The Refugee in International Society: Between Sovereigns

Abstract : How is it that within a couple of short decades refugees in European public perception went from being the archetypal ‘‘heroes’’ of the international system— dissidents and fugitives fleeing communism and despotic regimes in search of freedom and individualism—to being a disparaged and unwanted ‘‘flood’’ of migrants: an apparently poverty-driven mass of asylumseekers masking their motives behind false claims of persecution and clogging the migration capacity of overly generous Western legal systems and welfare states? (...).