Abstract
The contemporary plight of refugees in a world of increasingly restrictive border controls raises pressing questions about moral obligations arising from forced displacement. As political theorists and philosophers have grappled with this problem, they have focused primarily on questions related to admissions, addressing what kinds of moral obligations states have to refugees who seek admission to their territories. As important as this question is, its prioritization in the academic debate has serious limitations, especially given that resettlement is not even a probable option for the majority of refugees who are held in camps for prolonged periods of time.
In her remarkably clear and powerful book, Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement, Serena Parekh makes a compelling case for moving away from the oft-debated topic of admissions and turning attention instead to “an ethics of the temporary” (137)—a much-needed shift for the purposes of addressing moral obligations owed to refugees who neither can go back to their countries of origin nor have any prospect of resettlement in the Global North. As a moral philosopher conversant with both the analytical and continental traditions, Parekh deftly interweaves the critical insights she draws from the works of a wide range of theorists, including Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Seyla Benhabib, Joseph Carens, Iris Marion Young, David Miller, and Thomas Pogge. What arises from this diverse set of engagements is an incisive critique of long-term encampment, one that offers an interdisciplinary and empirically rich analysis of the irreparable harms this normalized practice inflicts on refugees.
Some figures can be helpful for understanding the scope of the problem examined by Parekh: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that there were 65.6 million people who had been forcibly displaced worldwide at the end of 2016, and the average length of displacement is seventeen years (17). Less than 1% of those who are officially recognized as refugees are resettled each year, and although the UNHCR has started to implement alternatives to encampment, about 40% of refugees still remain in camps (19).
There is now a large scholarship establishing the pervasive problems of refugee camps, and Parekh offers a very helpful review of these problems in Chapter 1: Most camps are makeshift arrangements that hardly accommodate the basic needs of refugees. In addition, because of their “exceptional legal status” (30), camps often turn into extra-legal spaces where various actors can exercise arbitrary forms of power. As a result, refugees face systemic violations of human rights in camps and become vulnerable to various forms of violence, without being able to pursue any legal recourse (34).
Given these long-standing problems, why and how has encampment become the “de facto long-term solution” to protracted refugee situations (23)? Parekh answers this question in Chapter 1 by joining scholars who identify a crucial historical shift in the global refugee regime: Whereas resettlement was the preferred option following the end of World War II, changes in migration patterns after the Cold War, particularly the increasing numbers of refugees from Africa and Asia, gave rise to the prioritization of voluntary repatriation as the ideal solution at the expense of other alternatives such as local integration (24–25). Because repatriation remains a remote possibility in many cases—in the context of prolonged civil wars, for example— “warehousing” of refugees in camps for years, even decades, has in effect become the norm (4).
Parekh’s critical review of the global refugee regime highlights the need to pay closer attention to the challenging moral questions posed by the acceptance of encampment as the de facto solution. As she persuasively demonstrates in Chapter 2, however, these questions have been mostly neglected due to an almost exclusive focus in the fields of moral and political philosophy on the topic of admissions. In many ways, this focus is due to Michael Walzer’s highly influential book, Spheres of Justice, which has led the scholarly debate to revolve around mainly the following question: 1 “how to morally justify exclusion while maintaining a commitment to universal human equality” (53).
This question has elicited different responses in the literatures on membership, migration, and borders. On the one hand, some scholars have provided a wide range of justifications for the state’s right to exclude refugees. Walzer, for example, underscores the need to maintain “communities of character” (56); accordingly, although he acknowledges that states have obligations to refugees on the basis of the principle of “mutual aid,” he also insists that states have the right to determine how many and which refugees to admit (55). Besides Walzer, Parekh critically examines the arguments that David Miller (58–59) and Christopher Wellman (59–63) offer for the purposes of justifying the state’s right to exclude refugees. Her key criticism of these different justifications is that they all overlook the global context in which the sovereign right to self-determination functions and leave encampment as the de facto option. Parekh’s own position is much closer to those scholars who take into account this global context and call for more robust moral obligations to refugees, including Seyla Benhabib, Joseph Carens, and Matthew Gibney. She devotes considerable attention to Benhabib’s work on migration (63–70) and takes from her two key ideas: first, migration gives rise to new forms of membership at the subnational and supranational levels, which challenges conventional understandings of citizenship; and, second, there is a need to rethink sovereignty as a “relational concept” in a world that is characterized by various forms of interdependence (65–66). Although Parekh builds on the arguments of Benhabib, Carens, and Gibney, she also criticizes them for rarely addressing the question of moral obligations to refugees who have no prospect of resettlement and remain in camps for years (76).
