By Kristin Bergtora Sandvik, Astrid Espegren and Ingunn Bjørkhaug
This intervention will be presented at The Refugee Convention at 75: Perspectives Within and Beyond Conference taking place 22-23 June, 2026 at the University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway
Introduction
Refugee resettlement has long been celebrated as the most ambitious of the three durable solutions, embodying international solidarity and humanitarian responsibility. Yet in recent years, resettlement has faced an existential crisis: quotas have reached historic lows, multilateral frameworks are fragmenting, and ad hoc, nationally driven initiatives are emerging where collective multilateral commitments are weakening. Although resettlement as a durable solution has been in crisis and disarray before (after the Vietnamese boat refugee collapse, 9/11 and most recently, covid-19), the simultaneous erosion of funding, norms and infrastructure suggests that we have approached the endgame for the very notion of tripartite durable solutions. This does not mean that there will not be remnants of national resettlement programs left, but the speed with which quotas have shrunk are indicative of steep decline: as recently as 2019, the Norwegian resettlement quota was 3000 (Kvalø et al., 2023), but in 2026 it is reduced to an all-time low of 100 (Ministry of Justice, 2025). In the Swedish case the resettlement quota went from 5000 to 900 in 2023 and has remained at that level since (Emilsson, 2025).
Drawing on our long-term engagement with refugee resettlement as practitioners in UNHCR and the Norwegian bureaucracy and as commentators and scholars (Sandvik, 2009, Bjørkhaug, 2017, Garnier et al. 2018; Sandvik et al., 2023; Bjørkhaug & Bækkevold, 2025; Espegren & Valenta 2025), this commentary initiates a conversation about how we can make sense of the end of resettlement as a durable solution. Our motivation is threefold: Ethically, for the sake of people hoping for resettlement and scientifically, for the integrity of a research field increasingly dominated by old data, there is a need to shift our conversation on resettlement. Politically, there is a need to encourage politicians, bureaucrats and civil society actors to think ahead about the future of protection, burden sharing and our shared humanity. To that end, we conceptualize the decline of resettlement as a politics of ‘hollowing out’ and use empirical examples from policy and practice to illustrate this.
Resettlement in decline, research on the rise
Over the last three years or so, resettlement has finally arrived as a subfield of refugee studies in its own right, with books (Zieck, 2025; Welfens, 2025; de Oliveira, 2024; Balakian, 2025), special issues (Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 28, Issue 12, 2025, eds. Arar, R., Fee, M., Gowayed, H., & Sackett, B.; Refugee Survey Quarterly, Vol.44 Issue 1, 2025, eds. Fee, M., Darrow, J., Howsam Scholl, J., Cureton, A.; Gonzalez Benson. O.; Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2026, ed. Soennecken, D.) and a multitude of articles ( Tesfai, 2025; Hashimoto, 2025; Mogstad, 2025; Maple & Hovil, 2025), and book chapters (Davitti & Vankova, 2024). Paradoxically, the growth of the resettlement literature is occurring just as resettlement is not only fragmenting through diverse pathways such as private sponsorship programs or humanitarian visas – but disappearing. Over the past year, as we have reviewed and synthesized key insights from this growing body of literature, it has become apparent that refugee studies must begin to make analytical sense of the disappearance of resettlement.
Opening a conversation
To open a space for such conversation, in this commentary, we treat the decline of resettlement as a form of political work. We start from the notion that international mechanisms, such as the refugee regime and UNHCR’s international protection framework, die when mobilizing structures, and resource bases, are depleted. Despite this, the mechanisms appear to remain intact formally, as the normative approach, wording and policy documents, remain unchanged. Methodologically, to find analytical tools for describing the ‘hollowing out’ of resettlement, we have turned to familiar concepts from scholarship on legal mobilization, social movements, agenda setting theory and norm entrepreneurship – i.e. we revert them. We focus on (1) resettlement norm collapse; (2) resettlement agenda collapse and (3) resettlement infrastructure collapse. We understand these as three interconnected dynamics: the weakening of the normative foundations of resettlement, the gradual disappearance of resettlement from political agendas, and the dismantling of the institutional infrastructure required to sustain it.
Resettlement norm collapse
Over the last decade, dating back to the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ the ideals of humanity, charity and solidarity the once underpinned refugee resettlement have gradually lost political traction across the global north (Jumbert et. al, 2023). We highlight four aspects of this norm collapse.
