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Asylum as Reparation pp 1–19Cite as

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Introduction

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Abstract

This introduction outlines the book’s basic argument that asylum should at times act as a form of reparation for the unjustified harms of displacement. Noting that the main theoretical conceptions of asylum, such as the dominant humanitarian approach, neglect the external causes of forced migration, Souter explains why these causes matter deeply when analysing states’ responsibilities to refugees, referring to examples such as military intervention, environmental displacement and post-colonial conflict. He shows that a full engagement with such causes should lead us towards a distinct reparative approach to asylum, which recognises that certain states bear special responsibilities to refugees where they are responsible for their flight. Souter establishes the importance of reparative justice for understanding asylum and introduces key ethical questions raised by this approach.

Keywords

  • Asylum
  • Reparation
  • Refugees
  • Forced migration
  • Responsibility

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as an individual with a ‘well-founded fear of persecution’ on various grounds who is ‘outside their country of nationality’, and excludes those displaced for other reasons and those who remain within the borders of their own states.

  2. 2.

    While there are also a number of vital ethical questions surrounding the proper response to refugees by non-state actors—from the role of multinational corporations in creating displacement, to the proper response of civil society organisations to the arrival of refugees—my focus in this book is on the responsibilities of states. This is because the state generally remains the central actor with the capacity to respond to the plight of refugees in the contemporary world, given their control of access to territory that refugees need to enter in order to avoid serious harm.

  3. 3.

    Although Matthew Price’s view of asylum as a potential form of condemnation recognises the internal causes of forced migration, by seeing asylum as a remedy for those facing persecution at the hands of their own states (Price, 2009), the other accounts canvassed briefly at the start of this chapter do not engage with the external causes of forced migration in any depth.

  4. 4.

    In this respect, my argument has parallels with theoretical work that seeks to challenge the framing of global issues as causally unconnected with Western actions, such as global poverty (Pogge, 2002) and humanitarian intervention (e.g. Dunford & Neu, 2019; Nili, 2011).

  5. 5.

    The Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act asserted that ‘the United States has a fundamental obligation to help the vast number of Iraqis displaced in Iraq and throughout the region by the war and the associated chaos, especially those who have supported America’s efforts in Iraq’ (United States, 2008).

  6. 6.

    Discussions include: Bader (2005: 346–347), Blake (2013: 114–119), Carens (2013: 195), Coen (2017), Ferracioli (2020: 195–196), Mark Gibney (1986: 79–108, 1991), Matthew Gibney (2004: 48–57), Holtug (2016: 285–286), Lennox (1993), Miller (2016: 113–114), Owen (2020: 67), Shacknove (1988: 140–141), Walzer (1983: 48–51), and Wilcox (2007). More recently, however, a few scholars have offered somewhat more detailed explorations of states’ reparative obligations towards the environmentally displaced (e.g. Buxton, 2019; Draper, 2018; Eckersley, 2015), war refugees (Davidovic, 2016; Kling, 2019), and migrants more generally (e.g. Achiume, 2019; Bosniak, 2016: 209–217; Collste, 2015: ch. 12; Glanville, 2020; Nevins, 2019).

  7. 7.

    For instance, in his discussion of states’ responsibilities to refugees, Mark Gibney (1986: 80) sees the ‘harm principle’ as being ‘such an intuitive concept that it nearly defies justification’.

  8. 8.

    In Chapter 5, where I address this question in depth, I use the term ‘justified displacement’ to refer to both the intentional displacement of refugees, and flight that is an unintended by-product of external states’ actions, giving more attention to the latter kind of case.

  9. 9.

    Indeed, there are a number of other special responsibilities that states may bear towards refugees. These include the responsibility of refugees’ states of origin to readmit and reintegrate their estranged citizens (Bradley, 2013); the responsibility of states which, by receiving refugees onto their territory, acquire a duty of non-refoulement (Miller, 2016: 84); and states’ associative duties towards refugees on the basis of political, social or cultural ties those refugees may have to a state of asylum that stem from colonial legacies (e.g. see Amighetti & Nuti, 2016; Smith, 2008, 2014). While recognising these other forms of special responsibility to refugees, my focus in this work is on states’ reparative obligations arising from the act of causing or contributing to refugees’ flight.

  10. 10.

    I am grateful to Blair Peruniak for suggesting this point.

  11. 11.

    For a rectificatory argument with a parallel structure, see Butt (2009: 14).

  12. 12.

    The argument presented in this book is also therefore of a contextualist character, taking one principle that is firmly embedded in a particular normative context, rather than basing it on any foundational or metaphysical truth. Although this renders the argument readily applicable to liberal-democratic states (given both their commitment to principles of reparation and their roles in the production of refugees), it also potentially applies to non-democratic states which also generate refugees and adhere in their laws and policies to a conception of reparative justice. For a discussion of contextualism with reference to the ethics of immigration, see Carens (2004).

  13. 13.

    Outcome responsibility, as I explain in Chapter 3, is a term broadly defined by the legal scholar Tony Honoré (1999: 14) as ‘being responsible for the good and harm we bring about by what we do’, and has been taken up in work on global justice by David Miller (2007: ch. 4).

  14. 14.

    For broader theoretical definitions of the refugee, see Shacknove (1985), and Gibney (2004: 7).

  15. 15.

    For a critique of the use of idealism and realism in political theory concerning refugees, see Sandelind (2019).

  16. 16.

    I am grateful to Daniel Butt and Katy Long for prompting this point.

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  1. School of Politics and International Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    James Souter

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Souter, J. (2022). Introduction. In: Asylum as Reparation . International Political Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62448-4_1

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