Asylum as Reparation: Refuge and

Responsibility for the Harms of

Displacement James Souter
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/asylum-as-reparation-refuge-and-responsibility-for-th
e-harms-of-displacement-james-souter/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

Refuge beyond Reach: How Rich Democracies Repel Asylum

Seekers Fitzgerald

https://ebookmass.com/product/refuge-beyond-reach-how-rich-
democracies-repel-asylum-seekers-fitzgerald/

Morality and Responsibility of Rulers: European and

Chinese Origins of a Rule of Law as Justice for World
Order Anthony Carty

https://ebookmass.com/product/morality-and-responsibility-of-
rulers-european-and-chinese-origins-of-a-rule-of-law-as-justice-
for-world-order-anthony-carty/

Sanctuary Cities: The Politics of Refuge Loren

Collingwood

https://ebookmass.com/product/sanctuary-cities-the-politics-of-
refuge-loren-collingwood/

The Bilateral Mind as the Mirror of Nature: A

Metaphilosophy James Blachowicz

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-bilateral-mind-as-the-mirror-
of-nature-a-metaphilosophy-james-blachowicz/
Syria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refuge State Dawn
Chatty

https://ebookmass.com/product/syria-the-making-and-unmaking-of-a-
refuge-state-dawn-chatty/

Wrongs, Harms, and Compensation: Paying for our

Mistakes Adam Slavny

https://ebookmass.com/product/wrongs-harms-and-compensation-
paying-for-our-mistakes-adam-slavny/

Environmental and Disaster Displacement Policy:

Organisational Cooperation between the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees and the International
Organisation for Migration Silvana Lakeman
https://ebookmass.com/product/environmental-and-disaster-
displacement-policy-organisational-cooperation-between-the-un-
high-commissioner-for-refugees-and-the-international-
organisation-for-migration-silvana-lakeman/

Ethics and Professional Responsibility for Paralegals,

6th Edition eBook

https://ebookmass.com/product/ethics-and-professional-
responsibility-for-paralegals-6th-edition-ebook/

The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of

Criminal Responsibility Gideon Yaffe

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-age-of-culpability-children-
and-the-nature-of-criminal-responsibility-gideon-yaffe/
INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL THEORY
SERIES EDITOR: GARY BROWNING

Asylum as Reparation
Refuge and Responsibility for
the Harms of Displacement

James Souter
 International Political Theory

Series Editor
Gary Browning, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
The Palgrave International Political Theory Series provides students and
scholars with cutting-edge scholarship that explores the ways in which
we theorise the international. Political theory has by tradition implic-
itly accepted the bounds of the state, and this series of intellectually
rigorous and innovative monographs and edited volumes takes the disci-
pline forward, reflecting both the burgeoning of IR as a discipline and the
concurrent internationalisation of traditional political theory issues and
concepts. Offering a wide-ranging examination of how International Poli-
tics is to be interpreted, the titles in the series thus bridge the IR-political
theory divide. The aim of the series is to explore international issues in
analytic, historical and radical ways that complement and extend common
forms of conceiving international relations such as realism, liberalism and
constructivism. This series is indexed by Scopus.

More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/14842
 James Souter

Asylum as Reparation
Refuge and Responsibility for the Harms
of Displacement
James Souter
School of Politics and International Studies
University of Leeds
Leeds, UK

ISSN 2662-6039 ISSN 2662-6047 (electronic)

International Political Theory
ISBN 978-3-030-62447-7 ISBN 978-3-030-62448-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62448-4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: Oleksiy Maksymenko/Alamy Stock Photo

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Acknowledgements

I have accumulated many debts as this work has made its long journey
from MSc dissertation, to doctoral thesis, to its current form a decade
later. First and foremost, my supervisor throughout my postgraduate
studies, Matthew Gibney, has deeply shaped my understanding of the
ethics and politics of asylum and refugee protection, and I am grateful
for his invaluable support, guidance and encouragement. During these
studies, I was fortunate to receive very helpful written and/or oral feed-
back on my work in progress from Jenny Allsopp, Megan Bradley, Roger
Duthie, Marcus Carlsen Häggrot, Rob Heimburger, Diletta Lauro, Susan
MacDougall and Jonathan Seglow, as well as from audiences at confer-
ences and seminars in Oxford, Copenhagen, Sibiu and Cairo. My exam-
iners at various stages of the doctorate—namely Alexander Betts, Daniel
Butt, Dawn Chatty, Katy Long and David Miller—also really helped me
to develop my work. My postgraduate studies were only made possible by
a full scholarship from the Economic and Social Research Council.
As the manuscript gradually made its way to completion, I have bene-
fited from further feedback and support. I would like to thank Blair
Peruniak, who has offered me very valuable input and encouragement
throughout this project, providing challenging comments during long
conversations not only on my draft doctoral thesis, but also on the book
manuscript. Since moving to Leeds, I have been glad of discussions
with and support from colleagues, particularly Laura Considine, Derek
Edyvane, Josh Hobbs, Jason Ralph and Kerri Woods. Members of the

v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Centre for Contemporary Political Theory at Leeds offered very helpful

advice and support in the final stages of writing. When developing my
argument in Chapter 5 of this book, I received useful guidance from
Christina Nick, and I am grateful to Derek for the opportunity to try
out an early version of that chapter at a MANCEPT workshop at the
University of Manchester in September 2017.
I was also very appreciative of the opportunity to participate in a work-
shop on the draft manuscript of this book at the annual conference of the
Association for Political Thought in Oxford in January 2020. In addition
to the conference organisers, particularly large thanks are due to the two
discussants at the workshop, David Owen and Clara Sandelind, for very
helpful comments on a previous version of the whole manuscript. I am
also grateful for detailed feedback from an anonymous reviewer.
Anne Birchley-Brun and Ambra Finotello at Palgrave Macmillan
offered very useful and reliable support, as well as much patience, as I
completed the manuscript. Earlier versions of some passages of this book
were published in Political Studies as ‘Towards a Theory of Asylum as
Reparation for Past Injustice’ (2014, 62(2), 326-342) and in the Journal
of Refugee Studies as ‘Durable Solutions as Reparation for the Unjust
Harms of Displacement: Who Owes What to Refugees?’ (2014, 27 (2),
171-190). I am grateful for helpful feedback from anonymous reviewers
for these journals, as well as to those for the Journal of Social Philosophy.
The usual disclaimer—that any remaining errors and shortcomings are my
responsibility alone—of course applies.
This work took shape during a long period of mental health difficul-
ties, and I am very grateful to my family, friends and colleagues for their
support throughout. Without ongoing support from my mother, Annette
Souter, I doubt I would have completed the thesis at all, let alone this
book. My brother, Andrew Souter, offered a valuable pair of eyes as
I finished both projects. Finally, I am grateful to Agi for her love and
support, and to Marianna and Robin: it is because of them all that I got
there in the end.
 Praise for Asylum as Reparation

