Refugees flee fallen regimes and oppressive governments. They flee contexts within which their scope of action is limited to the minimal: contexts of profound lacks of personal and political freedom. This makes it even more surprising that refugees are often denied these freedoms in displacement. This is not only the case in the liberal democracies of the Global North, where refugees are not enfranchised, but also when considering the main international agency that governs refugees’ lives: the UNHCR. The self-stylized ”Refugee Agency” governs the lives of refugees world-wide and in various contexts and stages of their displacement. It manages camps, documents, and recognizes refugees, manages livelihoods and negotiates with governments on behalf of refugees. In other words, the UNHCR has assumed the role of de-facto sovereign of refugees in various international political settings. This paper does two things. First, it shows that the UNHCR has assumed the role of a transnational sovereign over refugees. Second, uses principles of democratic inclusion to argue that this entails that UNHCR should be democratized. Refugees ought to have a say in the way they are governed and represented by an agency that claims to work not with, but for them.
