The Necessity of an Ethical Response

This paper argues that, in the context of increasing hostility towards refugees, an understanding of, and advocacy for, an ethical response is correspondingly increasingly urgent. The paper notes the context of increasing hostility may invite concessionary positions from theorists and practitioners, for instance, to mitigate the erosion of existing institutions of protection only. I suggest this concessionary position stems from a State-Centred Approach to understanding obligations to refugees where analysis proceeds from a state’s perspective when confronted with refugees seeking asylum in the contemporary global context of hostility. If instead we take a Refugee-Centred Approach (Fine 2018; Parekh 2020; Hillier-Smith 2024) to focuses on the specific harms and injustices refugees (will) endure to understand obligations towards them, we reach a different position. This latter approach foregrounds that displacement numbers are increasing and likely to further increase in the near-future, and increasing non-compliance in protection schemes, and increasing hostility towards refugees, will, of course, result in increasingly severe harms and (direct and structural) injustices against an increasing number of innocent persons. This fact supports a reason against acquiescing within concessionary positions that permit increasing harms. The Refugee-Centred Approach also reveals the specific obligations to refugees which then constitute the elements of what an ethical response would be. Once understood, this prospective ethical response underpins a range of possible policies, and provides an important standard against which contemporary policies and practices can be normatively assessed and potentially be reformed to reach.