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

Justice for States or Refugees? The Unresolvable Tension in Fair Share Design

How should the existing distribution of refugees be made more fair? A major difficulty with answering this question is that what is fair to states may not be fair for refugees. Using a thought experiment where a bloc of states and refugees must deliberate over a set of distributive principles under conditions of mutual respect, I show that states and refugees will come to opposing positions on the optimal distribution. States will be more inclined to support a liability-first scheme in efforts to reduce the supply of refugees, while refugees will support principles like community and capacity that better promise a decent hosting environment. These differing positions illuminate a fundamental trade-off between interstate fairness and refugee well-being when designing a fair share scheme. Because actors operating in good faith will nevertheless reach an impasse, any scheme that assigns exact weights to each principle must make a prior choice to pursue certain values over others. By mapping the connection between what actors value and the weight to place on a distributive principle, this paper provides the normative foundation from which specific weighting decisions can be derived and defended.

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.