“How should the role of external states in generating refugee flows inform
our understanding of obligations to refugees? In this book James Souter
provides a lucid and compelling response to this question that elaborates
the place of reparations within the moral functions of asylum. Working
through a range of cases, Souter demonstrates the scope and significance
of this reparative function for state responsibilities and its important role
in strengthening the international refugee regime. This is a vital contri-
bution to the political ethics of asylum that significantly develops the
field.”
—Professor David Owen, Politics and International Relations, School of
Economic, Social and Political Sciences, Faculty of Social Sciences,
University of Southampton

“In this excellent book, James Souter explores the urgent question of
state responsibility for asylum. Which countries should be responsible for
refugees, and why? He provides an original, compelling, and nuanced case
for viewing asylum as reparation for states’ role in the causes displacement,
whether due to military intervention, climate change, or colonial legacies.
Asylum as Reparation is a significant contribution to Political Theory and
Refugee Studies, which will be of great interest to students, researchers,
and practitioners interested in the design of more just refugee policies.”
—Alexander Betts, Professor of Forced Migration and International
Affairs, University of Oxford

vii
viii PRAISE FOR ASYLUM AS REPARATION

“This book fills an important gap in the literature on the ethics of

asylum, by detailing how asylum can be a form of reparation rather
than mainly a fulfilment of humanitarian obligations. Unlike dominant
accounts of asylum, this book emphasises the role of refugee-receiving
states in contributing to the production of refugees. This emphasis ought
to strongly impact how the literature as a whole understands asylum,
leading us towards a more political and historical understanding. The
book is exceptionally well-written and, as the first account of asylum as
reparation, will be one of the key texts in this field.”
—Clara Sandelind, University of Manchester

“Asylum as Reparation is an insightful, sophisticated, original work that

forces us to rethink the traditional moral basis for protecting refugees.
By highlighting the need to take the historical wrongs suffered by the
displaced seriously, Souter has produced a book that is essential reading
for anyone interested in the future of asylum.”
—Matthew J. Gibney, Professor of Politics and Forced Migration,
University of Oxford
 Contents

1 Introduction 1
Foregrounding the Causes of Forced Migration 2
Military Intervention and Displacement 3
Climate Change and Displacement 4
Colonial Legacies and Displacement 4
A Reparative Approach to Asylum 5
Structure of the Argument 11
References 16

Part I Asylum as a Form of Reparation

2 Asylum and its Humanitarian Function 23
Asylum’s Moral Functions 24
Asylum’s Humanitarian Function 29
Existing Understandings of Humanitarian Asylum 30
A Revised Conception of Humanitarian Asylum 37
References 39
3 Asylum’s Reparative Function 43
The Principle of Reparation 43
The Case for Viewing Asylum Reparatively 51
Asylum as Restitution, Compensation and Satisfaction 53
What This Argument is Not 59
References 60

ix
x CONTENTS

Part II The Conditions of Asylum as Reparation

4 Causality and Outcome Responsibility 69
Outcome Responsibility 70
Causal Responsibility for Forced Migration 75
Creating Refugee Movements 76
Intensifying Refugee Movements 78
Creating the Conditions for Refugee Movements 79
Joint Responsibility 80
Assigning Outcome and Reparative Responsibility 81
References 87
5 Unjustified Harm 91
Just Displacement 95
Tragically Justified Displacement and Dirty Hands 97
Features of Dirty Hands Cases 101
Reparative Obligations and the International Context 103
What Reparation Would Be Owed? 108
References 109
6 Reparative Fittingness 113
Reparative Alternatives to Asylum 114
Other Considerations 122
Refugees’ Choice 123
Rectifying Particular Harms of Displacement 127
References 130
7 Reparation and Capability 135
Absorptive Capacity 136
Incapacity and Progressive Realisation 142
From Reparation to Capability 145
References 148

Part III Domestic and International Implications

8 Reparative Justice and the Prioritisation of Refugees 153
Reparative and Humanitarian Asylum 154
Reparative Asylum and Prioritisation in Refugee
Admissions 157
 CONTENTS xi

Humanitarian Duties and Reparative Obligations 159

Asylum, Reparation and Prioritisation 162
References 166
9 Reparative Justice and International Refugee
Responsibility-Sharing 169
Situations of Full Compliance 171
Situations of Partial Compliance 176
Incentives 178
Incentive 1: ‘Refugee Insurance’ and Moral Hazard 179
Incentive 2: The ‘Blame Game’ 181
Incentive 3: Refusing Humanitarian Intervention 182
Implications 184
References 185
10 Conclusion 189
References 193
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Refugees face the stark threat of serious harm. They escape dangers such
as war, generalised violence, persecution, severe poverty and damaging
environmental change, whether these ills have been created partly or
wholly by their own states, non-state actors or other states. Refugees flee
in very large numbers: at the end of 2020, there were around 82 million
displaced persons in the world, of whom around 26 million had crossed
an international border as refugees (UNHCR, 2021: 2).1 Yet very many
do not find the protection they seek. Given the policies of a range of
states, they endure frequently perilous journeys only to be trapped in inse-
cure camps or to lead precarious lives in urban settings throughout the
developing world for years, or even decades, on end (see Parekh, 2020).
In particular, the variety of measures that wealthy states use to exclude
refugees ensures that only a relatively small number reach their borders
to claim asylum, although this does not prevent loud declarations of ‘cri-
sis’ in response by politicians, publics and sections of the media in those
states (see FitzGerald, 2019; Gibney, 2004).
The plight of refugees is now one of the most urgent moral and polit-
ical issues in the contemporary world. Indeed, the sheer magnitude of

1 The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as an individual with a ‘well-founded

fear of persecution’ on various grounds who is ‘outside their country of nationality’, and
excludes those displaced for other reasons and those who remain within the borders of
their own states.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
J. Souter, Asylum as Reparation, International Political Theory,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62448-4_1
2 J. SOUTER

current refugee movements, the severity of the harms faced by refugees

and the ongoing political controversies surrounding asylum in Western
states, all give rise to many pressing questions. How should the insti-
tution of asylum function? Who, of the many millions who live with
their basic needs unfulfilled in their states of origin, should be granted
asylum? Should the question of which actors caused refugees’ flight have
any bearing on the question of who is obliged to protect them? How
should responsibilities to protect refugees be distributed among states?2
In addressing such questions, political theorists have identified a
number of moral functions that asylum may assume. As I examine in
Chapter 2, the dominant understanding of asylum, in both theory and
some contemporary political practice, is humanitarian, viewing asylum
as a response to the moral imperative to protect refugees from serious
harm and to meet their immediate needs, simply by virtue of our common
humanity (e.g. Gibney, 2004). Proponents of this humanitarian approach
to asylum tend to view the refugee as an individual in flight from serious
harm, to recommend that refugees are allocated to states on the basis
of their capacity to protect them, and that they are prioritised for protec-
tion, where necessary, on the basis of the urgency of their need. However,
theorists have also recognised a range of other moral roles that asylum
may take and have highlighted, for instance, its potential as a means of
condemning the illegitimate actions of refugee-producing states (Price,
2009), expressing solidarity with refugees with whom a state of asylum
shares particular affinities (Walzer, 1983: 49), and even repairing the
legitimacy of the international states system (Owen, 2016).

