Exploring possibilities of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees’ integration with churches in refugee response

Abstract

The refugee crisis has been an ongoing global challenge. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is the international body that is mandated to protect refugees. However, in undertaking its function, it involves many stakeholders such as refugee communities, civil society actors, government entities, non-governmental organisations, other United Nations agencies and the church; thus ensuring effective interventions. With this in mind, it is sought in this article to understand how the UNHCR involved or integrated churches in its approach to intervention in refugee crises, as some churches had evidently become community bulwarks and safe havens for refugees. In order to accomplish the aforementioned objective, literature pertinent to the subject is reviewed. It commenced by discussing the UNHCR’s approach to intervention in and responses to the refugee crisis, and this was followed by the identification and discussion of the UNHCR’s interventions in which the churches were meaningfully involved to optimise their response to refugee crises. In discussing this role and the approach of the UNHCR, the extent is revealed to which the churches’ involvement or integration in the refugee agency’s approach to intervention in the refugee crisis was limited. Notably, this limitation was exacerbated by, among many others, the key sticking issues that could be the barriers or challenges in preventing the integration of churches in the UNHCR’s responses to migration crises and vice versa. Although there were sticking issues that hampered the UNHCR’s integration of churches in its approach to intervention in the refugee crisis, the article is concluded by identifying and discussing some existing opportunities that may further strengthen the existing UNHCR–Church intervention approaches to the crises. Among many others, formal UNHCR–Church collaborations were found to be critical in strengthening their mutual efforts to ameliorate the refugee crisis, as they could complement each other in providing effective and comprehensive interventions.

Contribution: The major contribution of this article is that it examined the responses of the UNHCR and the church to the refugee crisis. Notably, embedded in this was the assessment of how the UNHCR was integrating churches in its approach to intervention in refugee crises. Consequently, this resulted in the identification and discussion of opportunities that may further strengthen the existing UNHCR–Church intervention approaches to the aforementioned humanitarian crisis.