The weakening of resettlement is closely linked to broader normative shifts in how refugee protection is understood and prioritized. The first is the moral re-ranking of what protection needs consist of and who has the greatest protection needs. An example of such moral re-ranking is the manner in which the temporary protection of Ukrainians from February 2022, which both reduced protection space for other displaced groups and created tiered of services and resources within country-protection schemes, with Ukrainians receiving privileged access (Koikkalainen et al., 2026).
The second is a shift from burden sharing to externalization. Burden sharing refers to the principle that states collectively assume responsibility for protecting refugees through mechanisms such as resettlement. Externalization, by contrast, involves efforts by states to prevent displaced people from reaching their territory and to shift responsibility for protection to other countries or regions. In this context, migration and people on the move are increasingly framed as security threats, accompanied by border closures, deterrence policies(Sandberg et al., 2025), and deportations (Borrelli & Lindberg, 2025).
The third relates to soft law vulnerability (Betts, 2010). Resettlement commitments are largely formulated through non-binding arrangements rather than enforceable legal obligations (Kälin, 2001). As a result, states can reduce quotas, quietly disengage, or simply fail to implement pledges without incurring the stigma of norm violation or treaty withdrawal. As Zieck (2024) shows in her recent book on resettlement in international refugee law, the system has long rested on a state-centric and quota-driven model in which refugees themselves hold few enforceable rights. Keeping resettlement outside the core of refugee law has therefore created a legal architecture that is politically easy to scale down or sidestep.
Related to this is how the political opportunity structure of soft law offers what we, inspired by Goffman’s ‘veneer of consensus’ label ‘the veneer of commitment’ and how soft law language provides political legitimacy. Resettlement continues to feature prominently in policy rhetoric as a key protection tool, even as the number of places offered by states shrinks to a tiny fraction of global needs. The European Commission, for example, continues to describe resettlement as a ‘safe and legal alternatives to irregular journeys’ that ‘demonstrate European solidarity with non-EU countries hosting large numbers of people fleeing war or persecution’, even as the number of places offered by Member States has declined sharply. The language of commitment therefore remains in place, providing political legitimacy and signaling adherence to international norms, even where actual participation in resettlement programs is minimal or declining.
Resettlement agenda collapse
Why is this erosion of resettlement met with so little protest? We argue that the lack of political cost for undermining, withdrawing and dissolving resettlement itself is an important political opportunity structure linked to a collapse of the resettlement agenda. Central to this collapse is the role of two groups of actors we refer to as counter-entrepreneurs (Bloomfield, 2016) and dismantelers (Bauer & Knill, 2014). This refers to prominent individuals or civil society groups (norm counter-entrepreneurs) and politicians (dismantelers) who actively work to disassemble the norms, programs and practices that sustain resettlement. The sharp reductions in U.S. resettlement quotas during the Trump administration illustrate how such actors can rapidly undermine a system that depends on sustained political support.
Furthermore, attention must be given to the nuts and bolts of temporarily downgrading priorities and normative objectives, and how this can be done without causing major international reactions or the risk of sanctions. An example of this is Denmark, which suspended its annual UNHCR resettlement quota in 2015–16 due to the large number of spontaneous asylum arrivals. What was initially framed as a temporary emergency pause quietly became long-term practice, even after asylum arrivals dramatically decreased after 2016. The same situation occurred in Austria, where the resettlement program was suspended in 2018 and has remained halted since then.
Last, but also related to agenda collapse, emphasis has been put on the strategic reframing of resettlement. ‘Reframing’ is the process of changing the construction and organization of meaning. Part of this reframing has happened by the decline of multilateral collaboration and the international liberal order at large. The 2021 evacuation from Afghanistan can serve as an example of a gradual shift from a multilateral, treaty-based refugee resettlement system to nationally defined obligations. During the evacuations countries justified their selection based on a moral debt to local wartime personnel rather than universal refugee rights. Consequently, resettlement became selective, conditional, and disconnected from global norms, which can be seen as undermining the coherence of the international refugee regime. The 2016 EU–Turkey Statement has also been described as a reframing of the burden‑sharing norm, where Turkey uses its role as a host country for geopolitical influence, while the EU externalizes its responsibilities and prioritizes containment (Parlak, 2026). This illustrates a strategic reframing of the refugee resettlement agenda from humanitarian commitments to a form of asymmetrical co-management, driven by power dynamics and strategic pragmatism rather than normative obligations. Whereas the resettlement agenda has always been complex and characterized by multiple and dynamic framings of national and international resettlement, the current reframing seems to largely abandon humanitarian and protection related rationales.
