Refugee protection
Refugee protection: “here” or “there”?
Policymakers in states of the Global North are in the privileged position of having a genuine ethical choice concerning whether to devote their resources to providing refugee protection in their territory (e.g. by enabling safe passage of refugees to their borders and offering generous resettlement opportunities) or to prioritise resourcing refugee protection in the Global South. For these policymakers the question ‘Should we protect refugees here or there?’ posed in this global context represents a real, and not merely a notional, ethical challenge. The primary focus on this article is the ethical dilemma confronted by the conscientious policymaker in the Global North concerning where (and how) to support refugee protection. A secondary focus is the ethical dilemma faced by conscientious policymakers in the Global South in relation to the global context and the issues confronted both Northern and Southern policymakers in their distinct regional contexts.
We all owe a debt of gratitude to David Owen and Alex Aleinikoff for their thoughtful reflections on the desirability and practicality of proposals and practices that divide the world between refugee hosting states (in the Global South) and refugee protection financing states (in the Global North). Given the way the winds have blown over the last decade, with Northern states assembling numerous measures to contain refugees in the South and to prevent them from accessing their territory, there can be few issues more important to the future of refugee protection. In this response I want to focus on the question of the desirability of proposals for what we might call differentiated responsibility between Northern and Southern states, the part of Aleinikoff and Owen’s discussion that considers whether ‘over there’ approaches might be acceptable from a realistic-utopian perspective.
In their paper, Alex Aleinikoff and David Owen frame as a ‘genuine ethical dilemma’ for ‘conscientious policy makers in the Global North’ whether to devote ‘resources’ to refugee protection in their territory or ‘in the Global South’. While we we agree with many of the conclusions in this piece, we argue these conclusions do not go far enough. We argue in particular that accepting that there is a ‘genuine ethical dilemma’ in this context concedes too much ground to the status quo. We open with some observations about the problems this framing entails, and question whether a Global North / Global South heuristic is really useful when discussing obligations to refugees. We suggest instead that focusing on the costs and harms of containment, and denaturalizing the distinction between ‘here’ and ‘there,’ is an important element of improving refugee protection everywhere.
The authors present the central question of the paper as ‘a genuine ethical dilemma’: ‘conscientious policymakers’ in the Global North are in the privileged position to decide between doing their share of global refugee protection in their territory (‘here’) or through development aid to countries hosting large numbers of refugees in the Global South (‘there’). In this response, I am going to argue that the way the choice between protection here and there is construed leaves out a third option, an increasingly popular one among policymakers in the Global North, which I call ‘protection elsewhere.’ I will suggest that, as currently posited, the discussion around the here v. there dichotomy is not fully equipped to address the problem of responsibility shirking and the indeterminacy of protection in the framework of non-arrival policies exemplified by ‘protection elsewhere.’ To attend to this problem, I suggest that the here v. there problem could be addressed not only by demanding a greater mix of protection ‘here’ and ‘there,’ but also by putting clear limits on policies that aim to keep refugees away and leave the prospects of protection unspecified.
We respond to our critics, focusing on their critiques of the ‘here’ versus ‘there’ distinction. While we agree with much of their commentary, we challenge some of their interpretations of our original argument and defend its central claims and conclusions.