Beyond "Durable Solutions": The Portability of Social Protection and Syria as a Potential Test Case

Introduction

Refugees are continually on the move, yet the international system designed to safeguard their rights and dignity remains fundamentally oriented toward containing their mobility rather than enabling it. Traditionally, this framework has relied on three “durable solutions” to address forced displacement: voluntary repatriation, local integration, and third-country resettlement. Over recent decades, however, criticism of the 1951 Geneva Convention and the actual durability of these solutions has steadily grown amid protracted and intertwined crises. Critics point to the Convention’s limited scope and the chronic failure of nation-states to implement its provisions, which together resign those in search of international protection to a state of “permanent temporariness.”1 A core flaw of these solutions is their underlying premise: they are “predicated on a goal of ending movement.” As Arar and Fitzgerald argue, this rigid objective cannot “accommodate refugees’ ongoing mobility and their sustained ties to both host countries and countries of origin.”2 This oversight demands a far broader array of policy responses, including mechanisms that allow essential social protections to cross borders alongside the displaced populations that they protect.

Conclusion

This paper argues that the portability and exportability of social security rights offer a new way of looking at international protection. Rather than the static logic of durable solutions, this approach is attentive to refugees’ ongoing mobility and transnational lives. It better responds to the multidirectional, non-linear realities of displacement, defined by complex trajectories that go beyond traditionally durable solutions. 

First, integrating refugees into host countries’ social protection schemes, with accumulated rights made portable, would help “reduce vulnerability, promote formal employment and advance decent work,” while it concurrently alleviates labor market competition and tensions with local populations.35 Second, portability would support return as a possible choice available to refugees, as it increases return preparedness36 and facilitates reintegration and recovery efforts in countries of origin once conditions allow for return. Third, portability would bolster labor mobility pathways for refugees toward third countries, beyond both home and host states. Such mechanisms would bring together international protection and decent work from a transnational perspective, in the spirit of the original Nansen Passport.