Resettlement infrastructure collapse
The final category concerns resettlement infrastructure collapse. Whereas agenda collapse reflects declining political attention to resettlement, infrastructure collapse captures the weakening of the institutional and operational systems that make resettlement possible in practice. Within this category, we identify several mechanisms through which the infrastructure of resettlement is gradually eroded.
First, the international humanitarian system is experiencing major resource withdrawal. In July 2025 UNHCR reported that 11.6 million people are losing access to assistance because of major international budget cuts in humanitarian funding. Earlier in the same year, the UNHCR issued a warning, stating that the consequences of cuts in humanitarian aid for people fleeing danger would be immediate and devastating. They emphasized that ‘this is not just a funding shortfall – it is a crisis of responsibility’.
Second, institutional erosion further weakens resettlement infrastructure. Budget cuts and shifting political priorities have reduced staffing and protection capacity within international organizations responsible for managing resettlement processes. In June 2025 UNHCR reported that 3,500 permanent staff posts had been discontinued, and hundreds of temporary staff positions had been terminated, in addition to the closure and downsizing of offices. These institutional changes affect the everyday functioning of resettlement systems, from case identification and protection assessments to coordination between UNHCR, states and implementing partners.
Third, decisions about refugee protection are increasingly moved away from multilateral resettlement frameworks to national or ad hoc initiatives, weakening coordinated approaches. One of the most well-known recent examples of such ad hoc initiatives is the controversial move by the Trump administration to resettle white South Africans as refugees in the US. This development reflects venue shifting (Scott, 2017), as activities previously coordinated under the auspices of UNHCR are increasingly relocated to domestic programmes and alternative governance activities, often operating on a smaller scale and relying on temporary political or organisational initiatives rather than stable institutional systems.
In recent years, a growing number of complementary pathways and NGO-driven submissions have emerged, where actors other than UNHCR identify candidates for protection. While these initiatives may open protection pathways for some refugees, they are often more ad hoc and dependent on initiatives rather than institutionalized systems. The growing number of complementary pathways may give the impression that resettlement is continuing in new forms. In practice, however, many of these initiatives operate outside the traditional multilateral resettlement system and rely on different actors and institutional arrangements. Taken together, these developments illustrate how resettlement is gradually hollowed out in practice.
Moving forward
We conceptualize the decline of resettlement as a deliberate political work of ‘hollowing out’ what has been considered one of the durable solutions of the international refugee regime. There are several ways of accounting for normative decline. Particular relevant for the empirically driven field of refugee studies is the growing IR literature on the future of the international order, the decline of ‘formerly strong norms’, and norm contestation and erosion. What we have begun to outline is how the demise of resettlement can be understood through a triple collapse: resettlement norms, international and domestic resettlement agendas, and the transnational resettlement infrastructure that sustains resettlement. Further qualitative and quantitative research is needed to develop this framework. We hope this approach be useful not only to the refugee studies community, but also for thinking about the decline of the international humanitarian system more broadly.
As noted in the introduction, if resettlement enters terminal decline, the number of durable solutions is reduced to two: local integration and voluntary repatriation. A central theme in the literature of resettlement has long been how the possibility of access to resettlement shapes hope, aspirations, actions and priorities in refugee communities. If resettlement is gone, the refugee regime – and refugee studies scholars – should say so.
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Kristin Bergtora Sandvik (Professor of Sociology of Law, the Faculty of Law, the University of Oslo, Professor II Sámi and Indigenous Peoples Law, UiT the Arctic University of Norway).
Astrid Espegren (PhD candidate at the Department of Social Work, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and a senior researcher at NORCE Norwegian Research Center) has worked on resettlement for two decades as a migration official in the Norwegian bureaucracy (UDI and IMDi), and UNHCR.
Ingunn Bjørkhaug (Researcher Fafo) has worked on vulnerability assessments and refugee protection systems from 2007, with a focus on West, Central and East Africa.
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