Foregrounding the Causes of Forced Migration

These accounts all provide important rationales for protecting refugees
in other states. As I hope to show throughout this book, however, they
are also incomplete: they offer only a partially adequate moral and polit-
ical picture of the institution of asylum and its moral functions, and need

2 While there are also a number of vital ethical questions surrounding the proper
response to refugees by non-state actors—from the role of multinational corporations in
creating displacement, to the proper response of civil society organisations to the arrival
of refugees—my focus in this book is on the responsibilities of states. This is because
the state generally remains the central actor with the capacity to respond to the plight of
refugees in the contemporary world, given their control of access to territory that refugees
need to enter in order to avoid serious harm.
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

to be supplemented in order for us to capture the full range of these

functions. As I explain shortly, these accounts are incomplete precisely
because of their general reluctance to engage fully with the moral signifi-
cance of the causes of contemporary forced migration, and particularly its
external, international causes. Placing the causes of contemporary forced
migration at the forefront of our ethical analysis of states’ responsibilities
to refugees should, I will argue, lead us to embrace an additional repara-
tive approach to asylum as a political institution, which asserts that states
bear special responsibilities to offer asylum to refugees where they have
caused or contributed to their flight. In order to see more clearly why the
external causes of forced migration matter when seeking to understand
states’ responsibilities to refugees fully, consider the following kinds of
cases.

Military Intervention and Displacement

In March 2003, the United States led a military coalition into Iraq
to oust Saddam Hussein’s regime, following air strikes with a ground
invasion. While the invasion itself generated little initial displacement
(Chatty & Marfleet, 2009: 1), the coalition’s subsequent military activ-
ities, a steep decline in public services, and the emergence of sectarian
violence between Iraq’s Sunni and Shi’a religious communities, led to
growing patterns of large-scale forced migration. Having brought about
the effective collapse of the Iraqi state and its institutions, coalition forces
produced a power vacuum into which insurgent groups could move,
creating the conditions for the full-scale civil war which erupted in 2006,
as part of which a pattern of ethnic cleansing in previously mixed cities
such as Baghdad arose (Stansfield, 2007: 205). Although a subsequent
change in US military tactics led to a decline in the bloodshed, and
its military presence formally ended in December 2011 (Dodge, 2012:
13, 75), the extremist militant group, Islamic State, were soon able
to capitalise upon persisting Iraqi state weakness, seizing territory and
major cities in northern Iraq from 2014 until their ousting from these
strongholds several years later. As a result, 1.7 million Iraqis were esti-
mated to have become refugees, and 2.8 million had fled as internally
displaced persons by 2012 (Chatty & Mansour, 2012: 98), while at least
3.2 million people fled from areas seized by Islamic State between January
2014 and October 2015 (Ferris & Kirişci, 2016: 24).
4 J. SOUTER

The plight of Iraqi refugees has become increasingly overshadowed by

the displacement of an estimated 13.5 million Syrians—over half of Syria’s
population—since the onset of its brutal civil war in 2011 (UNHCR,
2021: 7). While Syria has not been subject to any thoroughgoing external
invasion during this conflict, as in the case of Iraq, other states (notably
Russia and Iran) have played significant roles in fuelling this mass displace-
ment. As the Syrian regime has forced out huge numbers of its own
citizens, it has enjoyed the supply of weapons, ammunition and other
military support from Russia (Souleimanov & Dzutsati, 2018: 42), which
has also intervened more directly through air strikes against civilian areas,
including hospitals and markets, thereby worsening the displacement crisis
more directly (Ferris & Kirişci, 2016: 25).

Climate Change and Displacement

There is today compelling evidence that the intensive and ongoing use of
fossil fuels since the advent of the industrial era, particularly by Western
states, is driving rising temperatures and the breakdown of the world’s
climate. This process is increasing the frequency of extreme weather
and climatic events (such as heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, deluges and
storms), jeopardising health and food security and potentially risking
violent conflict, while sea-level rise is threatening coastal communities and
the very existence of small island states. This range of risks is contributing
to growing patterns of displacement, as millions are expected to find life
in their homes less and less viable, to the point of becoming impossible
(see Romm, 2018). Although it can be very challenging to separate out
environmental drivers of forced migration from other contributing factors
clearly, climate change can be seen as a ‘threat multiplier, which magnifies
existing vulnerabilities’ (McAdam, 2012: 5). Despite the large responsi-
bility of Western states for causing these grave threats of displacement,
they have generally not shown the political will to respond adequately
and some, such as the United States under its former president, Donald
Trump, have openly denied this responsibility (Romm, 2018: 280–281).

Colonial Legacies and Displacement

While many refugee movements flow from recent military intervention or
the ongoing effects of excessive carbon emissions, others may be rooted
in historical injustice, such as the legacies of colonialism. In general,
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

some have argued that the prevailing models of the colonial state ‘set
the stage’ for postcolonial refugee movements, by deploying strategies
such as ‘divide and rule’, which involved the privileging of certain ethnic
groups over others, and thereby creating the conditions in which post-
independence conflict and displacement would result (Anthony, 1991:
574; see also Hovil, 2019). It is also frequently observed that the imposi-
tion of arbitrary boundaries that were insensitive to local social and ethnic
groupings also sowed the seeds of such conflict (e.g. Adepoju, 1982:
24), and that the leaders of former colonies perpetuated the repressive
apparatus of the colonial administration that they inherited upon inde-
pendence in order to consolidate and maintain their control (Hovil &
Lomo, 2015: 41; Otunnu, 1992: 18).
More specifically, there are cases in which particular former colonial
powers may have created conditions ripe for contemporary displacement.
One example here is the role of Belgium in creating the conditions that
made the Rwandan genocide possible, as well as its attendant refugee
crisis, in which three million Rwandans had become refugees by the end
of July 1994 (Klinghoffer, 1998: 3). Although the genocide has been
framed as a form of almost primordial ethnic violence (see Chimni, 1998:
360–361), Belgian colonial policies can be seen as largely responsible
for ossifying the distinction between Hutu and Tutsi, and privileging
the latter, thereby laying the ground for the subsequent acrimony and
violence between them (see e.g. Prunier, 1995: 37).

