From Protection to Policing: The Discursive Construction of the “Person of Concern” in Global Refugee Education Policy

Abstract

This study examines how UNHCR’s administrative category of the “person of concern” functions as a governance mechanism in refugee education policy, stripping refugees of political agency and positioning them as subjects of institutional control rather than rights-bearing actors. Employing Fairclough’s three-dimensional Critical Discourse Analysis alongside Quijano’s coloniality of power, the paper analyzes five key policy documents: four UNHCR education strategies spanning 2010 to 2020 and the World Bank’s INSPIRE Guide to Refugee Inclusion in National Education Systems (2025). The analysis identifies four dominant discursive themes: education as a mechanism of control, dehumanization and the passive subject, the neoliberalization of refugee education, and colonial legacies in knowledge production. The INSPIRE Guide is examined as a paradigmatic text crystallizing the shift from humanitarian parallel systems to developmental inclusion, revealing how the language of inclusion, efficiency, and sustainability reconfigures refugee education as economic governance while leaving the “person of concern” category uninterrogated. The study argues that UNHCR education policies reproduce colonial governance patterns in which education actively produces particular refugee subjects who can be governed, surveilled, and integrated into host-state frameworks on institutional terms. Findings challenge the assumed neutrality of humanitarian education frameworks and call for decolonial approaches centering refugee agency, epistemic sovereignty, and self-determined educational futures.

1. Introduction

The global refugee crisis has produced unprecedented numbers of displaced persons, with the global refugee population reaching 31.6 million by 2024, more than doubling over the preceding decade (UNHCR 2024). Children below the age of 18 constitute a disproportionate 47 percent of this population, and approximately 7.2 million school-age children remain out of school, with displaced children and youth missing an average of three to four years of schooling (UNHCR 2024; Ritika et al. 2025). Within this context, education has been elevated as both a humanitarian imperative and a protection mechanism, with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) positioning itself as the primary architect of global refugee education policy. The foundational frameworks through which refugee education is conceptualized, organized, and delivered remain insufficiently examined for the power relations they embed and reproduce. This paper examines a seemingly neutral administrative category, the “person of concern,” to uncover how it functions as a governance mechanism that shapes refugee education not as a platform for empowerment but as a tool for regulation, surveillance, and control.

The term “person of concern” emerged informally in UNHCR internal communications before being codified in official documents, with its earliest known use dating to 1991 in reference to Kurdish refugees in Iraq and Bosnian refugees in Serbia (UNHCR 1993). Training materials such as Self-Study Module 1: An Introduction to International Protection define persons of concern as those who “receive international protection, obtain humanitarian assistance, and secure a permanent solution,” positioning them primarily as objects of UNHCR’s mandate rather than as political actors in their own right (UNHCR 2005). Unlike the term “refugee,” which carries specific legal rights under the 1951 Convention, the broader category of “person of concern” allowed UNHCR to expand its operational mandate without requiring states to provide corresponding legal recognition, residency rights, or pathways to citizenship (Crisp 2010). In this way, the term became an instrument of international governance, enabling displaced populations to be managed, counted, and intervened upon while remaining in a legal and political limbo that prevented them from fully claiming state protection or citizenship rights (UNHCR 2006).

This paper argues that the “person of concern” is more than an administrative category. It functions as a discursive technology of governance that strips refugees of political agency and positions them as subjects of institutional control rather than as rights-bearing actors in their own education. By analyzing UNHCR education policy documents and the World Bank INSPIRE Guide through Fairclough’s (1995, 2010) Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) in conversation with Quijano’s (2000) coloniality of power, I reveal how this seemingly neutral humanitarian classification enables the policing and regulation of displaced populations through educational frameworks. The analysis demonstrates that education policy does not simply respond to displacement; it actively produces particular kinds of refugee subjects who can be governed, surveilled, and integrated into host-state frameworks on terms determined by institutions rather than by refugees themselves. This argument extends work I have developed with colleagues (Kasper et al. 2025; Koyama and Turan 2024) on the coloniality of refugee education, bringing that analysis to bear on the global policy architecture that shapes refugee education worldwide.

The significance of this inquiry lies in its challenge to the assumed neutrality of humanitarian education frameworks. The past decade has witnessed a major paradigm shift in global refugee education: the move from parallel education systems (temporary schools operated by humanitarian agencies using origin-country curricula) toward the full inclusion of refugee children in host-country national education systems. This shift, first articulated in UNHCR’s 2012–2016 Education Strategy and consolidated in Education 2030, has been codified as international consensus through the Global Compact on Refugees and, most recently, given institutional form in the World Bank’s INSPIRE initiative (Ritika et al. 2025). While this paradigm shift is presented as a progressive move toward equitable, sustainable, and quality education, a critical reading reveals that the language of inclusion, efficiency, and development that animates these documents simultaneously functions as a language of discipline, assimilation, and economic governance. This paper addresses this tension by demonstrating how the discursive construction of the “person of concern” within policy texts actively shapes the educational possibilities available to displaced populations.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, I situate the study within the existing literature on refugee education, humanitarian governance, and critical education policy analysis. Second, I elaborate the theoretical framework that brings together Fairclough’s CDA and Quijano’s coloniality of power. Third, I describe the methodology, including the policy documents analyzed. Fourth, I present findings organized around four dominant discursive themes identified through the CDA of UNHCR documents, followed by a critical analysis of the INSPIRE Guide as a text that crystallizes the contemporary inclusion paradigm. Finally, I discuss the implications of these findings for understanding refugee education as a contested terrain of power, governance, and resistance.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Conceptualizing the “Person of Concern”

UNHCR’s category of “persons of concern” emerged as an umbrella designation encompassing all populations to whom the agency extends protection and assistance beyond Convention refugees, including asylum seekers, returnees, stateless persons, and internally displaced persons (Crisp 2010; UNHCR 2005). Although framed as an administrative and technical label used to identify those entitled to international protection and humanitarian aid, it already performs classificatory work by distinguishing a specifically governed population from broader migratory movements and host communities (Crisp 2010). Crisp’s analysis traces how UNHCR’s remit expanded from a narrow focus on refugees to encompass diverse mobile populations under what amounts to a single humanitarian gaze, a pragmatic response to complex displacement that simultaneously stretches “persons of concern” into a flexible governance device. The UNHCR Manual on Security of Persons of Concern further codifies this label through a risk- and threat-oriented lens, emphasizing security management, access, and program criticality, and institutionalizing a protection-through-control logic around these populations (UNHCR 2011).

