Increasing the Effectiveness of UNHCR’s 4Rs Activities in Afghanistan: Compliance, National Capacity and Domestic Actors

Abstract

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has conducted activities in refugee producing countries to provide the sustainability of voluntary repatriation as the most preferred durable solution. The literature on UNHCR’s increasing activities of this sort has a rather normative focus, questioning whether UNHCR should be involved in such activities. However, it mainly lacks discussions on how the effectiveness of 4Rs activities may be increased. This article is an attempt to fill this gap in the literature by examining the effectiveness of 4Rs activities in Afghanistan. It argues that increasing Afghanistan’s national capacity for compliance through increasing support among domestic actors such as Afghan government officials and the public by persuasion and shared norms is likely to increase the effectiveness of the international refugee regime. The article seeks to identify the factors that are likely to shape the opinions of the domestic actors and to make tentative suggestions for increasing support among them for 4Rs activities

Keywords

• UNHCR, Afghanistan, 4Rs activities, effectiveness, domestic factors.

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