Question

Read the following passage carefully.

Scholarly treatments of international refugee law have traditionally centered on the 1951 Geneva Convention, framing the evolution of asylum predominantly as a triumph of post-war European diplomacy. In this orthodox paradigm, legal historians emphasize the treaty's drafting process as a deliberate, progressive shift away from ad hoc, nationality-based protections toward a universal, rights-based regime. Proponents of this narrative have exhaustively documented how Western states negotiated the treaty to codify a collective moral responsibility toward displaced persons, thereby stabilizing a volatile post-war continent.

However, a burgeoning wave of critical legal scholars has recently challenged this triumphant narrative, arguing that it obscures the inherently exclusionary mechanisms embedded in the Convention's original design. By foregrounding the geopolitical interests of Western powers, these revisionists contend that the 1951 framework was not initially conceived as a universal human rights instrument, but rather as a highly circumscribed geopolitical tool designed to manage Cold War defectors while explicitly excluding displaced populations in the Global South. As evidence, they point to the geographic and temporal limitations initially inscribed in the Convention—limitations that restricted refugee status almost exclusively to Europeans displaced before 1951.

While the revisionist critique provides a necessary corrective to the self-congratulatory tone of traditional historiography, it risks oversimplifying the agency of non-Western actors in subsequent decades. By reducing the international refugee regime solely to an apparatus of Western hegemony, critical scholars often neglect the profound ways in which post-colonial states actively repurposed the language of the Convention during the 1960s and 1970s. For instance, the 1969 OAU Convention in Africa significantly expanded the legal definition of a refugee to encompass those fleeing foreign domination and systemic structural disruptions, effectively forcing a structural evolution in global asylum norms.

Therefore, a comprehensive understanding of international refugee law requires a synthesis of these perspectives. It demands acknowledging both the exclusionary origins of the 1951 Convention, as rightly diagnosed by the revisionists, and the dynamic, adaptive strategies employed by post-colonial nations to transform a regional diplomatic treaty into a more globally responsive framework. Only by examining this dialectical process can legal historians accurately capture the fragmented, and often contradictory, evolution of modern asylum.

Based on the text above, which of the following accurately identify the author's primary rhetorical purposes? (Select all that apply)