Strategic Indifference as Refugee Policy in the Global South, with Kelsey Norman

Scope Conditions Podcast

In this episode, we ask: when a state doesn’t enforce the rules, is it because they don’t have the capacity to do so, or because they’ve chosen not to? Put differently, when is indifference a deliberate policy strategy?
We talk with Dr. Kelsey Norman about her new book, Reluctant Reception: Refugees, Migration, and Governance in the Middle East and North Africa. Kelsey is a Fellow for the Middle East at the Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University, where she directs the Women’s Rights, Human Rights & Refugees program.
In Reluctant Reception, Kelsey seeks to explain how states choose to engage with forced migrants (including refugees and asylum-seekers) living within their borders. Focused on the cases of Egypt, Turkey, and Morocco, this is an innovative study in a number of important ways. There’s a vast literature analyzing how rich democracies respond to immigration from the Global South and immigrants living within their borders. Yet Kelsey is interested in understanding the politics of migration within the Global South -- in how Global South states engage with migrants within their own borders.
Scholars have often thought of countries like Egypt or Morocco as mere migration stopovers -- as places that migrants from other parts of the Middle East or Africa pass through on their way to Europe. Kelsey’s investigation launches from the often neglected fact that a large share of migrants never make it to the Global North, and that the stopover often becomes the de facto destination, a place where millions of migrants and refugees end up making their lives.
So how do reluctant Global South host states respond to these large, uninvited, semi-permanent populations of migrants? In some cases, host states repress and exclude: they restrict access to labor markets and services, detain migrants and refugees, and deport them. In other cases, states seek to integrate migrants, granting them basic rights, assistance, and access to work.
But often, Kelsey argues, states choose neither to repress nor to integrate. Instead, they adopt a policy approach that Kelsey calls “strategic indifference.” Under strategic indifference, states deliberately choose not to formally grant residency permits, access to employment, or services; but they tolerate informal labor-market participation, while declining to enforce residency rules and allowing NGOs and international agencies to provide basic services.
We talk with Kelsey about why states construct deliberately ambiguous policy responses -- what’s in it for them -- and about how a regime of strategic indifference shapes the day to day lives of migrants and refugees.
Kelsey also talks to us about her two years of intensive fieldwork in the three countries: about how a policy pattern that had been little-noted in the literature came into focus as she watched developments on the ground; how an ethnographic sensibility shaped the way she attended to the world around her; and how she’s grappled with the ethical quandaries of conducting research with vulnerable populations in the Global South as a citizen of the affluent North.
As always, you can find references to all of the academic works that we discuss in the episode on the episode page on our website.