Working Papers (Under Review)

Allocating Responsibility for Refugees: A Sequential Weighting Approach

How should the responsibility for refugees be distributed among states? Although many different sources of responsibility have been proposed, scholars have not synthesized these principles into a unified framework. The puzzle is one of weighting: how to specify each principle’s relative importance for assigning responsibility. I create a dynamic sequential theory that first defends an ordering of the principles—where liability is applied first, community second, and capacity last—and then allows their weight to vary based on a set of specified conditions. When a principle only partially meets the conditions, a remainder is passed to the subsequent principle. In some cases, the principle’s weight simply reflects its relative placement in the sequence while in others, they deviate so that the principle placed first may have the least weight. Overall, the framework is designed to maximize both fairness among states and refugee well-being.

Weighing Responsibilities: Combining Moral Principles for Fair Refugee Allocation

What would a fairer distribution of refugees look like? 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 a practically urgent problem to resolve because states have incentives to downplay their own level of responsibility, advocating for the principle that minimizes their responsibility and implicates others. 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 metrics can be applied to other refugee crises to pinpoint under-performing states that deserve scrutiny and pressure to do more.