A Reparative Approach to Asylum

In these and many other cases, external states have been deeply impli-
cated in the production of refugees. This much is perhaps unsurprising
in a globalised world that has become highly interconnected politi-
cally, economically and socially. However, dominant approaches to asylum
in contemporary political theory do not take the moral significance of
these causes into account fully when discussing states’ responsibilities to
refugees.3 For instance, the widespread humanitarian account of asylum,

3 Although Matthew Price’s view of asylum as a potential form of condemnation recog-

nises the internal causes of forced migration, by seeing asylum as a remedy for those
facing persecution at the hands of their own states (Price, 2009), the other accounts
canvassed briefly at the start of this chapter do not engage with the external causes of
forced migration in any depth.
6 J. SOUTER

with its heavy focus on meeting refugees’ immediate and pressing needs,
generally views the capacity of each state to protect refugees, and not any
special responsibility it may have for the creation of those refugees, as
morally decisive when determining the correct distribution of responsi-
bilities to refugees among states. It does not ultimately matter for this
distribution, on the humanitarian view, whether or not Syrians were
forced to flee partly given Russia’s actions or purely due to those of
their own government, whether some may be displaced as a consequence
of other states’ excessive carbon emissions, or whether ethnic conflict
that produces refugees is rooted in ongoing colonial legacies. It would
follow from this that Russia has no greater responsibility to protect Syrian
refugees than any other state, that the world’s highest-emitting states
bear no more responsibility for hosting the environmentally displaced
than the lowest emitters, and that Belgium was no more responsible for
protecting Rwandan refugees in 1994 than, say, Thailand. Yet, intuitively,
these conclusions are highly implausible. The reason they are implausible,
or so I shall argue, is that the humanitarian impulse sits alongside another
widespread and deeply rooted conviction which, very roughly, asserts that
those who cause harm, and especially unjustified harm, bear a special obli-
gation to make amends for it. This, in very basic terms, can be described
as a principle of reparation. In many other contexts—from legal settings to
interpersonal relationships—we routinely apply something like this prin-
ciple, so a key question facing the humanitarian and other theoretical
accounts of asylum is: why not in the context of asylum?
Acknowledging both the frequently external causes of forced migra-
tion and the intuitive force of the principle of reparation should lead us
also to recognise an additional moral function that asylum may possess:
as a form of reparation for the unjustified harms of displacement. This
potential reparative function, I shall argue, stems from a special obliga-
tion on the part of states to offer asylum to refugees for whose flight they
are responsible, whether through their military interventions, support for
oppressive regimes or imposition of damaging economic policies. Asylum
needs to be partly re-conceptualised in order to reflect fully the range
of moral obligations that states bear towards refugees; it should also be
conceived as potentially offering a means by which states that have caused
or contributed to refugees’ flight can rectify the unjustified harms that
they have imposed on them. In ethical theorising on states’ responsibili-
ties to refugees, I aim to show, it is of great moral import that states of
asylum are often implicated in the flight of the refugees to whom they
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

may go on to offer protection, even while they more often than not go
to great lengths to debar those refugees from their territory.4
The idea that states bear a special responsibility to offer asylum to
refugees for whose flight they are responsible has been politically salient
in the modern era in light of military interventions by Western and other
states, such as the Vietnam War, NATO’s bombing of Kosovo in 1999,
the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and Russia’s military role in the Syrian civil
war. In response to these cases, some politicians, citizens and academics
have asserted that the intervening powers bore a special obligation to
protect the refugees whom they generated (e.g. Carens, 2013: 195;
Walzer, 1983: 49). While clear examples of states explicitly using their
asylum policies for reparative ends are not plentiful, the United States’
resettlement of Vietnamese refugees can be seen as implicitly reparative
in character (Carens, 2003: 100), and the legislation passed in the US
promising admission to Iraqi interpreters and translators was explicitly
framed as fulfilling a special responsibility to them.5
In contrast, this reparative approach to asylum has not received detailed
theoretical treatment, as political theorists have often engaged with
this idea only in passing.6 Reflecting the dominance of the humani-
tarian approach, ethical theorising on asylum has instead tended to be
synchronic and ahistorical in character, focusing upon the rights and
duties of refugees and states that stem from the current situations of both
parties, rather than from pre-existing relationships among them. Work

4 In this respect, my argument has parallels with theoretical work that seeks to challenge
the framing of global issues as causally unconnected with Western actions, such as global
poverty (Pogge, 2002) and humanitarian intervention (e.g. Dunford & Neu, 2019; Nili,
2011).
5 The Refugee Crisis in Iraq Act asserted that ‘the United States has a fundamental
obligation to help the vast number of Iraqis displaced in Iraq and throughout the region
by the war and the associated chaos, especially those who have supported America’s efforts
in Iraq’ (United States, 2008).
6 Discussions include: Bader (2005: 346–347), Blake (2013: 114–119), Carens (2013:
195), Coen (2017), Ferracioli (2020: 195–196), Mark Gibney (1986: 79–108, 1991),
Matthew Gibney (2004: 48–57), Holtug (2016: 285–286), Lennox (1993), Miller (2016:
113–114), Owen (2020: 67), Shacknove (1988: 140–141), Walzer (1983: 48–51), and
Wilcox (2007). More recently, however, a few scholars have offered somewhat more
detailed explorations of states’ reparative obligations towards the environmentally displaced
(e.g. Buxton, 2019; Draper, 2018; Eckersley, 2015), war refugees (Davidovic, 2016;
Kling, 2019), and migrants more generally (e.g. Achiume, 2019; Bosniak, 2016: 209–217;
Collste, 2015: ch. 12; Glanville, 2020; Nevins, 2019).
8 J. SOUTER

that has addressed the rights of refugees to reparation has tended to focus
strongly on voluntary repatriation and refugees’ claims for redress against
their states of origin during transitional justice processes following periods
of conflict and human rights violations, rather than any entitlement to
asylum from external states (e.g. Bradley, 2013; Bradley & Duthie, 2014).
While Megan Bradley (2013) has convincingly argued that the voluntary
repatriation of refugees can potentially act as a form of redress for the
injustices of displacement, Bradley’s insight that ‘reparations are a critical
expression of accountability for forced migration’ (Bradley, 2013: 2) is
highly relevant for reflection on the responsibilities of refugees’ states of
asylum, as well as those of their states of origin.
Given this relative neglect of the reparative approach to asylum, the
claim that states bear a special obligation to those whom they have
displaced continues to contain unresolved ambiguities. Although this
basic claim may—at least for those of a broadly liberal and internation-
alist ethical orientation—be highly intuitive or even considered obvious,7
it is when we seek to flesh out and specify it that matters become much
more controversial and interesting. As it turns out, even if we are prepared
to admit the existence of this obligation in principle, the conditions under
which it should obtain are far less clear. Should external states offer asylum
to refugees for whose flight they bear only causal responsibility, or should
moral responsibility, in the form of fault or blameworthiness, be required?
Should such states offer asylum as reparation to refugees whom they have
displaced justifiably (assuming this is possible), or is it owed to refugees
who have been displaced only unjustly?8 How should this obligation
be balanced against other competing moral considerations, not least the
morally powerful humanitarian principle? What are the moral and practical
implications of asylum as reparation for the operation of the international
refugee regime?
Moreover, without a clear account of states’ reparative responsibilities
to refugees, theorists are liable to slide, perhaps inadvertently, between

7 For instance, in his discussion of states’ responsibilities to refugees, Mark Gibney

(1986: 80) sees the ‘harm principle’ as being ‘such an intuitive concept that it nearly
defies justification’.
8 In Chapter 5, where I address this question in depth, I use the term ‘justified displace-
ment’ to refer to both the intentional displacement of refugees, and flight that is an
unintended by-product of external states’ actions, giving more attention to the latter kind
of case.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

assertions of different types of putative special responsibility, including

reparative responsibilities, in this context.9 Take perhaps the most famous
articulation of states’ special responsibilities towards refugees within
contemporary political theory, expressed by Michael Walzer (1983: 49):

Toward some refugees, we may well have obligations of the same sort that
we have toward fellow nationals. This is obviously the case with regard to
any group of people whom we have helped turn into refugees. The injury
we have done them makes for an affinity between us: thus Vietnamese
refugees had, in a moral sense, been effectively Americanized even before
they arrived on these shores.

