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“Relief empire”: Racial aphasia, colonial unknowing and international organizations in the global governance of refugees

by Megan Bradley

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Megan Bradley

Abstract

International organizations play vital roles in the global governance of refugees, with the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) spearheading assistance and protection efforts. Yet UNHCR is part of a larger constellation of international organizations—past and present—created by states to govern displacement. This article deploys the concepts of racial aphasia and colonial unknowing to retheorize international organizations’ roles in the global governance of refugees. Racial aphasia (difficulty speaking meaningfully about race) and colonial unknowing (actively sustained ignorance of the historical and contemporary entanglements of colonialism and racism) provide vital lenses for investigating the power and persistence of racialized hierarchies in the refugee regime. While UNHCR—originally mandated to support select European refugees—has ascended to the alpha position in global refugee governance, international organizations focused on non-white refugees have been relegated to lower rungs of the ladder or shuttered and shunted to the margins of history. This article explores this dynamic through analysis of the United Nations Korean Reconstruction Agency (UNKRA), an international organization charged with responding to mass displacement in the Korean War. Probing the “unknowing” of UNKRA and its institutional failures sheds light on the ways in which racialized hierarchies and racial aphasia actively structure the refugee regime.