The field of refugee and migration studies is rapidly expanding, with scholars considering new ways to examine and critically evaluate the governance structures regulating movement across borders. Although much previous work has focused on states—in particular, states of the Global North—as well as the role of intergovernmental organizations like the UNHCR or IOM, new work turns its attention to nonstate actors. Both Europe’s Migration Crisis: Border Deaths and Human Dignity and The Global Governed? Refugees as Providers of Protection and Assistance assess the role that NGOs and refugees themselves play in contributing to, or pushing back against, refugee and migration policies.

In Europe’s Migration Crisis, Vicki Squire argues that the European migration “crisis” was actually a crisis of European humanism. Although other activists and scholars have questioned whether 2015 was really a “migration” crisis—rather than a humanitarian crisis, a political crisis, or a crisis of protection—Squire questions the crisis logic on a more fundamental level. She argues that the events of 2015 and 2016 were in fact quite predictable, given the precarity of the EU’s external migration policy, changing regional dynamics, and human insecurity, as well as longer-standing colonial inequalities. Squire then offers an interrogation of the European response to what it alleged was a crisis. The response since 2015 was not highly different from strategies pursued by the EU in previous decades, but as Squire rightly argues, the 2015 agenda unified and enhanced various security mechanisms that had been used across the Mediterranean. The violence of these policies necessitated viewing migrants as “less than human,” and crisis politics helped further legitimize this understanding.

In the second half of the book, Squire provides an analysis of European activist interventions using a practice-based approach. Specifically, she examines three interventions by activist groups that contested the EU’s policies—the humanitarian corridors initiative (Corridoi Umanitari) in Italy, the Sea-Watch search and rescue operation in the central Mediterranean, and the practice of grave dressing on the island of Lampedusa—with a chapter devoted to each intervention.

The humanitarian corridors initiative in Italy was organized by religious activists who were dismayed by deaths in the Mediterranean and wanted to provide a legal migration route in lieu of life-threatening sea voyages. The project was able to secure 1,000 temporary humanitarian visas to relocate asylum seekers from Lebanon and Morocco, who were able to then apply for asylum once they arrived in Italy. Squire applauds the program for providing a tangible alternative to violence, precarity, and death, though also acknowledges criticism that it failed to challenge the EU’s hierarchical categorization of “deserving” bona-fide asylum seekers versus “undeserving” migrants.

The second organization examined by Squire, Sea-Watch, was started in 2014 by a German entrepreneur and grew into a midsized search-and-rescue operation that assisted tens of thousands of individuals in the Mediterranean. The organization also monitored rights violations and continued to operate despite increasing threats of criminalization by EU authorities, which argued that ships like Sea-Watch constitute “pull-factors” for increased migration. Nonetheless, Squire does question Sea-Watch’s cooperation with EU governments in its handing over of rescued asylum seekers and also the organization’s use of militaristic search-and-rescue products and recycled equipment.

Finally, Squire turns to practices of grave dressing on Lampedusa, which served as a hotspot and reception center during the events of 2015. She argues that cemetery activism challenges a politics of indifference and the normalization of death. Yet Squire differentiates between activists acting out of pity, who symbolically attempt to commemorate the lives of the deceased, and those acting out of empathy who aim to provoke discomfort and compel action that challenges the governance practices leading to deaths at sea.

Although she addresses these organizations’ shortcomings in each case study, Squire ultimately argues that they offer the possibility of a more hopeful response to migrant and refugee arrivals in Europe and an alternative to the EU’s long-standing—though recently amplified—policies of violence, containment, and removal. Yet if an aim of the book is to demonstrate an alternative politics of migration and to push back against the dominance of European migration governance, why focus only on the EU as a site of activism? Squire acknowledges that activities like rescuing people in the Mediterranean or grave dressing are not unique to Europe (p. 164), and yet European organizations remain her focus. In this regard, The Global Governed? Refugees as Providers of Protection and Assistance from Kate Pincock, Alexander Betts, and Evan Easton-Calabria provides a complementary read.

