Peer-Reviewed Publications

Weighing Responsibilities: The Allocation of Fair Refugee Quotas (International Theory)

How should the responsibility for refugees be distributed among states? While scholars have proposed various sources of responsibility to make the distribution more equitable, they have not provided guidance on how to weigh each principle within a composite scheme. This is an important problem to resolve because the principles often implicate different actors, resulting in distinct distributions of responsibility. Moreover, states are particularly able to obfuscate their level of responsibility when multiple principles exist. To remedy this problem, I specify the range of possible solutions to the weighting problem, based on the principles of liability, community, and capacity. This argument identifies the relative importance of each principle based on the stated goals of a particular framework. These goals include whether the scheme is intended to operate under ideal or non-ideal assumptions, or if it intends to optimize state or refugee interests. By focusing on how to weigh various sources of responsibility, this paper paves the way for scholars to develop determinate schemes that can identify each state’s fair share in contexts where multiple principles apply.

Working Papers

Unresolvable Trade-offs: A Typology of Fair Refugee-Sharing Schemes

How should the existing distribution of refugees be made more fair? While scholars have offered various reforms, they have not made explicit the value trade-offs that their proposals rely on, impeding constructive dialogue on how to fix the system. This paper formalizes two trade-offs scholars must navigate when designing their proposals: whether the framework is intended to operate under ideal or nonideal theory assumptions and whether it is primarily designed to favor state or refugee interests. This interaction produces four possible solutions to fairly distributing refugees. These reforms differ significantly on fundamental questions of how to create the quotas and how binding they ought to be. The typology illustrates that any reform must make difficult choices to pursue certain values over others. By mapping these different priorities onto distinct proposals, we can uncover the range of reasonable solutions and make progress towards reforming the system.

Combining Moral Principles for Fair Refugee Allocation: A Sequential Weighting Approach

What would a fairer distribution of refugees look like? I develop an innovative weighting scheme that arranges the following principles—liability, community, and capacity—into a general sequence while allowing each principle’s weight to vary. Two novel empirical metrics are created: the refugee responsibility index (RRI) and the refugee intake gap (RIG). The RRI operationalizes the framework to generate each state’s expected (fair) contribution for the post-1975 Southeast Asian refugee crisis while the RIG measures how far a state’s hosting contribution deviated from its expected contribution under the RRI. The RIG reveals that the distribution of responsibility was unfair, as the countries that should have contributed the most generally failed to host their fair share while many neighboring countries hosted a disproportionate number of refugees relative to their expected contribution. The framework can be applied to other global domains to fairly distribute responsibility among states.