Here, Walzer effectively combines a recognisably reparative moral

claim (when he refers to ‘the injury we have done them’) with a distinct
solidarist claim (when he writes of ‘an affinity between us’ that he believes
was created as a result of this injury). Furthermore, as I note later, the
claims made on behalf of Iraqis employed by the US-led coalition during
its occupation of Iraq have melded together, or oscillated between, repar-
ative, associative and desert-based notions. Various commentators argued
not only that Iraqi employees have a special claim to asylum because of
the harm posed to them as a result of their employment, but also as
a reward for their assistance to the war effort, which some consider to
have forged a strong tie between them and the US polity. This slippage
between different kinds of special responsibility claim may not be prob-
lematic from the perspective of refugee advocates, who will pragmatically
aim to mobilise whichever arguments, or combination of arguments, will
enable them to make their case most forcefully and effectively. For polit-
ical theorists, however, getting a clearer view of what is at stake in the
ethics of asylum requires disentangling the overlapping, yet conceptually
distinct, special responsibility claims made in the context of asylum and
refugee protection.

9 Indeed, there are a number of other special responsibilities that states may bear
towards refugees. These include the responsibility of refugees’ states of origin to readmit
and reintegrate their estranged citizens (Bradley, 2013); the responsibility of states which,
by receiving refugees onto their territory, acquire a duty of non-refoulement (Miller, 2016:
84); and states’ associative duties towards refugees on the basis of political, social or
cultural ties those refugees may have to a state of asylum that stem from colonial legacies
(e.g. see Amighetti & Nuti, 2016; Smith, 2008, 2014). While recognising these other
forms of special responsibility to refugees, my focus in this work is on states’ reparative
obligations arising from the act of causing or contributing to refugees’ flight.
10 J. SOUTER

In addition, although the principle of reparation is widely accepted in

everyday moral thought, its application to asylum in any given case of
displacement is somewhat more variable and unpredictable. The asser-
tion of a special obligation on the part of a particular state to offer
asylum as reparation to certain refugees is vulnerable to a variety of
counterclaims, concerning issues of causality, justice, state capability and
fittingness, which may defeat it in certain circumstances. As we shall see,
in some cases a state’s putative obligation to offer asylum as reparation
to certain refugees may be resisted, whether convincingly or unconvinc-
ingly, on the grounds that the causal links between a state’s actions and a
refugee’s flight are too tenuous; that the intervention which created the
refugees was morally justified and that therefore no reparation is owed to
them; that the responsible state lacks the capacity to offer an adequate
form of asylum; or that another form of reparation is more fitting than
asylum. The normative force of reparative justice itself notwithstanding,
the instability and defeasibility of our intuitions concerning states’ repar-
ative obligations to refugees in any given case means that these intuitions
need bolstering by an explicit account of asylum as reparation that brings
our perhaps semi-conscious beliefs and presuppositions into the open, and
clearly defends them.10 In short, while the basic idea of asylum as repa-
ration may be highly intuitive, its normative presuppositions, background
commitments, practical implications and underlying complexities require
detailed clarification.
In this book, I address the ambiguities surrounding the notion that
states bear a special responsibility to offer asylum to refugees whom they
have displaced by characterising it as an obligation to offer ‘asylum as
reparation’ to those refugees. I thereby forge a theoretical link between
two concepts that are standardly discussed in isolation from one another,
and develop a detailed and systematic account of when this obligation
obtains. As noted above, my starting point is a general moral principle,
which I term the principle of reparation. I make no explicit argument
in support of this principle, but rather assume it as an important part
of the fabric of modern moral, political and legal thought and practice
within, but not limited to, liberal-democratic states, and put it to work
in a context to which it has not been explicitly applied. The argument

10 I am grateful to Blair Peruniak for suggesting this point.

 1 INTRODUCTION 11

made here effectively has a ‘conditional character’,11 suggesting that ‘if

one believes in the principle of reparation, then one has good grounds for
also believing that states at times bear a special obligation to offer asylum
as reparation to certain refugees’.12
As my opening comments make clear, the argument of this book is
animated by the observation that forced migration often has external
causes. However, my main intention in this work is to offer a theoretical
framework which can then be used to assign reparative responsibilities
to protect particular refugees through asylum in a more justifiable and
convincing way. This framework may be of use to those who take a
variety of empirical views on the contemporary causes of forced migra-
tion, from the belief that only a small proportion of the world’s refugees
are generated through external forces to the conviction that most, if not
all, refugees are produced this way. The theory of asylum as reparation
developed here is, therefore, amenable to a range of views on the causes
of contemporary displacement.

Structure of the Argument

This book is divided into three main parts. In Part I, I lay out my repar-
ative approach, and explain the ways in which it constitutes an alternative
to the dominant humanitarian understanding of asylum. In Chapter 2,
I begin by examining the nature of humanitarian asylum, and make a
distinction between the way in which this mode of asylum is currently
understood in political theory and some practice on the one hand, and its
most defensible form on the other. In Chapter 3, I more precisely articu-
late the principle of reparation that I use to guide the subsequent analysis,
and explain the ways in which asylum may act as a form of reparation for
the unjustified harms of displacement. Asylum, I suggest, may constitute
forms of restitution (where effort is made to recreate the conditions that

11 For a rectificatory argument with a parallel structure, see Butt (2009: 14).
12 The argument presented in this book is also therefore of a contextualist character,
taking one principle that is firmly embedded in a particular normative context, rather than
basing it on any foundational or metaphysical truth. Although this renders the argument
readily applicable to liberal-democratic states (given both their commitment to principles
of reparation and their roles in the production of refugees), it also potentially applies to
non-democratic states which also generate refugees and adhere in their laws and policies
to a conception of reparative justice. For a discussion of contextualism with reference to
the ethics of immigration, see Carens (2004).
12 J. SOUTER

