Responses to displacement in Africa: The irrelevance of best practice

With immigration and asylum policy at the root of socio-political conflicts in countries as diverse as South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya, and Côte d'Ivoire, Africa has joined other world regions in struggling to address this increasingly significant phenomenon. Unfortunately, international and domestic efforts to protect displaced people have largely failed to keep pace with the scale and scope of Africa's need.

Although resource constraints and lack of political will within the international community go far in explaining these shortcomings, there are other, critical factors that limit the effectiveness of current responses and hinder new approaches to protecting forced migrants. This paper draws attention to two of these factors. The first is that internationally (or even domestically) agreed upon standards are an effective means of ensuring protection in environments where principles of law and human rights are only weakly enforced.