2.2. Humanitarian Governance and the Depoliticization of Refugees

UNHCR consistently presents its work as humanitarian and non-political, foregrounding protection and assistance while downplaying the political stakes of determining who is protected, where, and on what terms (UNHCR 2011). This self-positioning aligns with broader scholarship on humanitarian governance, which shows how the language of protection, risk, and access can obscure the political nature of decisions that render certain populations governable and others expendable (Beigbeder 1991; Giuffré and Moreno-Lax 2021). Malkki’s (1996) foundational work reveals how the humanitarian order produces refugees as speechless, ahistorical figures whose complex political subjectivities are erased in favor of universalized narratives of victimhood and need. Agier (2011) extends this analysis to the spatial dimensions of humanitarian governance, demonstrating how refugee camps function as technologies of governance that manage displaced populations through practices of enclosure, surveillance, and the provision of basic services that maintain life at a minimal level.

Empirical work on humanitarian organizations’ involvement in migration control demonstrates how agencies originally oriented toward advocacy and protection have been gradually steered into partnering in migration management, blurring the line between care and policing (Kox and Staring 2022): Studies of “vulnerability governance” similarly document how categories such as “vulnerable asylum seeker” are mobilized to justify differential inclusion, allocating care and resources while normalizing surveillance, conditionality, and filtering logics (Jacobsen 2024; Turner 2025). The coloniality of migration framework, developed by Gutiérrez Rodríguez (2018), extends this analysis by showing how migration and asylum policies produce hierarchical categories of migrants and refugees drawing on Orientalist and racialized imaginaries rooted in European colonialism, linking contemporary control regimes to racial capitalism and the colonial organization of labor.

2.3. Refugee Education Policy as a Governance Arena

Within the humanitarian architecture, UNHCR positions education as a central pillar of protection for persons of concern, framing it as both a basic human right and a means toward “durable solutions” (UNHCR 2005, 2019). Education briefs emphasize schooling’s role in preventing child labor, early marriage, and recruitment into armed groups, constructing education as an instrument for risk mitigation, social control, and the stabilization of refugee populations (UNHCR 2019). Dryden-Peterson’s (2016) mapping of the global landscape of refugee education documents how displaced learners navigate between the competing demands of origin-country curricula, host-country systems, and international education frameworks, while her later work conceptualizes refugee education as preparation for an “unknowable future” characterized by uncertainty (Dryden-Peterson 2017). Dryden-Peterson et al. (2019) further demonstrate how the purposes of refugee education are shaped by competing institutional logics, with policy increasingly emphasizing integration into national systems over the development of refugee-led alternatives.

The dominant paradigm within this field has largely focused on questions of access: enrollment rates, gender parity, school infrastructure, and the integration of refugee learners into national education systems (UNHCR 2024). While these concerns are undeniably important, the access-centered framework often treats education as a neutral good that merely needs to be delivered more effectively, obscuring the political and ideological dimensions of educational provision in displacement contexts. Critical scholars have begun to challenge this paradigm by examining the political economy of refugee education (Novelli 2016; Carvalho and Dryden-Peterson 2024), revealing how international education frameworks are shaped by donor priorities, geopolitical interests, and neoliberal logics that reduce education to human capital development rather than recognizing it as a space for political agency, cultural continuity, and epistemic self-determination.

2.4. The Inclusion Paradigm Shift

Over the past decade, the global community has advocated a shift from specialized refugee education systems toward the inclusion of refugee children in host-country national education systems (Ritika et al. 2025). This shift, introduced in UNHCR’s 2012–2016 Education Strategy and consolidated in the Comprehensive Refugee Response Framework and the Global Compact on Refugees, has been positioned as “a more effective and sustainable response to the challenge of refugee education” (Ritika et al. 2025, p. 7). Parallel education systems, funded through humanitarian assistance, are acknowledged as stopgap solutions that operate outside national oversight, lack certification pathways, and remain dependent on short-term, unpredictable humanitarian funding cycles (Abu-Ghaida and Silva 2021; Dryden-Peterson 2016).

The INSPIRE initiative represents the most comprehensive institutional articulation of this developmental approach. INSPIRE aims to ensure that refugee children attend schools that are part of host countries’ national public systems, funded through government channels, and attended by both refugee and host-community children together (Ritika et al. 2025). The initiative frames inclusion as beneficial for host countries through greater economies of scale and reduced reliance on implementing partners, while also highlighting predictable development funding as superior to volatile humanitarian financing (Ritika et al. 2025). While this paradigm shift holds promise for sustainable access and credential recognition, critical analysis is needed to examine how the discourse of inclusion, efficiency, and development may reproduce governance logics that constrain refugee agency and reproduce colonial hierarchies of knowledge.