held before a violation occurred); compensation (where a monetary or

material good is provided to make up for that violation); and satisfaction
(where an apology for, or other form of recognition of the violation is
offered). I argue that asylum, while capable of offering only a fairly weak
form of restitution, may have a strong compensatory role, and can also
potentially function as a form of satisfaction.
In Part II, I aim to identify the main conditions under which asylum
should function as a form of reparation. Over the course of the following
four chapters, I apply the principle of reparation outlined in Chapter 3 to
the case of refugees seeking asylum in another state. I argue that a state
owes asylum as reparation to refugees when it bears outcome responsi-
bility13 for subjecting them to the risk or experience of unjustified harm;
when asylum is the most fitting form of reparation for this harm that is
available to those states; and the state in question is capable of offering
this form of asylum to the refugees who are owed it. Throughout these
four chapters, I work through and defend each of the elements of this
formulation.
I begin this process in Chapter 4, highlighting the variety of both direct
and diffuse ways in which external states may bear outcome responsibility
for refugee movements. I defend the condition that a state must bear
outcome responsibility for displacement in order to owe asylum as repa-
ration to them, as opposed to other types of responsibility, such as its
causal or moral forms. I also address the difficulty of accurately attributing
responsibility for displacement to external states in causally complex cases
in which responsibility is shared by many actors given their joint or sepa-
rate behaviour over extended periods. Nevertheless, I suggest that such
responsibility may be justifiably assigned even in these causally murkier
cases through a political and deliberative process.
In Chapter 5, I examine the condition that a state owes asylum as repa-
ration to refugees when those refugees have suffered unjustified harm,
or are at risk of suffering such harm. While the idea that perpetrators
of unjustified harm should offer reparation is philosophically uncontro-
versial, I focus on external states’ reparative responsibilities to refugees

13 Outcome responsibility, as I explain in Chapter 3, is a term broadly defined by the

legal scholar Tony Honoré (1999: 14) as ‘being responsible for the good and harm we
bring about by what we do’, and has been taken up in work on global justice by David
Miller (2007: ch. 4).
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

produced by justified humanitarian interventions aimed at halting atroci-

ties in two rarer (and perhaps hypothetical) kinds of cases. The first type
of case would arise where displacement caused as part of such an inter-
vention could conceivably be fully just. In contrast, the second kind of
case would arise where the production of refugees would be tragically
justified, in the seemingly paradoxical sense that this would involve states
unavoidably engaging in wrongdoing despite the existence of an overall
justification for their actions. Such states, I suggest, would thereby gain
what some political theorists have come to refer to as ‘dirty hands’ in the
process (Walzer, 1973). I argue that, if cases of tragically justified displace-
ment were genuinely to arise, reparative responsibilities for the refugees in
question would have be shared among the international society of states at
large. This would be required given both considerations of international
fairness and the fact that outcome responsibility for the effects of justified
humanitarian intervention can plausibly be seen as being shared among
the states comprising international society, rather than being borne by the
intervening states alone.
In Chapter 6, I address the condition that, for a state to owe asylum as
reparation to refugees, asylum must be the most fitting form of reparation
for the harms of refugeehood that is available to that state. Acknowl-
edging that asylum is not always the most fitting form of reparation for
these harms, I identify some of the reparative strengths of other forms
of refugee protection and assistance, such as voluntary repatriation and
in situ interventions, and recognise certain reparative weaknesses and
biases within asylum in its current form. Despite these weaknesses, the
chapter contends, there are genuinely conditions under which asylum is
the most fitting form of reparation for refugees that is available to states.
I also outline some of the considerations that determine which form of
refugee protection is most reparatively fitting for any given refugee, such
as their choices, location, social ties and group identity, and suggest that
the content of reparative asylum needs to be tailored to address particular
harms that prompted refugees’ flight.
In Chapter 7, I examine some of the ways in which genuine limitations
to states’ capacities might legitimately prevent them from fulfilling their
reparative obligations to refugees, whether these constraints are material,
political or even conceivably cultural. If states were genuinely unable to
discharge their reparative responsibilities to refugees through grants of
asylum, I argue that this would not let them off the hook morally, as
they should seek to progressively realise reparative justice in this context
14 J. SOUTER

as their capacity increases. I also address a consequentialist challenge to

the notion of asylum as reparation, which states that using asylum repar-
atively is unjustified wherever it leads refugees to gain a lesser quality of
protection as a result.
Having elaborated a theoretical framework for understanding asylum as
a potential form of reparation, in Part III of this book I turn to explore
some of the potential practical implications of this idea for domestic and
international asylum politics. In Chapter 8, I focus on two implications for
states’ asylum systems on the domestic level. The first concerns whether
the demands of reparative justice might warrant unfairly differential treat-
ment of refugees within a state of asylum depending on which actors
caused their flight. The second, in contrast, relates to how reparative and
humanitarian claimants should be prioritised if a state found itself in a
scenario in which it genuinely could not offer asylum to all refugees who
were owed it. In this chapter, I examine different ways in which states of
asylum can seek to navigate ethical tensions between the requirements of
reparative justice and humanitarianism in this context.
In Chapter 9, in contrast, I shift focus to the international level and
seek to anticipate some of the possible effects that the introduction of
reparative thinking into the international politics of refugee protection
might have. I begin by envisaging the ways in which this kind of thinking
might affect the operation of international refugee responsibility-sharing
schemes, at first making the assumption that all states would agree to
comply with their reparative obligations to refugees within such a scheme.
I then drop this assumption and consider the potential effects on inter-
national refugee protection in the much more likely scenario of states’
partial compliance. The chapter speculates as to the nature of the incen-
tives that might be created in this nonideal scenario, identifying certain
perverse incentives and moral hazards that the pursuit of reparative justice
might create in this context. Finally, I conclude this book by recapitu-
lating its main arguments and identifying broader questions raised by my
approach, reflecting upon its continuing relevance to refugee protection
and international politics as the twenty-first century progresses.
In elaborating this reparative approach to asylum, it may be that it is
vulnerable to attack from two sides: by those who see it as unrealistic or
even utopian in some respects, and by those who view it as insufficiently
radical in others. On the one hand, the account may be seen as unreal-
istic simply because I am open to the possibility that states may comply
with their obligations to offer asylum as reparation to refugees whom
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

they have displaced. This may seem unwarranted, given the highly limited
extent to which states—perhaps at times conscious of the admission of
failure implicitly involved in protecting refugees from states where their
interventions were supposed to have delivered freedom and security—
have recognised or fulfilled their reparative obligations towards refugees.
It may also seem unrealistic given that the analysis in this book does
not, in principle, apply only to those defined as refugees under the 1951
Refugee Convention, who have a well-founded fear of persecution on
various grounds, but to any individual forced to flee serious harm; a defi-
nition which would enjoin states to host far greater numbers of refugees
than they are generally prepared to.14 Although much of this book is an
exercise in what has become known as nonideal political theory—in that
my focus is upon the proper response to the injustices of displacement,
generated by states’ lack of compliance with ideal moral requirements—it
may also fall within what Charles Mills (2009: 178) has described as ‘rec-
tificatory ideal’ theory, which aims to identify ‘what is ideally required to
remedy past injustices’ (emphasis added).15 Thus, while the account of
asylum as reparation advanced here is concerned with these injustices, it
seeks to identify the ideal remedy for these injustices, in a way that may
well be far from being politically feasible.
On the other hand, others may detect a certain conservatism built
into the theoretical framework of asylum as reparation itself, given that
it involves presupposing what Joseph Carens (2013: 10) has dubbed
‘the conventional moral view on immigration’ that states are entitled to
control their borders. This view, some have argued, leads liberal states
to violate the principles of freedom and equality to which they are
committed (e.g. Carens, 1987). Indeed, instead of challenging a view
of asylum as a ‘loophole in otherwise restrictive immigration policies’
(Price, 2009: 3–4), I argue only that the responsibility of external states
for certain refugees’ flight can provide those refugees with one specific
ground for passing through this loophole. It may even be the case that
the idea of asylum as reparation would not make sense in a world of open
borders for, in that scenario, refugees with reparative claims would simply
be acting on their general entitlements when entering another state, and

