Abstract
Alise Coen's Reconfiguring Refugees explores how the figure of the refugee has been represented, politicized, and instrumentalized in the U.S. context, particularly in the years leading up to and following the 2016 presidential election. Through detailed analysis of political discourse, Coen demonstrates how refugeehood has served as a proxy for debates over race, religion, and national identity. Her central argument is that refugees are not simply legal or humanitarian subjects, but symbolic figures used to mark the boundaries of Americanness. Her account of how refugeehood is constructed and contested within American political life offers valuable insight into the power of political discourse and its tangible impact on the lives of those marked as the Other.
I first read Reconfiguring Refugees during the Biden administration, when the refugee program was recovering from the sharp cuts and restrictive measures of Donald Trump's first term. Now, as I write this review during Trump's second term, the political landscape has shifted profoundly. Refugee admissions to the U.S. were once again halted immediately following Trump's inauguration, bringing renewed urgency to many of the concerns Coen raises in her book.
The book opens by unpacking the language used to describe humanitarian migration, including key legal and social categories such as “refugee,” “asylum seeker,” and “migrant,” and emphasizes how these terms are routinely misused and politically manipulated. Drawing attention to the constructed nature of these categories, she shows how the labels applied to displaced people are not neutral descriptors, but tools for defining legitimacy, deservingness, and threat as I have argued elsewhere (Myadar and Dempsey 2022).
Coen's primary methodological approach is discourse analysis. She draws on publicly available sources such as political speeches, congressional records, news media, civil society publications, and social media. Through this material, she illustrates how national and subnational actors reshape the meanings of refugeehood in ways that reflect broader anxieties about American identity, security, and sovereignty. This method allows her to trace how symbolic politics and identity narratives are woven into seemingly technical policy decisions and how these narratives have shifted over time.
The book is organized into six chapters, each addressing a different dimension of how refugeehood has been constructed in U.S. political discourse. Chapter 1 provides historical and legal context, outlining the development of refugee policy in the United States. Chapter 2 examines the period prior to 2016, focusing on what Coen terms the bipartisan logics of refugee responsibility-sharing. She argues that during the Cold War and into the early post-Cold War period, refugee resettlement was supported by both parties, not simply as a humanitarian obligation, but as a means of affirming American moral and political image as a safe haven and moral actor, even as racial and ideological exclusions remained embedded within it. Refugees were selectively embraced, particularly when they could be framed as fleeing communism or aligning with American geopolitical interests.
Chapter 3 focuses on the rise of nativist, anti-Muslim, and nationalist narratives that became central during the 2016 election cycle. Coen shows how conservative Christian and ethnonationalist logics positioned refugees, especially those from Muslim-majority countries, as threats to American culture, values, and security. She introduces the concept of competitive victimhood, describing how conservative groups claimed that the influx of refugees posed a threat to Christian Americans. Refugees, in this framing, were not just unwanted strangers, but civilizational infiltrators. Civil society groups, political candidates, and media personalities all played a role in pushing these narratives into mainstream political discourse.
Chapter 4 builds on this analysis by focusing more specifically on Syrian and Muslim refugees. Coen shows how they were constructed as dual threats, both in terms of national security and cultural cohesion. The post-9/11 security framework looms large in this chapter, as Coen explores how refugees from Muslim-majority countries were depicted as either terrorists or as culturally unassimilable. She critiques both Republican and Democratic rhetoric for relying on essentialist and gendered representations of the Middle East. While Democrats often framed refugees as victims in need of protection, this language sometimes reinforced paternalistic and Orientalist tropes. Republicans, on the other hand, frequently portrayed male refugees as violent and dangerous, reducing entire populations to potential threats.
Chapter 5 turns to the increasing partisan polarization over refugee resettlement. Coen argues that refugees became political symbols in the broader culture wars between liberals and conservatives. While Democrats often used refugee resettlement as a marker of moral leadership and inclusion, Republicans framed it as a national security failure and a cultural risk. These competing narratives reflected deeper ideological divides over the meaning of America itself. At the same time, Coen points out that both sides tended to overlook the United States’ role in producing displacement through its foreign policy, military interventions, and economic influence.
Chapter 6 addresses the early Biden administration and the persistence of many of the same symbolic and racialized dynamics. Although Biden reversed several of the most restrictive Trump-era policies, Coen argues that racialized hierarchies remained in place. The warm reception of Ukrainian refugees, for instance, contrasted sharply with the treatment of Afghan or Central American refugees, highlighting the continued role of race, religion, and perceived cultural proximity in determining who is welcomed and who is excluded. The chapter also considers the role of state and local governments, many of which have increasingly taken independent positions on refugee resettlement, either supporting or opposing national policy in ways that reflect local identity politics.
One of the book's strengths is its interdisciplinary approach. Coen brings together insights from political science, international relations, and critical migration studies to argue that refugeehood is shaped not only by law and policy, but by narrative, identity, and symbolic power. Her analysis helps explain how racialization operates in political rhetoric to structure inclusion and exclusion in ways that extend far beyond refugee policy itself.
There are, however, some limitations. The book focuses primarily on political actors and institutional narratives, which means that the voices and experiences of refugees themselves receive relatively little attention. While Coen is clear about her interest in how public discourse is shaped by elected officials, political parties, and media sources, this focus risks reproducing the very absence it critiques. Greater engagement with refugee-led organizations or first-person accounts could have added complexity, particularly in examining how those positioned as “Other” resist or reshape the narratives imposed upon them.
At times, the book left me wondering what it added to what many scholars and observers already recognize. The narratives and discourses Coen examines are well-documented across existing literature in migration studies and critical refugee studies. The argument that refugeehood has been racialized, politicized, and shaped by domestic identity narratives is not new, and much of what is presented feels familiar to those already working in this area. I found myself asking: yes, this is true, but what follows from it? What are the implications beyond recognizing the discursive patterns? Chapters often revisit the same core themes and tend to bleed into one another, and as a result, the overall structure feels more circular and redundant.
That said, Reconfiguring Refugees still offers a compelling and detailed account of how refugeehood has been defined and redefined in the context of American political life. It speaks to scholars and practitioners alike, reminding us that humanitarianism is never separate from politics, and that the category of the refugee has become a central site in the struggle over the boundaries of belonging in the United States. The recent policy of admitting white South Africans on an expedited basis, even as other refugee resettlement programs remain paused, powerfully underscores Coen's warnings about selective humanitarianism where race, identity, and perceived cultural proximity operate as active levers shaping political discourse and policy outcomes.