2.5. Critical and Decolonial Scholarship on Refugee Education

A growing decolonial strand of refugee education scholarship explicitly engages Quijano’s coloniality of power to argue that schooling for refugee youth extends contemporary colonial projects (Kasper et al. 2025; Koyama and Turan 2024). In the U.S. context, Koyama and Turan (2024) demonstrate how policies, pedagogies, and practices marginalize refugee students from certain school spaces, confine them to low-status tracks, and deny them academic opportunities and integrated support services, reading these dynamics as manifestations of coloniality, assimilation, and neoliberalism in education. Kasper et al. (2025) extend this analysis by “working the ruins” of coloniality in refugee education, tracing how colonial traces, fragments, and residues survive embedded in common sense, social practices, and political power long after nation-states assert independence and build school systems. Turan and Koro (2025) examine how Syrian educators in Turkey navigate the tensions between homeplace and school place, revealing how systems of cultural erasure and professional devaluation reproduce colonial patterns of domination in educational settings.

Azarmandi and Sharifkhani (2025) interrogate the coloniality of rights and inclusion within education policy, arguing that rights frameworks in settler–colonial contexts operate as technologies of governance that both promise protection and reproduce dispossession. Their analysis demonstrates that curricular and policy discourses of diversity, inclusion, and multiculturalism similarly depoliticize foundational structures of inequality, collapsing the distinct realities of refugee, migrant, and Indigenous communities into state-managed categories. Vićentić (2022) addresses the project of global education as configured in multilateral development institutions, demonstrating how educational initiatives directed toward the “South” present peoples and communities with continuous demands for improvement and realignment to modernity/coloniality by demanding assimilation to worldviews that perpetuate capitalism, patriarchy, Eurocentrism, and racism. Astolfo and Allsopp (2023) extend the coloniality of migration framework to integration policies, showing how contemporary control regimes perpetuate colonial hierarchies through administrative categories that sort populations according to perceived economic value and cultural compatibility.

European research on refugee education policy similarly interrogates how conceptualizations of safety, belonging, and success shape schooling for displaced children (McIntyre and Abrams 2021). Drawing on Fraser’s notion of participatory parity, these studies argue for frameworks that center refugees’ capacity to participate as peers and highlight how existing reforms often fail to address redistributive, recognitive, and representational dimensions of justice (Fraser 2010; McIntyre and Abrams 2021). Scholars of labeling and refugee subjectivities have further shown how administrative categories carry real-world consequences that shape educational trajectories, with refugees actively refusing the positions that institutional labels assign them (Koyama and Turan 2023; Zetter 2007).

2.6. Critical Discourse Analysis and Education Policy

Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has been widely employed in education policy research to reveal the ideological assumptions, power relations, and social implications embedded in policy texts (Ball 1993; Fairclough 2010; Rogers 2011; Taylor 2004). Fairclough’s (1995, 2010) three-dimensional model provides a particularly productive framework for analyzing education policy because it connects the micro-level features of policy language to broader structures of power and inequality. In the arena of refugee education policy, emerging CDA studies have begun to interrogate UNHCR’s global strategies, demonstrating how these strategies construct inclusion, align with neoliberal agendas, and perform truth-making about what counts as appropriate responses to refugees’ educational needs (Lester et al. 2017). CDA and corpus-based analyses of media and public discourses about refugees and migrants reveal how these groups are regularly associated with threat, illegality, and burden, drawing on racialized and securitized narratives (Baker et al. 2008; O’Regan and Riordan 2018; Zhao et al. 2019).

A notable gap remains in scholarship that explicitly interrogates the “person of concern” as a discursive and governmental category within education policy. While UNHCR manuals foreground persons of concern in terms of security, vulnerability, and access, education-specific policies tend to speak of “refugee learners” or “refugee and host community students,” leaving the connection between humanitarian classification and educational subject formation under-examined (UNHCR 2005, 2011, 2019). Existing CDA of refugee education strategies problematizes the framing of inclusion and alignment with neoliberal agendas but does not systematically analyze how the underlying “person of concern” category structures the intelligibility of refugee learners as governable subjects within education systems. Bringing Fairclough’s CDA into dialogue with Quijano’s coloniality of power offers a productive approach for illuminating how humanitarian classifications travel into sectoral policies, how they shape the production of refugee subjects expected to be governable, resilient, and self-reliant, and how these processes reproduce colonial patterns of governance under the sign of protection and inclusion (Crisp 2010; Gutiérrez Rodríguez 2018).

3. Theoretical Framework

This study employs a dual theoretical framework that brings together Fairclough’s (1995, 2010) Critical Discourse Analysis with Quijano’s (2000) coloniality of power to examine how UNHCR education policies and the INSPIRE Guide construct and regulate the “person of concern.” These two frameworks are complementary: CDA provides the analytical tools for examining how language functions as a form of social practice that constitutes and reproduces power relations, while the coloniality of power provides the historical and structural lens for understanding how these power relations are rooted in enduring colonial logics of classification, hierarchy, and control.

3.1. Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis

Fairclough’s (1995, 2010) three-dimensional model of CDA conceptualizes discourse as simultaneously a text, a discursive practice, and a social practice. At the textual level, analysis focuses on the linguistic features of policy documents: word choices, grammatical structures, modality, transitivity, and rhetorical strategies to reveal how particular meanings are constructed and particular subjects are positioned. At the level of discursive practice, analysis examines the processes of text production, distribution, and consumption, as well as how policy texts are authored, by whom, for what audiences, and within what institutional contexts. At the level of social practice, analysis connects textual and discursive features to broader structures of power, ideology, and hegemony, examining how discourse both reflects and constitutes social relations of domination and subordination. This three-dimensional model is particularly productive for analyzing refugee education policy because it enables the researcher to trace how seemingly neutral policy language functions within broader systems of power that govern displaced populations. As Fairclough (2010) argues, the power of discourse lies not in its overt coercion but in its capacity to naturalize particular ways of seeing the world, making certain arrangements appear inevitable or beyond contestation.

