On Friday, 6 March 2026, James Milner participated in the Department of Political Science Faculty Works in Progress Seminar Series. He presented an early draft of a chapter he is co-authoring with Matthew Bird (IDRC Research Chair at Universidad del Pacífico in Peru) and Jean Marie Ishimwe (Kenya-based East Africa Lead for R-SEAT: Refugees Seeking Equal Access at the Table) entitled “Regional Organizations, Localized Knowledge and the Shifting Geopolitics of the Global Refugee Regime.”
The chapter is a contribution to an edited collection being prepared by the 12 IDRC Research Chairs on Forced Displacement to articulate the differentiated contribution of knowledge originating from contexts most affected by displacement, especially in the Global South.
In their chapter, the authors explore how the role of regional organizations and regional processes, while historically marginalized in the literature on the politics of the global refugee regime, have been important sites of articulating progressive principles in recent years.
Their analysis focuses specifically on the 2024 Chile Declaration resulting from the Cartagena +40 process and the IGAD Ministerial Communique of December 2025. Contrary to the notion that major refugee-hosting states would subscribe to the priorities of major donor states as a means of securing external support, the chapter outlines how regional processes have produce positions more progressive than current paradigms would anticipate. Therefore, the authors argue that the marginalization of regional processes in the literature reflects Chimni’s 1998 argument about the geopolitics of refugee studies and the political economy of knowledge production.
The presentation was followed by a lively discussion on the conceptual and empirical implications of the argument presented in the chapter.
Stay tuned for further updates on the publication of the edited collection!