This book provides a critical account of the concept of international protection. The author questions the boundaries between protection and assistance, and challenges the dominant focus on state sovereignty. Drawing upon a broad range of sources, she scrutinises the central role played by the state in providing legal, social and economic protection, which entails positive obligations upon the state. Protection, in this context, does not simply mean protection from persecution, threats, and sustained violence, but emancipation. By focusing on the local and national contexts wherein protection is enacted, created and also contested, she combines the politics of protection with the practices of protection, with a special