3.2. Quijano’s Coloniality of Power

Quijano’s (2000) coloniality of power provides the macro-structural framework for understanding how the discursive patterns identified through CDA are rooted in historical colonial logics that continue to organize global relations of power. Quijano argues that European colonialism created a global classification system centered on the concept of race. This system organized various aspects of social life, such as labor, knowledge, authority, and interpersonal relationships, into a hierarchy that positioned European peoples and cultures at the top, with all others placed in subordinate roles. Crucially, this system of classification did not end with formal decolonization; rather, it persists as the coloniality of power, a matrix of power relations that continues to structure global governance, knowledge production, and subjectivity in the contemporary world. Gandarilla Salgado et al. (2021) emphasize that coloniality persists after formal decolonization through economic dependency, elite-mediated governance, and racial orders embedded in law, policy, and everyday institutional practices, including education and humanitarian regimes. The coloniality of power framework reveals how the governance of displaced populations through education policy reproduces colonial patterns of domination, illuminating how the “person of concern” functions as a contemporary colonial category that classifies displaced populations according to a hierarchy of worth, rights, and belonging determined by institutional authorities.

3.3. Synthesizing CDA and Coloniality of Power

By bringing together these two frameworks, this study examines both the micro-level discursive mechanisms through which UNHCR education policies construct the “person of concern” and the macro-level colonial logics that these discursive mechanisms reproduce. The synthesis enables a multi-layered analysis that moves from the specific linguistic features of policy texts to the broader historical and structural forces that shape how education operates as a governance mechanism for displaced populations. As Vićentić (2022) argues, global educational initiatives directed by multilateral institutions demand assimilation to worldviews and value systems that perpetuate capitalism, Eurocentrism, and racism, reproducing narratives, methodologies, and hierarchical categories conducive to the preservation of coloniality. This approach reveals how education policy functions not merely as a technical response to the practical challenge of educating displaced learners but as a site where colonial power relations are reproduced and contested in the contemporary humanitarian order.

It is important to note that CDA functions in this study as both a theoretical framework and a methodological approach, and this dual role is by design. As Fairclough (1995, 2010) himself argues, CDA is not a method separable from its theoretical commitments; its analytical procedures are grounded in a social theory of discourse that treats language as constitutive of social relations, power, and identity. The three-dimensional model provides both the theoretical lens through which I understand how policy discourse produces governable subjects and the systematic analytical procedure through which I examine specific texts. In Section 4, I describe the concrete steps of the analytical procedure—close reading, cross-document comparison, and attention to textual, discursive, and social dimensions—while here I have elaborated the theoretical assumptions that underpin those procedures. This integration of theory and method is characteristic of CDA scholarship and is well-established in education policy research (Rogers 2011; Lester et al. 2017; Taylor 2004).

4. Methodology

4.1. Research Design

This study employs Critical Discourse Analysis of UNHCR education policy documents and the World Bank’s INSPIRE Guide to Refugee Inclusion in National Education Systems. This approach enables the study to examine how refugee education is discursively constructed at the global policy level and how these constructions structure the educational possibilities available to displaced populations.

4.2. Data Sources

The primary data for this study consists of five key policy documents that represent the evolution of global refugee education policy: (a) UNHCR Education Strategy 2010–2012: Education for All Persons of Concern to UNHCR; (b) UNHCR Education Strategy 2012–2016; (c) Education 2030: A Strategy for Refugee Education (2019); (d) Coming Together for Refugee Education (2020); and (e) the INSPIRE Guide to Refugee Inclusion in National Education Systems (2025). The first four documents were selected because they represent the primary policy instruments through which UNHCR has articulated its vision for refugee education across a critical decade during which global policy shifted from emergency-focused interventions to systemic inclusion within national education systems. The INSPIRE Guide was added as a fifth data source because it represents the most comprehensive institutional codification of the inclusion paradigm, produced by the World Bank with contributions from the UNHCR, Global Partnership for Education, FCDO, UNESCO, and UNICEF. As a text that crystallizes the paradigm shift from humanitarian parallel systems to developmental inclusion, the INSPIRE Guide provides a critical window into how the discourse of efficiency, sustainability, and results-based financing reshapes the governance of refugee education.

4.3. Analytical Procedure

Each document was analyzed using Fairclough’s (1995, 2010) three-dimensional CDA model. At the textual level, I conducted close readings of each document, examining word choices, grammatical structures, modality, and rhetorical strategies to identify how refugees were positioned and what ideological assumptions were embedded in policy language. At the level of discursive practice, I examined the institutional context of text production, including authorship, intended audience, and the relationship between these policy texts and broader humanitarian and educational discourses. At the level of social practice, I connected textual and discursive features to broader structures of power, examining how policy language reflects and reproduces colonial governance patterns and neoliberal ideologies. The analysis began with individual document analysis, where each text was examined in depth to identify key themes, linguistic patterns, and ideological assumptions. This was followed by a cross-document analysis comparing how these texts collectively construct the discourse on refugee education, revealing both continuities and shifts that reflect broader global governance strategies.

