The Luxury of Theory

Today at each of our sites, we welcomed a speaker who discussed refugee determination procedures and the UNHCR (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). As we listened to her speak, both of us were struck by how utterly Western were the concepts guiding this process. The overarching theme we found is that often governments fail to live up to the theoretical guidelines mandated by the UNHCR. For starters, most of these refugees are living in Cairo “temporarily,” meaning that the Egyptian government cannot send them back to their home country. Yet in reality, few will ever be resettled in Egypt or elsewhere, and thus will never receive full citizens’ rights. A particularly telling quote from the lecture: “You [refugees] have rights, but they often aren’t carried out in practice.”

In the West we have the luxury of believing that all the agreements we make and treaties we sign will become reality, and that our humanitarian efforts will be fulfilled. Thus we have the luxury of theory – debating the finer points of wording while ignoring the failures and imperfections in implementation. But how do theoretical rights, agreed to on paper but not respected or adhered to in real life, help our students who suffer on a daily basis? Today we heard about our students’ first hand experiences in Cairo: being hit on the shoulder by an Egyptian and being unable to respond, being disgustingly overcharged while buying juice in a market, and having to pay the police in order to avoid arbitrary arrest.

We are not intending to diminish the efforts of the UNHCR, or our guest speaker, or AMERA (Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance), an NGO with which we work closely. Today’s lecture simply made us realize the gap between Western ideals and the true refugee experience. The language of UNHCR policies is laden with ‘maybe’s and ‘might’s and ‘probably’s and ‘possibly’s, but this legal jargon does not account for the real lives of our students. Successful theory, that which on paper solves problems and grants rights, does not necessitate happy and healthy lives. These policies certainly are the jumping off point for a solution to the suffering of refugees, yet they need to be tweaked to suit the infrastructure of the non-Western world. Trusting in theory – pretty pieces of paper that hypothetically eliminate injustice – is a luxury that we never knew we had.