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Migration
Opinion note
*. I am grateful to Natasha Saunders for her valuable comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editorial team at the International Review of the Red Cross for their help and careful reading of the text.
Speaking on World Refugee Day in 2016, Barack Obama surmised that "[t]he scale of this human suffering is almost unimaginable; the need for the world to respond is beyond question".1Unfortunately, this was not an isolated summation. Presenting the highest level of displacement that has ever been on record, in 2016 the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimated that "65.3 million people around the world have been forced from home".2A staggering 21.3 million of these people were said to be refugees. Although these dire numbers are alarming, it is necessary to foreground that they are precisely that: numbers, calculations, statistics, figures and estimates.
This is not to suggest that numbers do not matter. For many scholars, they are inherently political and powerful modes of governance.3However, when it comes to calculating the scale and costs of what the then United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, termed a "crisis of solidarity" in 2016,4it is not enough to simply think or talk in terms of numbers. On the contrary, as the Secretary-General emphasized elsewhere, "we must change the way we talk about refugees and migrants. And we must talk with them. Our words and dialogue matter."5In a similar fashion, Pope Francis told members of the US Congress that "we must not be taken aback by their numbers, but rather view them as persons, seeing their faces and listening to their stories, trying to respond as best we can to their situation".6
With these calls in mind, a guiding concern of this article is to examine how the protection of migrants, refugees and internally displaced persons (IDPs) is being spoken about and framed. Today it is evident that the dominant responses of sovereign States to each of these issues is heavily reliant on the language of security and (de)securitization.7Indeed, this article conceptualizes ongoing attempts to protect migrants, refugees and IDPs as a series of (de)securitized "games".8