4.4. Positionality

My positionality is inseparable from the questions that animate this study. I am a Kurdish researcher who grew up witnessing the forced displacement of communities across the Middle East, including members of my own extended family. My early educational experiences in Turkey, where Kurdish language instruction was prohibited and cultural identity was a liability in the classroom, gave me a first-hand understanding of how education systems can function as instruments of cultural erasure and political regulation. My work with Syrian and Iraqi refugees in conflict and post-conflict zones has helped me understand how seemingly benevolent approaches can cause harm and oppression in educational environments. These experiences shape my scholarly commitment to examining education not as a neutral service but as a deeply political space where belonging, recognition, and agency are negotiated. I came to the United States to pursue doctoral studies at Arizona State University, where I have worked extensively with refugee communities, conducting long-term ethnographic and qualitative research in schools serving displaced learners. This fieldwork, carried out in collaboration with colleagues (Kasper et al. 2025; Koyama and Turan 2024) has examined how coloniality manifests in everyday educational practices, from the labeling and tracking of refugee students to the erasure of their linguistic and cultural knowledge. It is from this grounding in both lived experience and sustained empirical engagement that I approach the present discourse analysis, bringing to the policy texts a reading informed by what displacement means educationally from the perspective of those who have been displaced. I acknowledge that my position as a researcher affiliated with a major U.S. research university situates me within the very institutional structures that this paper critiques, and I hold that tension as a productive site for reflexive scholarship rather than a contradiction to be resolved.

5. Findings

The findings of this study are organized in two parts. The first part presents the results of the Critical Discourse Analysis of UNHCR education policy documents, organized around four dominant discursive themes. The second part presents a critical analysis of the INSPIRE Guide as a paradigmatic text of the contemporary inclusion paradigm.

5.1. Part I: The Discursive Construction of the “Person of Concern” in UNHCR Education Policy

5.1.1. Education as a Mechanism of Control

Across all four UNHCR education strategy documents, education is framed not only as a fundamental right but as a regulatory tool that disciplines, assimilates, and governs the “person of concern” within host-country frameworks. A recurring linguistic pattern is the consistent use of state-centric terminology that positions education as a governance mechanism rather than a tool for refugee self-determination. Terms such as “integration,” “alignment with national curricula,” “cohesive societies,” and “national education systems” appear repeatedly, reinforcing the expectation that refugee learners must conform to host-state educational structures rather than sustaining their own epistemic traditions. At the same time, terms that emphasize refugee autonomy, “self-governance,” “community-driven education,” and “cultural preservation” are notably absent, demonstrating how education is structured as an externally managed intervention rather than a right that refugees can exercise independently.

The 2012–2016 Education Strategy exemplifies this pattern, stating that the general approach is integration of refugee learners within national systems where possible and appropriate, and as guided by ongoing consultation with refugees (UNHCR 2012). At the textual level, the phrase “integration of refugee learners within national systems” frames education as absorption rather than collaboration, implying that refugees must adapt to existing structures rather than have systems adapted to meet their specific needs. The omission of refugee-led education initiatives or alternative learning models reinforces the idea that education can only be legitimate if it conforms to host-state systems. The modifier “where possible and appropriate” introduces discretionary ambiguity, allowing governments to determine when and how to integrate refugees without guaranteeing universal access. The phrase “guided by on-going consultation with refugees” suggests inclusion but does not grant refugees decision-making power; the verb “guided” implies a passive advisory role, positioning refugees as subjects of governance rather than autonomous educational agents. At the level of discursive practice, this statement is produced within a broader UNHCR discourse that prioritizes national education systems over independent refugee-led alternatives. The discourse of consultation without real decision-making authority aligns with broader humanitarian governance models where refugees are engaged to legitimize externally imposed policies but are not recognized as stakeholders in shaping those policies. At the level of social practice, this integrationist model mirrors colonial education policies where indigenous knowledge systems were systematically erased in favor of state-imposed curricula that served colonial administrative needs (Quijano 2000; Kasper et al. 2025).

The securitization of educational access further reinforces education as control. The 2010–2012 Strategy frames out-of-school refugees as potential security threats, suggesting that a refugee “unable to attend school or a vocational training course is more likely to become discouraged and involved in illegitimate or military activities” (UNHCR 2009, p. 13). This framing constructs education not as a right but as a containment mechanism, linking the absence of formal education to criminality and radicalization. The choice of “illegitimate” rather than “alternative livelihoods” delegitimizes informal economic activities and community-based survival strategies, positioning refugees who fall outside formal education systems as inherently suspicious subjects requiring institutional intervention. The absence of any discussion of structural barriers preventing school attendance shifts responsibility onto refugees rather than acknowledging systemic exclusion from education.

Education 2030 continues this pattern, emphasizing that “inclusion in equitable quality education in national systems contributes to resilience, prepares children and youth for participation in cohesive societies, and is the best policy option” (UNHCR 2019, p. 6). The emphasis on “resilience” positions education as a means of managing hardship rather than as a right or space for empowerment, subtly reinforcing the expectation that refugees must adapt and endure rather than critique exclusionary systems. The phrase “participation in cohesive societies” instrumentalizes education for social order rather than intellectual autonomy or critical inquiry. The assertion that national system inclusion is “the best policy option” signals a singular, universal approach that dismisses the possibility of context-specific, refugee-led alternatives, foreclosing precisely the kind of pluralistic educational futures that decolonial scholars advocate (Azarmandi and Sharifkhani 2025; Vićentić 2022).

5.1.2. Dehumanization and the Passive Subject

The second dominant theme reveals how UNHCR education policies systematically construct refugees as passive recipients of institutional benevolence rather than as political agents with self-determined educational aspirations. Across the four documents, the “person of concern” is consistently positioned through language that emphasizes vulnerability, need, and dependence while obscuring refugee agency, resistance, and intellectual capacity. The 2010–2012 Strategy employs the term “persons of concern” as a foundational descriptor, positioning displaced populations within a recipient-based framework where they are subjects of international aid rather than active participants in shaping their educational futures (UNHCR 2009). This categorization reduces complex human identities with diverse educational histories, linguistic repertoires, cultural knowledge, and political perspectives to a single administrative label that facilitates institutional management.

