Lecture 17: RefugeesSerena Parekh – “Moral Obligations To Refugees”

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Agenda

1. Serena Parekh

2. Guiding Questions

3. Facts

4. Two Sets of Obligations

5. What are the Grounds for our Obligation to Refugees?

6. Discussion Questions

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Serena Parekh

• Associate professor of philosophy at Northeastern University in Boston, where she is the director of the Politics, Philosophy, and Economics Program.

• Ph.D. in philosophy from Boston College.

• Taught at the University of Connecticut in the Department of Philosophy and Human Rights Institute.

• Her primary philosophical interests are in social and political philosophy, feminist theory, and continental philosophy.

• Wrote Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights.

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Guiding Questions

1. Do we have stronger obligations to citizens rather than non-citizens?

2. What makes a refugee different from other kinds of immigrants (such as economic migrants)?

3. What should be our obligations toward refugees and why?

4. What should be our obligations in response to structural injustices?

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Facts

• “A population roughly the size of Italy – 59.5 million people – lives outside the nation-state system.”

• “2/3 refugees live in protracted refugee situations, on average for 17 years, often much longer.”

• “Of the forcibly displaced who are considered to be ‘refugees’ by the UN, less than 1% will ever be resettled permanently in a new country.”

• “Countries in the Global South play a much larger role in hosting refugees than the Western democracies that largely fund the regime; 87% of refugees are hosted in the Global South and less than 1% of the displaced are resettled in Western states.”

• “Of the 4 million Syrian refugees, about 650,000 have sought asylum in the West, but the other 3.4 million refugees remain in the 5 countries that surround Syria; millions more remain trapped within Syria.”

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Aerial view of Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan, July 18, 2013.6

Two Sets of Obligations

The Refugee Convention contains two sets of obligations for states. One is toward asylum seekers, and the other is toward refugees in camps.

1. Obligations toward asylum seekers• Principle of non-refoulement: a state cannot deport a person seeking asylum

if she has a well-founded fear of persecution.• Connection to Kant: perfect duty of justice.

2. Obligations toward refugees in camps• Helping refugees in camps is understood as a matter of generosity or good

will.• Connection to Kant: imperfect duty of charity.

Is there any morally relevant difference between asylum seekers and refugees in camps?

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What are the Grounds for our Obligation to Refugees?

“It is helpful to think about many of the harms associated with the treatment of the forcibly displaced as structural injustices. The way that Iris Young describes it, structural injustices are not the result of deliberate harm or explicitly unjust policies, but the unintentional outcome of the actions of different agents each working for her own morally acceptable ends. It refers to situations in which something is morally wrong, but there is no clear causal explanation or clear intention on someone’s behalf to cause the harm.”

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Donations in Roszke refugee camp on the Hungary / Serbia border

What are the Grounds for our Obligation to Refugees?

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“I want to suggest, again following Iris Young, that we have a collective, political responsibility to reject policies and practices of containment as unjust and unacceptable and to work with other states to come up with comprehensive strategies for dealing ethically with the displaced. Political responsibility arises when actions are taken in our name, when we contribute through financial or political support, or we engage in practices that uphold a particular injustice. Western states certainly contribute politically and financially by upholding various policies that support practices of containment and confinement.”

What are the Grounds for our Obligation to Refugees?

“Responsibility here derives from our interdependence in global processes of cooperation and competition in which we seek benefits and to realize our own aims and projects. So though we are not guilty or liable in a legal sense for an unjust action or moral harm, our co-imbrication means that we must take responsibility for remedying the injustices that arise as outcomes of our actions. Responsibility for Young is derived not from living under the same constitution, but from participating in the diverse institutional processes that produce structural injustice.”

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Discussion Questions

1. What should be our obligations in response to structural injustices (injustices that are unintentional but result from many agents acting)?

2. In what ways might racism, sexism (or other forms of oppression) also be, in part, structural injustices?

3. When it comes to structural injustices, does Peter Singer’s principle hold? Namely, if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

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Discussion Questions

1. Is the situation of refugees a structural injustice, or is it also a case of agents intentionally and actively causing harm?

2. Do we have stronger obligations to citizens rather than non-citizens? Why or why not?

3. How are refugees different from other types of immigrants (such as economic migrants)? How does this affect our duties toward them?

4. What are our obligations to refugees and how can we fulfill them?

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