14 For broader theoretical definitions of the refugee, see Shacknove (1985), and Gibney
(2004: 7).
15 For a critique of the use of idealism and realism in political theory concerning
refugees, see Sandelind (2019).
16 J. SOUTER

the state responsible for their flight would consequently have to offer
reparation to them in other ways.16 While a reparative argument for open
borders could be mounted if one established that all migration is the
product of external states’ actions, as Jonathan Seglow (2013: 2556) has
recognised, reparative justice ‘does not call for open borders when no
harm has occurred’ (see also Song, 2018: 82, 92).
Nevertheless, there is value in running both ideal and nonideal argu-
ments on parallel tracks, as it were. Even if the idea that the powerful
may voluntarily hold themselves accountable for the displacement they
cause seems unrealistic and we need instead to pursue some course of
action that falls short of Mills’ rectificatory ideal in this context, we still
have to know what this ideal consists of, so as to ensure that we do not
end up confusing the normatively desirable with the practically possible.
Similarly, it is possible to support open borders as a longer-term political
goal while at the same time advocating asylum as reparation for certain
refugees in the meantime, given the obstinate political reality of immigra-
tion controls. Asylum as reparation, therefore, is significant as a potential
means of offering some measure of justice to refugees in a deeply unjust
and bordered world.

References
Achiume, E. T. (2019). Migration as decolonization. Stanford Law Review,
71(6), 1509–1574.
Adepoju, A. (1982). The dimension of the refugee problem in Africa. African
Affairs, 81(322), 21–35.
Amighetti, S., & Nuti, A. (2016). A nation’s right to exclude and the colonies.
Political Theory, 44(4), 541–566.
Anthony, C. G. (1991). Africa’s refugee crisis: State building in historical
perspective. International Migration Review, 25(3), 574–591.
Bader, V. (2005). The ethics of immigration. Constellations, 12(3), 331–361.
Blake, M. (2013). Immigration, causality, and complicity. In S. R. Ben-Porath
& R. M. Smith (Eds.), Varieties of sovereignty and citizenship (pp. 111–123).
University of Philadelphia Press.
Bosniak, L. (2016). Wrongs, rights and regularization. Moral Philosophy and
Politics, 3(2), 187–222.
Bradley, M. (2013). Refugee repatriation: Justice, responsibility and redress.
Cambridge University Press.

16 I am grateful to Daniel Butt and Katy Long for prompting this point.
 1 INTRODUCTION 17

Bradley, M., & Duthie, R. (2014). Introduction. Journal of Refugee Studies,

27 (2), 161–170.
Butt, D. (2009). Rectifying international injustice: Principles of compensation and
restitution between nations. Oxford University Press.
Buxton, R. (2019). Reparative justice for climate refugees. Philosophy, 94(2),
193–219.
Carens, J. H. (1987). Aliens and citizens: The case for open borders. Review of
Politics, 49(2), 251–273.
Carens, J. H. (2003). Who should get in? The ethics of immigration admissions.
Ethics and International Affairs, 17 (1), 95–110.
Carens, J. H. (2004). A contextual approach to political theory. Ethical Theory
and Moral Practice, 7 (2), 117–132.
Carens, J. H. (2013). The ethics of immigration. Oxford University Press.
Chatty, D., & Marfleet, P. (2009). Iraq’s refugees—Beyond ‘tolerance’. Forced
migration policy briefing 4. Refugee Studies Centre.
Chatty, D., & Mansour, N. (2012). Displaced Iraqis: Predicaments and percep-
tions in exile in the Middle East. Refuge, 28(1), 97–107.
Chimni, B. S. (1998). The geopolitics of refugee studies: A view from the South.
Journal of Refugee Studies, 11(4), 350–374.
Coen, A. (2017). Capable and culpable? The United States, RtoP, and refugee
responsibility-sharing. Ethics and International Affairs, 31(1), 71–92.
Collste, G. (2015). Global rectificatory justice. Palgrave Macmillan.
Davidovic, J. (2016). What do we owe refugees: J us ad bellum, duties to refugees
from armed conflict zones and the right to asylum. Journal of Global Ethics,
12(3), 347–364.
Dodge, T. (2012). Iraq: From war to a new authoritarianism. Routledge.
Draper, J. (2018). Responsibility and climate-induced displacement. Global
Justice: Theory Practice Rhetoric, 11(2), 59–80.
Dunford, R., & Neu, M. (2019). The responsibility to protect in a world of
already existing intervention. European Journal of International Relations,
25(4), 1080–1102.
Eckersley, R. (2015). The common but differentiated responsibilities of states
to assist and receive ‘climate refugees.’ European Journal of Political Theory,
14(4), 481–500.
Ferracioli, L. (2020). Refugees, rescue, and choice. In D. Miller & C. Straehle
(Eds.), The political philosophy of refuge (pp. 193–210). Cambridge University
Press.
Ferris, E., & Kirişci, K. (2016). The consequences of chaos: Syria’s humanitarian
crisis and the failure to protect. Brookings Institution Press.
FitzGerald, D. S. (2019). Refuge beyond reach: How rich democracies repel asylum
seekers. Oxford University Press.
18 J. SOUTER

Gibney, M. (1986). Strangers or friends: Principles for a new alien admission

policy. Greenwood.
Gibney, M. (1991). U.S. foreign policy and the creation of refugee flows. In H.
Adelman (Ed.) Refugee policy. Canada and the United States (pp. 81–111).
York Lanes Press Ltd.
Gibney, M. J. (2004). The ethics and politics of asylum: Liberal democracy and the
response to refugees. Cambridge University Press.
Glanville, L. (2020). Hypocritical inhospitality: The global refugee crisis in the
light of history. Ethics and International Affairs, 34(1), 3–12.
Holtug, N. (2016). A fair distribution of refugees in the European Union.
Journal of Global Ethics, 12(3), 279–288.
Honoré, T. (1999). Responsibility and Fault. Hart Publishing.
Hovil, L. (2019). Telling truths about migration. International Journal of
Transitional Justice, 13(2), 199–205.
Hovil, L., & Lomo, Z. A. (2015). Forced displacement and the crisis of citizen-
ship in Africa’s Great Lakes region: Rethinking refugee protection and durable
solutions. Refuge, 31(2), 39–50.
Kling, J. (2019). War refugees: Risk, justice, and moral responsibility. Lexington
Press.
Klinghoffer, A. J. (1998). The international dimension of genocide in Rwanda.
Palgrave Macmillan.
Lennox, M. (1993). Refugees, racism, and reparations: A critique of the United
States’ Haitian immigration policy. Stanford Law Review, 45(3), 687–724.
McAdam, J. (2012). Climate change, forced migration and international law.
Oxford University Press.
Miller, D. (2007). National responsibility and global justice. Oxford University
Press.
Miller, D. (2016). Strangers in our midst: The political philosophy of immigration.
Harvard University Press.
Mills, C. W. (2009). Rawls on race/race in rawls. The Southern Journal of
Philosophy, 47 , 161–184.
Nevins, J. (2019). Migration as reparations. In R. Jones (Ed.), Open borders: In
defense of free movement (pp. 129–140). University of Georgia Press.
Nili, S. (2011). Humanitarian disintervention. Journal of Global Ethics, 7 (1),
33–46.
Otunnu, O. (1992). Too many, too long: African refugee crisis revisited. Refuge,
12(3), 18–26.
Owen, D. (2016). In loco civitatis: On the normative basis of the institution
of refugeehood and responsibilities for refugees. In S. Fine & L. Ypi (Eds.),
Migration in political theory: The ethics of movement and membership (pp. 269–
289). Oxford University Press.
Owen, D. (2020). What do we owe to refugees? Polity Press.
 1 INTRODUCTION 19