The deficit-based framing is further evidenced in the characterization of education as providing “physical, psychosocial, and cognitive protection” (UNHCR 2009, p. 12), positioning refugees as populations requiring protection rather than as knowledge-producing subjects with intellectual agency. The 2020 report continues this pattern through its celebration of individual refugee success stories that attribute achievement to external humanitarian intervention rather than refugee resourcefulness and determination. This discursive pattern mirrors colonial narratives of Western benevolence toward populations deemed incapable of self-governance, reproducing what Malkki (1996) identifies as the humanitarian construction of the “speechless” refugee whose political subjectivity is erased in favor of universalized victimhood. The use of statistical framings throughout the documents reinforces this dehumanization by reducing refugee educational experiences to quantitative indicators: the repeated emphasis that “refugees are twice as likely to be out of school as non-refugees” (UNHCR 2019) focuses on what refugees lack rather than their capacities, constructing refugees as a problem to be solved through institutional intervention rather than as agents capable of defining and pursuing their own educational goals.

5.1.3. The Neoliberalization of Refugee Education

The third theme reveals how UNHCR education policies increasingly frame refugee education within neoliberal logics that prioritize economic utility over cultural preservation, intellectual self-determination, or political agency. Across the four documents, education is progressively repositioned from a humanitarian right to an economic investment, with refugee learners constructed as potential economic assets whose value lies in their future contributions to host-state labor markets. Education 2030 exemplifies this neoliberalization, emphasizing that “refugee education should enhance host-country economic and social development” and that “refugee youth must be prepared for economic participation within national economies” (UNHCR 2019). This framing explicitly positions education as a mechanism for labor force production rather than self-actualization, reducing refugee youth to future workers rather than future leaders, thinkers, or community builders.

The discourse of “self-reliance” that pervades Education 2030 is similarly revealing: self-reliance is framed not as agency or empowerment but as a means of reducing the financial “burden” of refugees on host states, reinforcing the dehumanization of displaced persons into economic liabilities whose education must be justified through potential economic returns. The emphasis on “sustainable refugee education” that “must be designed to fit within the host country’s national development strategies” (UNHCR 2019) further illustrates how sustainability is co-opted as a governance tool, ensuring that refugee education is financially and administratively advantageous to the host state rather than constructed around refugees’ own educational needs and aspirations. This echoes the historical parallel of colonial labor policies, where education was designed to produce a subservient labor force rather than independent thinkers capable of challenging structures of domination (Quijano 2000; Vićentić 2022).

The neoliberalization of refugee education is reinforced through donor-driven accountability frameworks that prioritize measurable outcomes over qualitative educational experiences. The emphasis on enrollment rates, gender parity indices, and results-based financing reflects the influence of the Sustainable Development Goals and their emphasis on metrics-based accountability. While such targets serve important monitoring functions, they also ensure that refugee education remains oriented toward donor priorities rather than refugee aspirations, reducing education to a series of measurable indicators that can be reported to international funders rather than experienced as meaningful learning by displaced populations.

5.1.4. Colonial Legacies in Knowledge Production

The fourth theme illuminates how UNHCR education policies reproduce colonial hierarchies of knowledge by privileging Western epistemological frameworks while systematically delegitimizing alternative knowledge systems, pedagogical traditions, and languages. The 2012–2016 Strategy mandates “provision of intensive language training where necessary to enable children (and teachers) to adapt to an environment where the prevailing language is not their mother tongue” (UNHCR 2012, p. 12). This policy reproduces colonial linguistic imperialism by framing language learning as a prerequisite for participation rather than as a right to multilingual education. The phrase “intensive language training” imposes urgency on linguistic assimilation rather than supporting bilingual or multilingual capacities that would preserve refugees’ native languages. The phrase “prevailing language” naturalizes a linguistic hierarchy where certain languages hold institutional value while others are rendered invisible. The absence of any reference to mother-tongue education or bilingual support reflects a monolingual ideology that mirrors colonial practices where indigenous populations were forced to abandon their native tongues in favor of European colonial languages (Koyama and Turan 2024; Kasper et al. 2025).

The delegitimization of alternative educational models is equally revealing. Education 2030 “strongly discourages investment in informal education when it is presented as a substitute for formal or non-formal education” (UNHCR 2019, p. 14). This directive delegitimizes community-based, refugee-led educational initiatives by positioning them as deviations from the preferred model of state-controlled formal education. The absence of any mention of indigenous, oral, or non-traditional knowledge systems reinforces a Eurocentric framing where only state-recognized, credentialed education is deemed valid. By discouraging investment in informal education, UNHCR ensures that refugee education remains a function of national governance and international institutional oversight rather than an autonomous practice of refugee communities. This pattern mirrors colonial education systems where indigenous learning methods, oral traditions, and apprenticeship-based models were dismissed as inferior in favor of state-controlled curricula designed to produce compliant subjects (Quijano 2000; Azarmandi and Sharifkhani 2025).

5.2. Part II: The INSPIRE Guide and the Consolidation of the Inclusion Paradigm

The INSPIRE Guide to Refugee Inclusion in National Education Systems (Ritika et al. 2025) represents the most comprehensive institutional articulation of the paradigm shift from parallel refugee education systems to full inclusion in national systems. The INSPIRE Guide carries significant institutional authority and warrants close critical analysis for how it constructs the “person of concern” within the developmental inclusion framework.

