Abstract
In What do we owe to refugees?, David Owen questions how refugee protection can be (re)considered as a shared responsibility. This accessible and thought-provoking book explores, from a political philosophic level, what states and their citizens owe refugees. Addressing this question is an urgent matter and a complex journey, and studies like this one are crucial to reflect on how to do better for people seeking refuge.
The book begins with a “Tale of Two Ships.” The story of the first ship, the MS St Louis, testifies to the WWII murders and displacements that resulted in the establishment of the international refugee regime. The contemporary refugee regime was extended in the context of (post)independence struggles of non-western countries, but over the last 30–40 years, many Western states have designed strict policies to prevent refugees from reaching their countries (p. 9) and increased their efforts to criminalize support to refugees. The second story, of MV Aquarius, speaks to the international refugee regime’s contemporary limitations and results in Owen’s main question: How should we approach refugee protection today?
Beyond the prologue, the book consists of an introduction and four chapters. As Owen notes, an understanding of refugee protection often hinges on one of two pictures: the “humanitarian picture” reproduces victimized understandings of refugees, whereas the “political picture” reduces complexity, often in support of exclusionary rhetoric. Owen suggests that a normative reconstruction of the institution of refugeehood and its grounding in historical developments related to the “political legitimacy of the international orders of state” (pp. 10–11) can loosen the grip of both pictures to further develop “our ethical and political imaginations” (p. 10).
Chapter 1 explores lines in Europe-centered history. The figure of the “refugee,” as Owen shows, came into being in the seventeenth-century Huguenot crisis, which enabled the possibility to simultaneously condemn acts of the French state as illegitimate, reassert the norm of state sovereignty as the basis of a European political order, and provide protection to people who were persecuted. Combined with the establishment of an international emergency assistance regime in the nineteenth century and further recognition that matters regarding forced displacement tend to require international cooperation, this invention of the figure of the refugee resulted in the 1951 Refugee Convention and the establishment of the UNHCR office.
The Refugee Convention provides legal specification about who counts as refugee, albeit with a clear persecution-membership nexus (p. 27), and established non-refoulement as a fundamental norm. The Convention’s temporal and geographic restrictions were removed by the 1967 protocol, whereas the 1969 Organisation of African Unity Convention and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration extended refugeehood’s scope to cover people fleeing for generalized violence. UNHCR’s “humanitarian self-understanding” (p. 27) also resulted in the UN agency expanding its scope to, for instance, concern IDPs (Internally displaced persons).
These developments are salient for Owen’s arguments, which raise the questions: who should be entitled to refugee status, and what entitlements come with such a status? Prominent refugee law scholars have argued in favor of sustaining clear political distinctiveness around the figure of the refugee to ensure that the Convention’s protection does not become diluted. In contrast, Owen maintains that moral solidarity means that individually persecuted IDPs and people crossing borders because of generalized violence or natural disasters would have a similar claim on us as other refugees have (p. 33) yet require, as is evident in Chapters 2 and 3, differentiating between types of refugees: asylum, sanctuary, and shelter.
“Asylum refugees” either are targeted by persecution activities of the home state or receive insufficient state protection from persecution by non-state actors. The granting of asylum and subsequent restoration of civic standing upon validation of asylum claims affirm the “dual commitment to state sovereignty and human rights” (p. 89) and serve as communicative acts of condemning the persecuting state on behalf of the “international order of states” (p. 67). “Sanctuary refugees” have fled generalized violence and the breakdown of public order. In that case, it is not that one’s political standing has been denied but rather that “it has become harmfully ineffective” (p. 58). “Refuge,” for Owen, relates to more discrete events such as famines or natural disasters. Here, shelter should be provided until repatriation becomes possible, unless the situation becomes protracted.
Owen’s distinction of different types of “refugees” relates to the provenance of, and reasons behind, forced displacement. Provenance would result in different ways to redress the harms to which refugees are subjected and, therefore, as Chapter 3 explains, results in different approaches to non-refoulement and responsibilities toward durable solutions. For “asylum refugees” residing in the global North, new state membership would become default. In reference to “asylum refugees” in Southern reception states, where most refugees are geographically located and where rights security is not yet so robustly available, resettlement would need to become widely available. In contrast, for “sanctuary” or “refuge” refugees, new state membership would only become an option if prolonged stretches of time have been spent in displacement. Non-voluntary repatriation is not ruled out (p. 80), but only in accordance with strict temporal limits, if public order in the home state has been restored and if forced return would not harm refugees subject to this process. Pointing to the absence of checks on (ab)use of state power in return practices, Owen suggests that at least for “sanctuary refugees,” return should be restricted to voluntary repatriation.
