The growth in the global population of refugees over the last 20 years
has been paralleled by the development and growth of refugee studies as a
recognised discipline. However refugees do not comprise a naturally
self-delimiting domain of scientific knowledge and have been constituted
by refugee studies through discourses that emphasise humanitarian,
apolitical and organic functionalist discourses that root refugee
identities in particular places. This paper argues that the presently
inadequate constitution of refugee identities in refugee studies has
been compounded by geographic representations of regional refugee
emergencies, stable conceptions of refugees and asylum seekers and dated
and unproblematic understandings of space as inactive and not
constitutive of social life. Using data collected in interviews held
between 1995 and 1998 with representatives from refugee and asylum
institutions and organisations this paper illustrates how discourses and
funding policies that unproblematically assume community groups
represent refugees asylum seekers ignore transnational differences and
tensions that can exist in marginalised communities. However it should
be pointed out that the discourses about place, nationality and identity
and `natural' communities can also be used by the powerless to resist
their marginalised and excluded positions.