This chapter argues that a distinct stock story of who refugees are and how they behave, which it describes as the ‘stock narrative of becoming a refugee’, featured throughout the hearings. This stock story is one version of how, when and why ‘genuine’ refugees decide to leave their home countries and seek refugee status in another state. The chapter analyses the extent to which this prescriptive narrative conforms with international and domestic definitions of refugee status, to show that the normative expectations embedded within the stock tale far exceed the legal basis for refugee protection. Nonetheless this story, with its distinct narrative form, was demanded of refugee applicants during oral hearings and structured how decision-makers tested and judged applicants’ evidence and credibility. While decision-makers frequently demanded evidence that conformed to the stock narrative of authentic refugeehood – or that applicants to account for deviations from this narrative – refugee applicants also implicitly or explicitly contested or resisted this demand when presenting their oral testimony.

In Chapter 5, I examine cases in which refugees directly challenge regional containment instruments. This has occurred in North America (a safe third-country agreement between the US and Canada), Asia-Pacific (offshore processing agreements between Australia and Malaysia, Australia and Papua New Guinea and Australia and Nauru), Europe (the Dublin System and a refugee swap agreement between Europe and Turkey) and Libya (an externalisation agreement between Libya and Italy). I examine the ways decision-makers manoeuvre juridical borders in constructing ideas of refuge and determining the legality of states’ attempts to prevent refugees crossing international borders. I observe that when courts consider the significance of refugeehood and expand their juridical borders, they set high thresholds for refuge and characterise it as a duty owed by states. However, in most cases courts ignore the salience of refugee status and retract their juridical borders. This means that there is no minimum standard of refuge set and refuge morphs from an obligation to a discretion. Refugees become trapped in the resisted place of refuge, unable to continue their journey except in extraordinary circumstances. What is considered exceptional is highly gendered with the narrow frameworks developed sidelining experiences of male and also many female refugees.