Since the late 1980s, scholars have highlighted the role of diverse conceptualizations of power in explaining the functioning of the global refugee regime. Part of this literature has examined the functioning of power in global contexts, while another part has explored expressions and experiences of power in local contexts. While these approaches illustrate how power may be expressed and experienced in the diverse contexts of the regime, can we conceptualize power in a way that engages with the functioning of the refugee regime in both global and local contexts? Can a more disaggregated understanding of power, sensitive to form and context of expression, open new areas of enquiry into the functioning of the regime and help explain its ability and inability to fulfill its core mandate of protection and solutions for refugees? In response, this article draws on the literature on power in global governance to propose a heuristic framework for understanding power and influence in the diverse context of the global refugee regime. It argues that various forms of power co-exist within the regime, and that further research could usefully examine the manifestations and implications of these forms of power through the making and implementation of global refugee policy.

The way in which a norm is legally codified in laws and treaties can differ from what that norm actually accomplishes in practice. Norm implementation interrogates how global norms are put into practice at the local level. This thesis analyzes the "everyday politics" of protection implementation through the case study of the SPRAR refugee protection project in Gioiosa-Ionica, Italy. I illustrate how productive and structural power work through the intimate relationship between frontline workers who are formally mandated to implement protection, and the refugees who are the beneficiaries of protection. Frontline workers create new local norms through patterned behaviour and practices that condition legal protection, the provision of basic services and integration measures, on the acquiescent behaviour of refugees. This perpetuates a stereotypical refugee subjectivity based on passiveness and "victimhood". Refugees resist these practices and the way their protection is received in commonplace and concerted ways. Local actors who are not officially mandated condition the arena in which frontline workers do their work by infiltrating implementing organizations; and placing barriers on how they are able to do and accomplish their work. As such the "everyday politics" of refugee protection in Gioiosa-Ionica is fertile ground for how power, resistance and contestation play into norm implementation.ii