Pincock, Betts and Easton-Calabria aim to understand the role of refugee-led civil society organizations within systems of global refugee protection and humanitarianism. The authors point out that, even though international organizations have touted the role that refugee-led organizations play, there is much variation in the involvement of these organizations when it comes to carrying out services or developing local, national, or international policy. Specifically, the authors ask: What explains variation in the scale and scope of refugee-led social protection? They examine this question through a paired comparison of four sites in two countries—Kampala and Nakivale in Uganda and Nairobi and Kakuma in Kenya—using a combination of semistructured interviews, focus groups, and participant observation.

The authors contend that variation in the role that refugee-led organizations play in these four sites can mainly be explained by UNHCR’s receptivity, which in turn is shaped by the organizational culture at the national level. In Kampala—Uganda’s capitol city—a Ugandan organization called Interaid has served as the sole UNHCR implementing partner since 1995, leading to the exclusion of refugee-led organizations. Despite this exclusion, refugee-led organizations in Kampala have been able to bypass Interaid’s monopoly via networks of reciprocity and, in rare cases, direct links to international funders. In Nakivale, located in the south of Uganda, the authors note greater interaction between the UNHCR, implementing partners, and refugee-led organizations, though this interaction was still informal and unlikely to include funding. And in cases where refugee-led initiatives were seen as competitors by UN-funded NGOs already providing specific services, their significance was downplayed.

In Kenya, Nairobi hosts a substantial urban refugee population, despite the government’s strict encampment policy. In this environment, refugee-led organizations have proliferated, especially after the adoption of the 2016 Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework (CRRF) that advocates refugee self-reliance. UNHCR implementing partners have since prioritized refugee-led organizations, seen as a more sustainable and cheaper form of service provision and protection for refugees, often through a subcontracting model that uses the knowledge and expertise of refugee-led organizations without treating them as equal partners. In comparison, the Kakuma refugee camp in the country’s northwest has followed a marketization model that one of the authors—Alexander Betts—has touted elsewhere as having the potential to greatly improve the lives of refugees and host communities, though Kakuma and its surrounding environs remain poor. A market-based approach has also generally meant that refugee-led organizations have struggled to secure the funding needed to become viable partners taken seriously by the UNHCR. Finally, refugee-led organizations have been viewed with suspicion by the Kenyan government, making it difficult to formalize their status.

Although the authors’ research question focuses on variation, they identify a number of commonalities across their research sites. Primarily, refugee-led organizations—while prolific and critical to refugees’ survival—are summarily excluded from the UN-led model of refugee protection. If they are formally included, it is as service providers via a subcontracting model that rarely incorporates the desires and in-depth knowledge of refugee communities. Furthermore, this model forces refugee-led organizations to make a difficult choice between adopting the organizational structure and bureaucratic language of the UN in order to participate in service provision and access funding networks, versus retaining a more activist and oppositional stance in order to remain accountable to their communities with the hope of enacting change within the broader system of refugee governance.

Both Europe’s Migration Crisis and Global Governed? speak to broader issues of activism and the pursuit of change within global migration and humanitarian governance structures. Although Squire acknowledges that humanitarianism is problematic on various counts, she also argues that humanitarian actors have the potential to challenge a situation in which death and vulnerability have become normalized. In contrast to humanitarian governance, Squire sees humanitarian politics as a site of contestation over “who counts and what it means to be human” (p. 69). She is divided on actors like Corridoi Umanitari, Sea-Watch, and the Lampedusa, viewing them as somewhat embedded within humanitarian governance but also striving to pursue humanitarian politics by actively disrupting the EU’s attempt to maintain and even expand its deadly system of migration control. For their part, Pincock, Betts, and Easton-Calabria would likely argue that refugees are already engaging in humanitarian politics, but the current system of humanitarian governance does not provide a space or platform for refugee-led organizations to be adequately heard or for their demands to be taken seriously. The authors call for a more genuinely participatory approach and the inclusion of refugees’ priorities on humanitarian agendas in order to overcome the power hierarchies present in the extant system of global refugee governance.