5.2.1. Inclusion as Governance Technology

The INSPIRE Guide defines inclusion as “the participation of refugee learners in publicly funded education institutions, at all education levels, on the same basis as local students” (Ritika et al. 2025). While this definition appears progressive, its textual construction reveals important ideological commitments. The phrase “on the same basis as local students” constructs equality as sameness, requiring refugees to participate in systems designed for host-country populations without acknowledging that equal treatment within unequal structures can reproduce inequality. The Guide explicitly frames inclusion as a consensus across key stakeholders, stating that INSPIRE “represents a consensus that refugee inclusion is the most sustainable and durable solution for refugee education” (Ritika et al. 2025, p. iii). The language of consensus forecloses debate, positioning inclusion not as one possible approach among many but as the singular legitimate framework. This discursive closure mirrors the pattern identified in Education 2030’s assertion that inclusion is “the best policy option,” consolidating institutional authority while delegitimizing alternative models.

The Guide’s acknowledgment that “countries may also move away from inclusion in response to public opinion, pressures from interest groups, fiscal pressures in the host country, or changes in the conflict in country of origin” (Ritika et al. 2025, p. 14) reveals a critical tension. This statement acknowledges that inclusion is contingent on political will rather than guaranteed as a right, exposing the fragility of the inclusion framework as a protection mechanism. Inclusion is positioned not as a permanent entitlement but as a revocable policy choice subject to the shifting priorities of host states, a construction that mirrors the conditional, discretionary nature of the “person of concern” label itself.

5.2.2. The Developmental Turn: From Humanitarian Aid to Economic Investment

The INSPIRE Guide consolidates a discursive shift from humanitarian to developmental logics in refugee education. Education is repeatedly framed in terms of investment, efficiency, and returns. The Guide emphasizes that “inclusion can improve the efficiency of education provision” through “greater economies of scale and fewer transaction costs arising from reliance on implementing partners” (Ritika et al. 2025). This framing repositions refugee education from a rights-based concern to a cost–benefit calculation, evaluating the worth of educating displaced children through the lens of fiscal efficiency rather than human dignity or epistemic justice. The emphasis on “predictable development funding” as superior to humanitarian financing further embeds refugee education within market logics, where sustainability is measured in financial terms rather than in the quality of educational experiences or the preservation of cultural and linguistic heritage.

The Guide’s treatment of the “political economy of inclusion” is particularly revealing. It acknowledges that “moving from parallel systems to refugee inclusion in national education systems introduces change to the status quo including shifts in roles and responsibilities for service delivery” (Ritika et al. 2025, p. 24). This technocratic framing of what amounts to a fundamental restructuring of refugee governance obscures the power dynamics at stake: the transfer of educational authority from humanitarian agencies to state Ministries of Education, the absorption of refugee students into systems that may perpetuate discrimination, and the elimination of community-based educational spaces that may have served refugee populations’ specific needs. The discussion of “host community perceptions” and “social cohesion” further reveals how inclusion is managed not as a right but as a political negotiation in which refugee communities’ interests must be balanced against and often subordinated to host-community concerns.

5.2.3. The Absent Subject: Refugees as Objects of Inclusion

Throughout the INSPIRE Guide, refugees are positioned as objects of inclusion rather than as agents of their own educational futures. The Guide’s guiding questions for practitioners—”What are the key characteristics of the displaced population?” “What are the key barriers preventing refugees from being included in public schools?” Construct refugee education as a logistical problem to be solved by external experts rather than as a political struggle in which refugees have standing and voice. The comprehensive data infrastructure outlined in the Guide, including enrollment ratios, cost dashboards, and inclusion continuums, integrates refugee education into a technocratic governance framework. In this framework, displaced populations are represented through statistical indicators rather than acknowledged as complex political subjects with varied educational aspirations.

The Guide’s inclusion continuum, which maps countries from “full restrictions” to “no restrictions plus additional measures to support inclusion,” illustrates the governance logic at work. Countries are assessed on a spectrum of inclusiveness based on their institutional frameworks, including legal structures, policies, programs, and interventions. However, there is no measure of refugee involvement in shaping these frameworks. The continuum constructs inclusion as something done to and for refugees by states and institutions, not as something that refugees themselves define, negotiate, or contest. This erasure of refugee agency within the very framework designed to advance their educational inclusion represents the ultimate expression of the “person of concern” as a governed subject visible to institutional gaze, countable within data systems, but absent from the deliberative spaces where educational futures are determined.

6. Discussion

The findings of this study reveal a fundamental tension at the heart of global refugee education policy: the discourse of protection, inclusion, and empowerment that pervades UNHCR education strategies and the INSPIRE Guide simultaneously functions as a discourse of control, assimilation, and economic governance. The term “person of concern” is not just a neutral administrative label; it functions as a discursive tool that creates specific types of refugee identities. These identities can be managed, counted, integrated, and made understandable to institutional authorities. However, this process systematically limits their political agency, rights to knowledge, and ability to make their own decisions.

The CDA of UNHCR education policy documents reveals four interlocking mechanisms through which this governance is achieved. Education as a mechanism of control disciplines the “person of concern” through assimilationist policies that tie educational access to compliance with host-state norms. Dehumanization strips refugees of political subjectivity by constructing them as passive beneficiaries rather than as agents capable of shaping their own educational futures. The neoliberalization of refugee education reduces displaced learners to economic assets whose value is measured in terms of their potential contributions to host-state labor markets. Colonial legacies in knowledge production ensure that Western epistemological frameworks dominate refugee education while alternative knowledge systems, languages, and pedagogical traditions are delegitimized.

These discursive mechanisms do not operate in isolation; they constitute a coherent governance regime that mirrors colonial patterns of domination as theorized by Quijano (2000). Just as colonial governance systems classified colonized subjects into hierarchical categories that determined their access to resources, rights, and recognition, contemporary humanitarian governance classifies displaced populations through the “person of concern” label in ways that structure their educational possibilities and constrain their political agency. Read through Gutiérrez Rodríguez’s (2018) coloniality of migration framework, these humanitarian classifications can be seen as contemporary techniques of colonial governance that stabilize global inequalities while presenting themselves as neutral and benevolent.

