Continental Containment: Crafting Middle East “Host States”

This chapter argues that Middle East host states have become hosting solutions for mass displacement, and redefined from transit to host states where refugees and migrants are kept indefinitely. The Middle East region’s conflict history presaged its role as territorial “landscapes of protection”. Despite being non-signatory states to the 1951 refugee convention, they have taken on obligations that accrue to Europe’s many convention states and since 2015 become an integral part of the European Union’s “external” migration policy. Despite a slow trend toward the geographic diffusion of refugees, the rebordering of Europe has served to retain both refugees and migrants in the new Middle East transit turned host states. The creation of a new hosting archipelago in the Middle East reflects the failure of international burden-sharing mechanisms, and geographic proximity to conflict being the primary distributive mechanism. The “proximity principle” has created new buffer states in the Middle East and is supported by new funding modalities (3RP), bilateral agreements (EU-Turkey, 2016), and host country programs. The “Mediterranean solution” includes preventive measures – border control, offshore detention, and deportation of asylum seekers – as integral parts of the EU’s “externalization” of migration management. Cost-benefit calculations and funding gaps promote third country off- and onshoring of impoverished refugees and migrants that has morphed into a new humanitarian strategy that maintains the Middle East as a refugee-hosting region. Taken together this has made refugee protection regional, rather than international, and crafted Middle host states where refugees and migrants are hosted indefinitely, reflecting Orientalism’s imaginative geography of the Middle East.