Responsible States? The Allocation of Fair Refugee Quotas

The costs of providing global goods are often disproportionately borne by some states over others for reasons that appear highly unfair. For example, poor countries and small island nations that are the least causally responsible for climate change are exposed most to its negative consequences. Countries located closer to refugee exoduses bear most of the costs of caring for them, while countries located farther away generally contribute less. While scholars have proposed many plausible sources of responsibility that would create a fairer distribution, they have not addressed the fundamental question of how to aggregate them within a composite framework. Using three sources of responsibility— liability, community, and capacity—I develop a novel framework for how to combine them to assign fair refugee-hosting quotas.

To determine a state’s fair share, I propose a flexible weighting approach that orders the principles in a general sequence but allows their weight to shift depending on the empirical circumstances. It defends a sequence where liability should be applied first, community second, and capacity last when distributing a given refugee population among states, arguing that this ordering best promotes fairness among states as well as refugee well-being. The weights to attach to each principle will vary based on factors like the empirical relevance of the principle for a given case. If the principle does not fully apply, the framework will shift the responsibility to the subsequent principle.

The weighting scheme generates two novel empirical metrics—the refugee responsibility index (RRI) and refugee intake gap (RIG)—that can be applied to various refugee crises. The RRI operationalizes each principle and combines them to generate fair share quotas for each state while the RIG assesses how far a state’s hosting contributions deviate from its expected contribution under the RRI, revealing which states meet their fair share and which do not. I apply these metrics to two prominent refugee cases—the post-1975 Southeast Asian and post-2003 Iraqi and Syrian refugee crises—to uncover how states performed in relation to their fair share benchmarks. These studies find that neighboring countries tended to host far more than their fair share while the countries that should have contributed the most—the ones that were identified as the most responsible—generally failed to host their fair share.

The book has implications for theory and policy. First, it helps resolve the ambiguity over how to distribute responsibility for human rights violations and other global problems. These obligations are commonly framed as collective responsibilities that fall on the international system of states as a whole, making it difficult to ascertain each individual state’s level of responsibility. While scholars have made progress in supplying sources of special responsibility that implicate specific states, I go beyond this step by articulating how these special responsibilities ought to be weighed against one another to assign fair shares to states. The book also has important implications for policy, where the creation of the refugee responsibility index (RRI) and the refugee intake gap (RIG) provide policymakers and civil society with clear metrics that can potentially improve state behavior. These rankings can be used by civil society actors (NGOs) to pinpoint specific states that deserve scrutiny and pressure to do more, where reputation-conscious states may be motivated to change their behavior to improve their ranking.