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The humanitarian picture identifies refugees as forcibly displaced persons who have typically crossed an international border – that is, people who have a compelling reason to flee, or not to return to, their home state on the grounds that return would pose a threat to their basic needs. This picture of refugees and our relationship to them ‘pervades the public imagination and academic literature’:

The term ‘refugee’ connotes people fleeing war, famine, and failed states. They are portrayed as victims waiting in camps until they can return or be resettled. These are the ‘neediest’ of the needy such that ‘a refugee’s plight appears morally tantamount to that of a baby who has been left on one’s door-step in the dead of winter’. Characterizations like this represent what has been called a ‘humanitarian’ conception of refugees where a foreigner’s need for protection – regardless of whether that need results from persecution, civil war, famine, extreme poverty, or some other cause – grounds a claim for asylum. The more serious and urgent is the need for protection, the stronger is that claim.⁵

A clear example of the humanitarian picture is provided by Betts and Collier in their recent book Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System, where they argue that ‘Syrians forced to flee their homes by violence’ are ethically analogous to a ‘drowning child’ and ‘we have an unambiguous duty of rescue towards them’.⁶

By contrast, the political picture argues for the distinctiveness of refugees by comparison to other forced migrants:

Refugees are special because persecution is a special harm. Refugees ‘are targeted for harm in a manner that repudiates their claim to political membership’; their ‘rights go unprotected because they are unrecognized’ rather than for other reasons…. Refugees are distinctive because their country of origin has effectively repudiated their membership and the protection it affords. The status on which almost all their other rights hinge is gone.⁷

This picture draws a sharp distinction between refugees and what Michael Walzer calls ‘necessitous strangers’:

Both are distinct from [voluntary] immigrants. Necessitous strangers are ‘destitute and hungry’ people fleeing generalized catastrophes. Their needs can be met ‘by yielding territory’ or ‘exporting wealth’ while withholding membership. Yet refugees are ‘victims of … persecution’ whose ‘need is for membership itself, a non-exportable good’.⁸

Whereas ‘necessitous strangers’ require humanitarian aid, refugees require asylum. The humanitarian and the political pictures of refugeehood thus diverge in their responses to the question of who should be entitled to refugee status; so, for example, from the humanitarian perspective there is no essential moral difference between people fleeing persecution and people fleeing famine, or between those who flee across international borders and those who are forcibly displaced within their state of nationality, whereas from the political perspective only persons outside the state and threatened by persecution should be entitled to refugeehood. Even more, the two pictures also shape distinct understandings of what obligations are owed to persons with that status; and these understandings, in turn, have significant implications for how such obligations should be shared and for how we think about the nature of the grant of refugee status as an expressive act. For the humanitarian picture, the underlying obligation is a moral duty to prevent undeserved suffering; this obligation takes the form of providing a refuge within which basic needs can be secured and protected as long as the costs of doing so are not unreasonably burdensome. Hence the focus of international cooperation is on sharing the burden of protecting refugees from serious harm, while the act of granting refuge (and of providing resources for refugee protection) is a communicative act that expresses moral solidarity with vulnerable strangers. By contrast, for the political picture, the underlying obligation is a political obligation to redress the injustice of membership repudiation to which refugees are subject; this obligation takes the form of providing refugees with asylum, which is conceived of as ‘surrogate membership’ in a state that is not their own, and thereby reasserting their political standing as equal members of global political society. Hence the focus of international cooperation is on sharing the responsibility of upholding the political standing of persons whose membership has been wrongfully repudiated, while the act of granting asylum is a communicative act that expresses political condemnation of the persecuting state.

The dilemma constructed by the coexistence of these different pictures is both political and philosophical. It is political, first, because it generates ethical indeterminacy concerning who should count as a ‘genuine’ refugee, and this indeterminacy is often exploited by politicians and media commentators for their own purposes. Second, this indeterminacy makes it difficult to hold states politically accountable for their responses to flows of asylum seekers (even if a shared legal definition of ‘refugee’ is adopted for policy purposes), precisely because both the nature and the extent of their duties are conditional on how the institution of refugeehood is conceived of. Politicians often claim that ‘we’ have done ‘our fair share’, but what, if anything, does the appeal to ‘fair shares’ mean in this context? Consider two facts:

1 In 2018 the UNHCR estimated that there are 25.4 million refugees worldwide and a further 3.1 million asylum seekers whose claims have not yet been assessed, and that 85 per cent of the world’s refugees are hosted in the developing world (Turkey, Uganda, Pakistan, Lebanon and Iran being the top hosting states), while only 102,800 refugees were granted resettlement places (typically in the developed world).9

2 The major funders of the UNHCR are the United States, the EU, individual states in the developed world (including those in the EU), oil-rich Gulf states, and private donors based in developed world states.10

Does this represent an unfair division of responsibility for refugee protection? On the one hand, the developed world takes in a relatively low percentage of the world’s refugee population under the UNHCR’s definition – one that has declined from about 25 per cent to about 15 per cent over roughly the last decade.¹¹ Indeed, many of the states of the developed world have spent the past 30–40 years deploying non-entry policies designed to prevent those who seek refuge from reaching their borders in order to claim asylum, while offering little in the way of resettlement places.¹² On the other hand, these same states and their citizens provide the overwhelming bulk of funding for the UNHCR as the primary agency of refugee protection. How, then, should ‘fair shares’ be determined? On the basis of numbers of refugees admitted? On the basis of contributions to the costs of protection? By reference to the wealth of states? Answering such questions requires a determinate account of who is entitled to refugeehood, of what is owed to refugees, and of what norms should govern a fair scheme of international cooperation; but this is precisely what is lacking.¹³ In the absence of an adequate account of the institution of refugeehood, the appeal to ‘fair shares’ lacks any determinate content and cannot underwrite domestic, international or transnational processes of holding states accountable with respect to refugee protection. This lack of determinacy is no doubt part of its rhetorical appeal.

The dilemma created by the coexistence of the two distinct pictures of refugees is also philosophical. It is so for the obvious reason that it raises the challenge of working out an adequate normative account of refugeehood in the face of two contrasting and incompatible views. But the challenge is philosophically deeper than that because, if it is to be satisfying, such an account must also make sense of the grip that these two pictures have established on our ethical and political imaginations. How, then, should we take up this challenge? The guiding thought of this book is that this task is best accomplished by providing a normative reconstruction of the point and purpose of the institution of refugeehood that is grounded in attention to the historical emergence and development of this institution and to the conditions of political legitimacy of the international order of states within which the institution of refugeehood is situated.¹⁴ The book’s hope is that such an account will enable us to make sense of how we have reached our current predicament, to understand the inadequacies of both pictures, and to provide an alternative view, which should enable us to return to the ethical and political challenges of refugee protection with a renewed understanding of the ground, justification and value of the international refugee regime – and of what it requires of us. The argument unfolds across four chapters.