Who Owes Refuge? Weighing Responsibilities in a World of Displacement

The global refugee system is in utter disarray. Having already fled unimaginable hardships from their home country, refugees and asylum-seekers lack meaningful refuge. Meanwhile, states put up barriers to these individuals trying to reach their territory, entrenching an imbalanced distribution of responsibility where neighboring and poor countries host the majority of the world’s refugees. This empirical reality poses a challenge for scholars and normative political theorists in particular who care about creating a fairer distribution than what exists in practice. Creating such a scheme, however, is far from straightforward and fraught with difficult choices. Each principle may track a different normative consideration, producing unavoidable trade-offs: a principle may fulfill a worthy moral objective like fairness for states yet do so at the expense of another reasonable one, like the well-being of refugees. Beyond this theoretical challenge lies an equally pressing empirical one: converting broad normative intuitions about how these principles relate into precise indices of state responsibility. In the absence of a determinate scheme that clearly lays out the relationship between the principles, states are particularly able to obfuscate their level of responsibility.

The book confronts both challenges in turn. First, it establishes the weighting problem—the question of how to specify the relative importance of each ethical principle—as the central impediment to fairly assigning responsibility. While political theorists have tended to dismiss this question as indeterminate, the book argues that ignoring this question not only obscures moral trade-offs at stake but also creates a permissive environment for states to strategically invoke whichever principle minimizes their own obligations. Using a common foundation of three ethical principles—liability, community, and capacity—where liability assigns responsibility to outside states that caused the refugees, community to the states that share a special relationship with the refugees, and capacity to the states that are most able to help in general, it shows that no weighting solution can simultaneously satisfy the interests of the two parties central to any agreement: states and refugees. A scheme can distribute costs fairly among duty-bearers, or it can place refugees where they are most likely to thrive, but not both at once. A thought experiment that pits state and refugee representatives against one another in a democratic global forum illustrates this tension, where states' interest in minimizing costs will lead them to favor a liability-first scheme, while refugees' interest in supportive hosting environments will lead them to favor community and capacity instead. Because these differences will remain even when parties negotiate in good faith, scholars must decide whose interests to prioritize before advocating a particular solution. Resolving the weighting problem, then, requires an intentional normative judgment about whose interests come first, as additional deliberation alone will not suffice.

This theoretical groundwork makes it possible to build a determinate scheme with full awareness of what it optimizes and what it sacrifices. The book develops a sequential weighting scheme which primarily seeks fairness for states by protecting innocent and nearby states from bearing a disproportionate share of the responsibility. The algorithm orders the principles in a general sequence—liability first, community second, and capacity last—while allowing each principle's weight to vary with its empirical relevance to a given case, where any unassigned responsibility is shifted to the subsequent principle. This algorithm operationalizes a refugee responsibility index (RRI), which identifies each state's fair share of a given refugee population, and a refugee intake gap (RIG), which measures the deviation between states' actual hosting contributions and their RRI-assigned quotas. These metrics are applied to two contrasting cases, old and new: the post-1975 Southeast Asian refugee crisis, and a comparison of the post-2021 Afghan and Ukrainian crises. A similar pattern emerges across time: the states with the greatest assigned responsibility generally fail to meet their fair share, while proximate states consistently host far more than theirs. The Afghan-Ukrainian comparison sharpens this finding further, revealing a disparity in treatment between the two refugee populations that the framework cannot justify.