Professor Ashwini Vasanthakumar is working with a Dublin-led research team in a €2-million European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant to study refugee law.

“RefLex: Is International Refugee Law Effective?” is “the first systematic attempt to understand the effectiveness of international refugee law,” Vasanthakumar says. “There are a lot of questions to ask about international refugee law – its historical development, what legal obligations it creates for states, how it should change. These questions are important to scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and, most of all, refugees themselves.”

Legal academics often focus on what the law is and how it should be changed, but underlying these questions are certain assumptions about the effects of the law, Vasanthakumar points out. This project aims to create a new dataset, the Refugee Protection Index, that will help to identify the factors that enhance the effectiveness of refugee law and the protection of refugees. “It will investigate how international refugee law changes states’ behaviour, informs policy outcomes, and improves the lives of refugee communities,” she explains.

Vasanthakumar’s research will focus on two areas, primarily in the first two years of the five-year study.

The first is conceptual analysis of effectiveness. “What do we mean when we say the law is effective? How can effectiveness be measured? And what are the different ways and domains in which the law can be effective?”

The second is exploring how international refugee law can be the basis of legal mobilization by refugees and refugee communities themselves. “We tend to think of refugees as the passive beneficiaries of refugee law, but refugee law is also the basis of social and political mobilization by refugees who claim a right to have a say in the policies and laws that pertain to them,” she says. “This resonates, both in substance and method, with my research on exile politics and the roles of diasporas in transnational and transitional justice.”

Vasanthakumar draws attention to the value of this project’s mixed-method approach as a global comparative study in international refugee law.

“One of the things I like most about this project is how it draws on a number of different methods, including statistical analysis, qualitative methods, case studies, and conceptual analysis. It really highlights the importance of collaboration as a way of drawing on different expertise and approaches.”

The study’s principal investigator is Professor Cathryn Costello from University College Dublin (UCD) Sutherland School of Law, and joining Vasanthakumar as a collaborator is Professor Lamis Abdelaaty, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, Syracuse University.

“I'm really excited to be tackling such an ambitious project and for the opportunity to work with Professors Costello and Abdelaaty,” Vasanthakumar says. In addition to enabling her to build on her existing research and scholarship, she sees the project as “an opportunity to work with these two terrific women, whose scholarship I greatly admire and from whom I'll learn a lot.”

In a UCD press release, Professor Costello shares Vasanthakumar’s enthusiasm about the research team, which also includes two post-doctoral researchers and two PhD students.

“I am thrilled to have the opportunity to work with two scholars I admire immensely – Professors Lamis Abdelaaty (Syracuse University, USA) and Ashwini Vasanthakumar (Queen’s University, Canada) – and to build a new research team to work at the cutting edge of research on international law and politics.”

Vasanthakumar is hopeful about the potential impact of this groundbreaking study into international refugee law.

“We're at a time in history that is particularly perilous for refugees and immigrants, and where even longstanding principles of international law and international refugee law are under attack,” she says. “My hope is that this research will result in a better understanding of what works, how, and for whom.”

By Tracy Weaver