UNHCR and Refugee Rights Protection in Ecuador: The Effects of Non-State Institutional Innovation on Peacebuilding and Human Security

This paper explores the provision of security within refugee-receiving countries, in which tensions between refugees and the host population may create instability and occasionally violence, and the state’s lack of political incentive to protect basic human rights for refugees (who do not vote) increases the vulnerability of this population. Even when formal institutional protections exist, refugee rights in practice are often denied and human security jeopardized through an ‘invisibility bargain’, in which the host society tacitly allows refugees’ physical presence within the country, but demands in return social and political invisibility, including an effective abrogation of formally-guaranteed rights and political claim-making. This leads to a volatile condition in which unresolved conflicts can escalate into intergroup or intragroup violence. In response to the gaps in the formal institutional protections of the state for refugees and forced migrants, non-state actors in some countries have adapted by taking over state-like functions of security provision and rights protection to prevent host-migrant conflicts from threatening peace. In particular, this paper traces the role of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) office in Ecuador and its local NGO implementing partners as key linkages through which an international institution penetrates national and local political spaces to negotiate the provision of security and protection of rights between the refugee population and state and non-state power brokers. Ecuador is the largest recipient of refugees in Latin America, of which more than 95% are fleeing the violence in Colombia. UNHCR is one of the most important actors working in Ecuador to provide protection and development assistance to this population. The paper draws on interviews and surveys carried out with UNHCR personnel and refugees during approximately 6 months of doctoral dissertation fieldwork. In complementing and sometimes substituting for state authority at the local level where state presence was often weak or absent, such as rural regions near the Colombian border, UNHCR became an alternative source for institutional innovation that created spaces for political participation and mechanisms for dialogue that did not previously exist within the traditional democratic political system of Ecuador. Not only did this enhance human security and improve services for both Colombian refugees and marginalized Ecuadorian host populations, but the negotiation of informal interventions between UNHCR and the state often resulted in a transformation of formal institutions with greater capacity and greater legitimacy to protect the rights of all inhabitants in order to reduce human vulnerability to violence. Through this study of an international institution taking on state-like functions by providing rights protections at the local level within refugee-receiving communities, the paper shows how the limitations of a traditional national security approach to security by states that are faced with non-traditional, transnational threats to domestic peace can be overcome by alternative, non-state and international actors innovating new structures of governance.