Rethinking mobility


Today there are 70.8 million forcibly displaced people worldwide – and many more that fall outside the category of refugee, asylum seeker, or IDP. Irregular migrants, and so-called ‘economic’ and ‘climate’ refugees are just a few of the categories of people on the move today. While borders certainly exist in our world, different mobility schemes (both formal and informal) challenge the straightforwardness of ‘crossing borders’, creating new and even extralegal categories of the bounds of territory. Some of the questions addressed here include: How does – and should – the international refugee regime protect irregular and other migrants falling outside the 1951 Convention? Where does mobility fall on the human rights agenda, and vice versa? What innovative temporary protection measures exist, and how might these both help and hurt migrants, and even the category of refugee?