Discursive and behavioural sources of regime erosion: the case of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)
本文利用联合国难民署执行委员会未公开的会议记录等资料，从长期视角揭示国际难民制度当前的不稳定源于制度扩大和深化后的内生争议，欧洲等国家通过话语和行为策略间接侵蚀了制度基础。
Taking a longitudinal perspective and drawing on hitherto unstudied Summary Records from the UNHCR's Executive Committee, along with other primary sources, this article demonstrates that the current destabilisation of the international refugee regime has long-standing roots in processes of endogenous contestation following regime widening and deepening. In response to expanding obligations, influential European and other ‘like-minded’ states have pursued two indirect strategies that have paved the way for today's more overt challenges. Mindful of not openly opposing the regime, they have discursively promoted a shift in UNHCR activities toward humanitarian engagement in the Global South, thereby reorienting the regime away from its original focus on territorial asylum in the Global North. In parallel, the same countries have behaviourally shifted cooperation on asylum to alternative venues – including loose transgovernmental networks and the European Union – where they have coordinated the development of countervailing policies that challenge the foundational principles of the refugee regime.