| dc.description.abstract | Protecting individuals who are not safe in their own homes is a practice that has been developed alongside the Western law, imposing different requirements to allow an “outsider” to be protected by another state. In this sense, the international refugee law is based on the Western law and is directed mostly to a selected group, the refugees from the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Additional Protocol. However, the definition of “refugee” contemplated in these treaties turns to a specific individual, who served as a political-ideological argument for the Western powers in the Cold War, and consequently does not support all flows. In finding the Global South, the concept of refugee adopted by the United Nations proved to be insufficient. Thus, in Africa and in Latin America new definitions of “refugee” have been established with the OAU Convention and the Cartagena Declaration, which demonstrate that the causes of refuge in the South are linked to colonialism and to the interventions of the Great Powers. However, even though the concept of refuge originated in the Global South is more protective than the one from the 1951 Convention, it is not applied with the pretension of universality by the United Nations. The present work aims therefore to comprehend the link between the non-application by the United Nations of the southern concept of refuge and the coloniality. Considering that, it seeks to compare the foundations of the refugee definitions from the 1951 Convention, the 1967 Additional Protocol, the OAU Convention and the Cartagena Declaration, as well as the contexts in which they are inserted; besides examining the relation between coloniality and modernity, and the construction of the coloniality of power, of the knowing and being, to comprehend how the southern epistemologies, allied to the TWAIL, can fundament the enlargement of the concept of refugee. Furthermore, it seeks to recognize the refugee as the “other”, an “outsider”, so that it can be known by the decolonial lenses, and how this condition relates to the refusal of applying the concepts of the OAU Convention and the Cartagena Declaration by the United Nations with universal pretensions. It also examines the link between the non-application of the southern concept of refugee and the classic bases of international law, with the manipulation of the language of law and with “who speaks for the refugee”, as well as the centralization of the possibility of extending the concept of refugee in the UNHCR. With the application of the dialectical, monographic, historical and comparative methods, it will be verified that the non-application of the concept of refugee, which considers those who flee from generalized violence, aggression, domination or foreign occupation, internal conflicts, massive violation of human rights or from other circumstances that disturb public order, is related to the locus in which this definition emerges, the Global South, since its non-application reaffirms the Eurocentric ethos of international law, besides appointing to the characteristics of the coloniality of the knowing and being, and demonstrating the relation between the power and knowledge, restricting the definition of refugee to an international organism that suffers with the influences of hegemonic states. | en |