Owen maintains that the above distinctions are crucial for the refugee regime to respond appropriately. He argues that the international refugee regime, next to and often overlapping with the international assistance regime, functions as a “legitimacy repair mechanism” (p. 47) of the global governance regime. If some states are unwilling or unable to protect the rights of (some of) their citizens, the international order of states must step in: failure to do so would result in a legitimacy problem of global governance.
Chapter 4, the most interesting in the book, critically engages with grounded predicaments of protection, discussing two strategies to engage with limited political will: issue linkage and reframing. It also discusses actions of refugees and concerned citizens in response to states’ failure to take responsibility for refugee protection, which are, in Owen’s opinion, civic acts that push states and the EU to perform their duty.
The vast majority of the world’s refugees reside in prolonged conditions of legal marginalization and socio-economic uncertainties. Owen pushes for more rights than most refugees currently have access to, regardless of how they are classified. Non-refoulement remains the minimum requirement of refugee protection, and all types of refugees would have access to housing, health care, education, employment, and welfare. If his model were implemented as Owen envisions, it could contribute to immediate betterment in refugees’ lives.
Despite the strengths described above, I was not convinced by Owen’s argument that more distinctions would contribute to better recognition of refugees’ rights. There is no substantiated reason to believe that “legitimacy repair” (p. 47) could serve as a motivator for global Northern states to provide immediate citizenship to “asylum refugees” arriving in Europe, adequate (support of) refugee protection, or resettlement slots. Owen is not naïve and points to states’ general reluctance to sacrifice what they perceive to be their own or their citizens’ interests. But the strategies he proposes are already widely used: Northern states draw on issue linkage, for instance, by linking support for refugees to matters like development and security, and the portrayal of some states’ good citizenry in the international order of states often coincides with human rights infringements toward people seeking refuge. Rather than contributing to more political will, these strategies sustain differences and steer toward containment of refugees in the Global South.
Furthermore, the challenge with differentiations like those proposed by Owen is that reality is fraught with complexities. Famine, deprivation, and exposure to disaster are often facets of persecution, and causes are often not distinct. Well-intended, top-down plans frequently work out differently in practice (which does not mean that thinking of how things could be different is not important). Matters such as who counts as (what type of) refugee, who does the counting, and what procedures are (not) followed in refugee recognition are deeply political acts. The introduction of more or other refugee-like labels and categories may result in fragmentation, rather than recognition, and provide additional leeway for state actors to impose conditionalities toward people’s rightful entitlements and to sustain prolonged conditions of displacement.
Discussions regarding whether the Refugee Convention is Eurocentric and whether Owen overlooks that refugee-hosting activities have long existed outside Europe go beyond this review. The book’s Convention-oriented focus does, however, ignore the fact that governments of many larger refugee-hosting countries have not signed or ratified it (although they still might engage with it) and that other international law treaties are also valid for refugee protection. And of course, many signatory states undermine the Convention. The increased automation, pluralization, and privatization of some elements of migration management only further diminish means to hold these states accountable.
Considering the book’s limited engagement with how imperialism and (neo)colonial rule(s) continue to play out within and beyond postcolonial states and across the international order of states, there is the risk of ignoring variations between ability to voice and claim rights among different citizenship holders and of sustaining an image of the state modelled by the West. Owen recognizes the structural differences between states and clearly spells out that states, not least Northern states, that are sustaining or benefiting from the world’s unjust conditions should carry more responsibilities toward refugee protection. As he argues, limited political will is the result of two generative problems. He briefly mentions the first — the ongoing reproduction of unjust background conditions and their contributions to the production of refugee populations (p. 96) – before he, in line with the rest of the book, focuses on the second: the failure to secure international cooperation for robust responsibility sharing for refugees. Is it possible to address the latter, however, without also thoroughly considering the former?
Like a good philosophical essay, this book gives much food for thought. Burning questions remain. Who is the “we” that David Owen is addressing? Is it the western citizen-subject who should more fully understand that refugee protection is a global public good toward which all must contribute? Or are “we” (also) the state whose interests are served by fairer responsibility sharing? The international order of states plays a key role in Owen’s ethical imagination of a more just refugee protection. The presumption, however, that the international order of states is willing and able to come to fairer schemes of cooperation regarding refugee protection that are also fair to refugees has yet to be proven. Should the acts of solidarity and acts in favor of refugee rights by citizens and fellow refugees then be perceived as in support of and within a state-governed model, or does the international order of states (also) hinder our ethical and political imaginations?