusion’, and while our stories and voices are being highlighted briefly for World Refugee Day, the UNHCR remains woefully exclusive of refugee voices from its leadership, decision-making, and funding practices.
So what should you do this World Refugee Day? First and foremost, we do not need you to give us hope. For most forcibly displaced people, hope is the one thing we cannot afford to lose. We need you to use your activism, your vote, and your solidarity to push for our rights and radical, systemic change for forcibly displaced people wherever we find ourselves. In short, we need your strength, resilience, and courage to stand with us to call out injustices against us and build a refugee protection movement that allows us to rebuild our lives on our terms.