Overview

‘Dilemmas’ explores the ethical challenges in migration and refugee policy-making, focusing on the real-world dilemmas faced by policymakers and civil society.

While the growing field of political theory on migration has extensively examined topics like immigration rights, citizenship, and asylum obligations, ‘Dilemmas’ takes a fresh, bottom-up approach, tackling specific, under-explored policy challenges.

Explore the debates:

Use the tabs to the left to explore different policy debates that pose significant ethical dilemmas in migration policymaking. Each debate features:

  • An open-access academic journal article that kicks off the debate
  • Responses from several scholars and political actors from around the world
  • A final response (or “rejoinder”) from the authors of the kick-off paper

Coordinators

‘Dilemmas’ is a joint initiative of the MPC and of the research project “Migration as Morality Politics” [PI Julia Mourão Permoser, Austrian Science Foundation (FWF) Grant V 743-G].

The project is coordinated by Martin Ruhs (MPC/EUI), Julia Mourão Permoser (Danube University Krems), Rainer Bauböck (EUI and Austrian Academy of Sciences) and Lukas Schmid (Goethe-University Frankfurt).

Latest news

4 December 2025: Mario Cunningham has published a new paper that discusses methodological issues of the Dilemmas approach.

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