For the purposes of shifting the terms of the debate, Chapter 3 provides an illuminating analysis of the harms inflicted by prolonged encampment, one that extends some of the key insights of Parekh’s first book, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity, into new directions. 2 One of Arendt’s key claims in The Origins of Totalitarianism is that the stateless people find themselves in a condition of rightlessness because their loss of citizenship goes hand in hand with the loss of human rights. 3 On the basis of Arendt’s account, Parekh calls for the need to distinguish between two different harms associated with statelessness—a “legal/political” harm and the “ontological” one. The “legal/political” harm consists in “the absence of a meaningful legal identity” as well as “the absence of a rights ensuring community” (84); these problems continue to exist despite significant changes in the international legal framework since the time Arendt wrote her analysis (85). However, an exclusive focus on the legal/political harm of statelessness, Parekh argues, would seem to suggest that resettlement and repatriation are the only options; in addition, such a focus would risk overlooking “a much more fundamental loss,” or “the loss of certain fundamental features of our humanity” (85). Rethinking Arendt’s arguments in light of Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical analysis of “bare life” and Michel Agier’s ethnographic account of refugee camps, Parekh identifies three main dimensions of the “ontological deprivation” arising from prolonged encampment: First, refugees lose their distinctive identities as they are reduced to abstract human beings or bodies to be cared for in a humanitarian framework (86). Second, isolated in camps, they are expelled from the common world shared by other human beings (90–91). Finally, refugees are systematically denied the possibilities of rendering their words and deeds politically relevant and meaningful (96–97). The key conclusion that Parekh draws from this discussion is that, even in the absence of solutions to the legal/political harm, we can address the problem of “ontological deprivation” by moving away from encampment and adopting alternatives such as local integration (100) that could allow refugees to live dignified lives in the absence of citizenship.
While I fully agree with Parekh’s critique of encampment, I have some hesitations regarding her proposal to pull apart its “legal/political” and “ontological” harms. Arguably, Arendt’s account of statelessness would resist that move with its insistence on the inextricable connections between different dimensions of rightlessness. From this perspective, it is much easier to put the stateless in camps and expel them from humanity precisely because they are not recognized as persons equal before the law and are deprived of a political community willing to guarantee their rights. To put it differently, it is impossible to live a “human” life in the absence of legal and political guarantees of equality. Read in this way, Arendt’s analysis would suggest that attempts to improve the conditions under which refugees live (e.g., local integration) cannot adequately address the problem of rightlessness if they leave the “legal/political” deprivation intact.
Even with that reservation, Parekh’s account of the harms inflicted by camps deserves attention because it significantly changes our understanding of the responsibilities owed to refugees. Chapter 4 discusses these responsibilities by rethinking global displacement as a form of “structural injustice,” arising from not “intentional or deliberate” acts but instead from the very structure of an international system organized into nation-states (105). Drawing on David Miller, Parekh argues that understanding forced displacement as structural injustice introduces the question of “remedial responsibility,” urging us to ask, “who ought to remedy the harm rather than who caused it” (105). Her response to this question builds on the arguments of Thomas Pogge and Iris Marion Young, who suggest that all those who participate in an unjust system and benefit from it share responsibility to remedy its harms (107–115). Given that the states in the Global North directly benefit from the global refugee regime (e.g., by not admitting refugees to their territories) and have the capacity to remedy its harms, they are the key actors Parekh’s account holds responsible.
Parekh draws from her critical analysis the conclusion that long-term encampment should be rejected. But perhaps because she engages in “non-ideal” theory (5), she also proposes that camps should be reformed if it is not possible to get rid of them altogether: “[R]efugee camps and other spaces of containment [should] be subject to the same moral and political norms of decent hierarchical societies” (40; also 127). But a “decent hierarchical society,” a concept introduced by John Rawls in The Law of Peoples, 4 would significantly fall short of the kind of “innovative participatory democracy” that Parekh envisions for the purposes of reforming camps (41). It would leave refugees without the right to vote or the right to dissent. More importantly, Rawls calls for international toleration of such “decent” societies because he works with the assumption that the people who live within such societies have chosen their modes of life. Leaving aside the problems with that assumption even on its own terms, it would be difficult to describe a refugee camp as a “decent hierarchical society” given that refugees have not chosen displacement or encampment as a mode of life.
Refugees and the Ethics of Forced Displacement opens with the story of Alan Kurdî, a Syrian toddler who died with his brother, mother, and at least 12 others when their boat capsized in the Mediterranean. The highly publicized image of Alan Kurdî’s body, washed up on a beach in Bodrum, Turkey, shook the consciences of many around the world, but not much has changed in international responses to forced displacement since then. “Missing Migrants Project,” launched by the International Organization of Migration following the death of at least 368 migrants near the Italian island of Lampedusa in October 2013, recorded 7,927 migrants as dead or missing worldwide in 2016. 5 Within this global context, Parekh’s effort to rethink international obligations to refugees beyond the confines of existing debates in moral and political philosophy is a timely and vital intervention—one that urges scholars to resist the tendency to characterize these deaths as mere accidents and understand them instead as carnages resulting from the structural injustices of the global refugee regime.