ABSTRACT
Refugees are special kinds of foreigners who interact with states in a unique way. Their interactions with states are distinct from other state-individual relations that political and legal theories delineate because they are neither inter-state relations nor center-periphery, statecitizen or citizen-citizen relations. The postwar notion of state, which originates from the principles manifest in the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, Westphalia Treaty of 1648, and the Wilsonian principles of 1918, prescribes states’ right to determine who to let in and who to exclude from their territories. On the other hand, through the 1951 Geneva Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its related 1967 Protocol, the liberal element of the very same ideology renders the states responsible for protecting refugees. By granting refugee status to foreigners, a state abandons its right to decide on their movements across its territory as well as its own discretion about how to treat foreigners. The state is also obliged by the Geneva Convention to guarantee civil and social rights to refugees. Therefore, the notion of refugee as defi ned in international law today is the only known phenomenon whereby a sovereign state and a person of foreign nationality, representing only his or her own person, interact with each other, to advance their claims for, respectively, sovereignty and protection .
