Rene Girard''s work provides critical insight into how certain groups become scapegoats. He posits that human societies have much internal violence and that sacrifice of "victims outside itself" can restore harmony to the community. He further argues that the process of selecting a sacrificial victim often stems from "a certain degree of misunderstanding". His work has been applied in literary criticism, anthropology, psychology, sociology, economics, cultural studies, and philosophy but has not received much attention in political science and international relations, despite its relevance to the international refugee regime and growing inequalities. Victims outside itself and degrees of misunderstanding are very much in line with today''s modern nation-state creating "others" of the refugee. Thus, in this paper, I seek to apply Girard''s concept of mimetic scapegoating to the international refugee regime and further explore what he terms the "crisis of sacrifice", resulting from society''s loss of its morality and rootedness and leading to greater violence, with the hope that doing so will inform better policy.
