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

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.