Introduction Both global governance and forced migration are elusive and contested terms. Broadly speaking, global governance relates to the institutional framework regulating states and transnational actors. Governance can be distinguished from government by the absence of a single overarching authority. As a process, global governance refers to all actions aimed at developing collective action between states and transnational actors. The substantive outcomes that result from this process are the norms and organisations that regulate particular policy fields. Forced migration is often used in contrast to voluntary migration. It denotes people who move within or across international borders because of significant coercion or structural constraints (Richmond 1993). This might result from conflict, persecution and natural or manmade disasters, for example. It is not a legal and institutional concept but it has emerged mainly in an academic context and rests upon problematic dichotomies of reactive and proactive or economic and political causes of movement. It is employed as a catchall term for policy categories as diverse as refugees, internally displaced persons, statelessness, human trafficking and environmental displacement, for example (Betts a. However, for many people, the line between forced and voluntary migration is increasingly blurred as people move fora variety of complex and mixed motives. The governance of forced migration is based on a fragmented tapestry of norms and international organisations. The global refugee regime represents the most formal and developed aspect of this framework, being based on a multilateral treaty, the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees, and an international organisation, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Overtime, this framework has been supplemented with other institutions. Most notably, the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, which were elaborated in 1998 as a set of soft law standards for responding to displaced populations who have not crossed an international border. This chapter provides a brief introduction to the global governance of forced migration. Rather than being descriptively comprehensive, it aims to provide away of thinking analytically about the fragmented tapestry of forced migration governance. It does so by examining 35
