Refugee health as migration control: Western donors and the politics of humanitarian health

The pace at which humanitarian responses are being subsumed within foreign policy agendas appears to be accelerating. From the Syrian ‘refugee crisis’ in Europe in 2015, to the outbreak of Ebola, the Zika virus and, more recently, Covid-19, attempts at tackling these ‘crises’ have not only conflated cross-border mobility with illness and disease, but have also served as a justification for sealing national borders. International relations and refugee scholarship has emphasised the politicized use of humanitarian aid by Western states as a means for reducing or controlling migration from the Global South (Greenhill 2010; Adamson and Tsourapas 2019). Yet so far there has been little research on how humanitarian funding priorities for health are being increasingly implicated within the border control agendas of Western states. This paper provides a new perspective on how the politics of healthcare undertaken by international donors have become a tool for migration management in refugee host states. I consider the case study of Jordan, a state hosting one of the largest refugee populations relative to its national population in the world. Based on more than six months of fieldwork and qualitative research, I investigate how the arrival of an estimated 650,000 Syrian refugees between 2012 and 2019 transformed Jordan into an arena in which large-scale national and international interests, foreign policy objectives, and power dynamics collide. My findings show that overseas development aid for health in refugee settings has not only been co-opted within the foreign policy agendas of both donor and refugee receiving states, but is increasingly used as a means for preventing the onward mobility of refugees towards Europe.