The analysis of the INSPIRE Guide adds a critical dimension to this understanding by revealing how the paradigm shift from parallel systems to national inclusion consolidates and extends these governance logics through developmental and economic rationalities. The INSPIRE Guide does not interrogate the foundational category of the “person of concern”; instead, it takes this classification as given and builds an elaborate infrastructure of data collection, cost estimation, and policy dialogue around it. The Guide’s emphasis on efficiency, economies of scale, and results-based financing repositions refugee education from a domain of humanitarian protection to one of economic governance, where the value of educating displaced children is measured in fiscal terms rather than in terms of human dignity, cultural continuity, or epistemic justice. This developmental turn aligns with what Azarmandi and Sharifkhani (2025) identify as the conditional extension of rights, tied to neoliberal benchmarks of economic utility and assimilation, and with Vićentić’s (2022) analysis of how multilateral education initiatives demand continuous realignment to modernity/coloniality.

The findings carry significant implications for how we understand and reform refugee education. First, they challenge the assumed neutrality of humanitarian education frameworks by demonstrating how the language of protection and inclusion can simultaneously function as a language of control and assimilation. Policymakers, practitioners, and researchers must attend not only to what education policies promise but to how their discursive framings structure the possibilities available to displaced populations. Second, the findings underscore the need for decolonial approaches to refugee education that center refugee agency, epistemic sovereignty, and self-determined educational futures. This means moving beyond the integrationist paradigm that dominates current policy to support refugee-led educational initiatives, multilingual education, and alternative pedagogical models that honor refugees’ diverse knowledge systems and cultural traditions (Kasper et al. 2025; Koyama and Turan 2024).

Third, the findings highlight the importance of participatory approaches to education policy development that go beyond performative consultation to include genuine decision-making power for displaced populations. The current model, in which refugees are “consulted” but do not participate in shaping the policies that govern their education, reproduces colonial governance patterns that deny political agency to the governed. The INSPIRE Guide’s framework for inclusion, which includes practitioners’ questions, data dashboards, and financing instruments, is primarily directed at institutional actors such as Ministries of Education, World Bank task teams, and UNHCR field offices. However, it lacks a mechanism for refugee communities to define what inclusion means on their own terms. Finally, the study demonstrates the value of bringing CDA into conversation with the coloniality of power for analyzing education policy, showing how policy texts construct governable subjects through discursive mechanisms rooted in colonial logics of classification, hierarchy, and control.

7. Toward Equitable Refugee Education

This paper does not advocate replacing one dominant framework with another. The critique presented here is not a call to abandon national education systems or discard quantitative monitoring. Rather, it is an argument for expanding what counts as legitimate educational knowledge, who participates in defining educational goals, and how displaced communities are positioned within policy frameworks. An equitable approach to refugee education would begin by treating integration not as absorption into predetermined structures but as a reciprocal process in which host systems also transform in response to the knowledge, languages, and pedagogical traditions that refugee communities carry. Concretely, this means creating institutional space for multilingual curricula that sustain mother-tongue literacy alongside host-country language acquisition, developing credential-recognition pathways that validate prior learning instead of erasing it, and establishing participatory governance structures where refugee educators and families hold deliberative authority over educational design. Such an approach does not reject inclusion; it redefines inclusion as a process that reshapes the system itself rather than requiring displaced learners to conform to it. Education policy that takes seriously the agency of the “person of concern” would move from consultation toward co-determination, from efficiency metrics toward holistic accounts of educational well-being, and from assimilation toward genuine epistemic pluralism.

8. Conclusions

This study has examined how the “person of concern” operates within UNHCR refugee education policy and the INSPIRE Guide as a governance mechanism that positions refugees as subjects of institutional control rather than as rights-bearing actors in their own education. By conducting a Critical Discourse Analysis of five key policy documents, I identified four dominant themes: education as a mechanism of control, the dehumanization of the passive subject, the neoliberalization of refugee education, and colonial legacies in knowledge production. These themes illustrate how what appears to be neutral humanitarian language actually serves to discipline, assimilate, commodify, and exert epistemic dominance over displaced populations. The analysis of the INSPIRE Guide demonstrates how the contemporary paradigm shift toward national inclusion consolidates these governance logics through developmental and economic rationalities that position refugee education as a domain of fiscal efficiency rather than a space for refugee self-determination.

By bringing together Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis and Quijano’s coloniality of power, this study demonstrates that contemporary refugee education policy reproduces colonial governance patterns whereby education does not merely respond to displacement but actively produces particular kinds of refugee subjects. The “person of concern” is not simply an administrative label; it is a discursive technology through which the coloniality of power is exercised in the contemporary humanitarian order, organizing displaced populations into hierarchical categories that determine their educational possibilities and constrain their political agency. As Koyama and Turan (2024), and Kasper et al. (2025) have demonstrated in specific national contexts, the coloniality of refugee education operates through policies, pedagogies, and practices that marginalize, silence, and constrain displaced learners. This paper extends that analysis to the global policy architecture, revealing how the foundational category of the “person of concern” structures the intelligibility of refugees within educational governance worldwide.

These findings call for a fundamental reimagining of refugee education—one that moves beyond the integrationist, neoliberal, and epistemically colonial frameworks that currently dominate global policy to embrace decolonial approaches centered on refugee agency, epistemic sovereignty, and self-determined educational futures. Such a reimagining requires not only changes in policy language but transformations in the power structures that determine who gets to define what counts as education, whose knowledge is valued, and whose educational futures are worth investing in. Until displaced populations are recognized not as “persons of concern” to be managed but as political subjects with the right to shape their own educational destinies, refugee education will remain a site of governance rather than liberation.