Parekh, S. (2020). Reframing the refugee crisis: From rescue to interconnection.

Ethics and Global Politics, 13(1), 21–32.
Pogge, T. W. (2002). World poverty and human rights: Cosmopolitan rights and
reforms. Polity.
Price, M. (2009). Rethinking asylum: History, purpose, and limits. Cambridge
University Press.
Prunier, G. (1995). The Rwanda crisis: History of a genocide. Hurst and
Company.
Romm, J. (2018). Climate change: What everyone needs to know. Oxford
University Press.
Sandelind, C. (2019). Can the welfare state justify restrictive asylum policies? A
critical approach. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 22, 331–346.
Seglow, J. (2013). Immigration. In H. LaFollette (Ed.), The international
encyclopaedia of ethics (Vol. V, pp. 2549–2560). Wiley-Blackwell.
Shacknove, A. E. (1985). Who is a refugee? Ethics, 95(2), 274–284.
Shacknove, A. E. (1988). American duties to refugees: Their scope and limits.
In M. Gibney (Ed.), Open borders? Closed societies? The ethical and political
issues (pp. 131–149). Greenwood Press.
Smith, R. M. (2008). The principle of constituted identities and the obligation
to include. Ethics and Global Politics, 1(3), 139–153.
Smith, R. M. (2014). National obligations and noncitizens: Special rights, human
rights, and immigration. Politics and Society, 42(3), 381–398.
Song, S. (2018). Immigration and democracy. Oxford University Press.
Souleimanov, E. A., & Dzutsati, V. (2018). Russia’s Syria war: A strategic trap?
Middle East Policy, 25(2), 42–50.
Stansfield, G. (2007). Iraq: People, history, politics. Polity.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). (2021). Global
trends: Forced displacement in 2020. https://www.unhcr.org/uk/statis
tics/unhcrstats/60b638e37/global-trends-forced-displacement-2020.html
Accessed 23 June 2021.
United States. (2008). S.1651 (110th): Refugee crisis in Iraq Act, 110th
Congress, 2007–2009. Text as of June 19, 2007 (Introduced). https://www.
congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/senate-bill/1651/text. Accessed 24 June
2020.
Walzer, M. (1973). Political action: The problem of dirty hands. Philosophy and
Public Affairs, 2(2), 160–180.
Walzer, M. (1983). Spheres of justice: A defence of pluralism and equality. Basic
Books.
Wilcox, S. (2007). Immigrant admissions and global relations of harm. Journal
of Social Philosophy, 38(2), 274–291.
 PART I

Asylum as a Form of Reparation

 CHAPTER 2

Asylum and its Humanitarian Function

In very basic terms, asylum is an institution that offers protection to

refugees in a state other than their own. However, if we seek to move
beyond this somewhat vague initial definition, we find much disagree-
ment among political theorists—as well as commentators, politicians and
citizens—over the form that asylum should take. What exactly should this
protection consist of, and for how long should refugees be entitled to
it? How should the category of ‘refugee’ be understood? How should
refugees be able to access asylum? Relatedly, there is disagreement over
the moral and political ends to which asylum should be put. In particular,
both theoretical and policy-focused discussions reflect a sharp divergence
between a humanitarian picture of asylum, which views this institution
primarily as a tool for saving lives and relieving suffering, and more polit-
ically resonant accounts, which see the purpose of asylum in terms of the
restoration of refugees’ political membership (see Owen, 2020: 4–11).
Before examining the ways in which asylum may act as a form of repa-
ration for the unjustified harms of displacement, as I do in the bulk of this
book, it is important to clarify the range of moral functions that asylum
may assume. This is important because, as we shall see, if states chose
to use asylum as a form of reparation in practice, this reparative function
would not operate in a vacuum, but would rather interact with a variety of
other moral functions that asylum possesses, in ways that raise challenging

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 23

Switzerland AG 2022
J. Souter, Asylum as Reparation, International Political Theory,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62448-4_2
24 J. SOUTER

ethical and political questions. As I explore in Chapter 8, the relation-

ship between asylum’s humanitarian and reparative functions cannot be
assumed to be necessarily harmonious, and there may have to be trade-
offs between them by states when they fashion their asylum policies in
practice.

Asylum’s Moral Functions

Political theorists have already identified a number of moral and polit-
ical ends to which asylum can be put, and these can be organised into
a typology of what I describe as asylum’s moral functions.1 However,
this project might be thought to be too high-minded, given that asylum
has standardly been used by states throughout its history not for other-
regarding moral purposes but simply to pursue their own interests,
providing them with, among other things, ‘a means of undermining one’s
enemies, gaining skills and labour, augmenting a declining population or
legitimating one regime over another’ (Schuster, 2003: 63). Neverthe-
less, as the fundamental moral purpose of asylum is the protection of
refugees, and states often make moral claims when seeking to justify their
asylum policies—take, for instance, the United Kingdom’s repeated asser-
tions of a ‘proud tradition’ of protecting refugees (see Mayblin, 2018)—it
is reasonable to hold them to these.
The typology of asylum’s moral functions that follows here can be
seen as a series of ideal types, which are at times imperfectly realised to
various extents in states’ actual asylum policies, and mirrored in some of
the recent moral claims made by refugee advocates.2 As such, these moral
functions may (and often do) significantly overlap in practice, and can

1 It might be objected here that, instead of writing of ‘asylum’s moral functions’,

the matter is better discussed simply in terms of moral grounds of , or justifications for,
asylum. This may be so because notions of humanitarian and reparative asylum relate
asylum to particular moral reasons that states have for granting it. However, the grounds
of asylum and its moral functions are interlinked, for such grounds may lead states to
grant asylum to refugees in ways which do things, whether materially (where asylum
meets basic needs in line with its humanitarian function) or symbolically (for instance,
where it expresses solidarity with certain refugees). It is appropriate, therefore, to describe
asylum as having moral functions. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for the Journal
of Social Philosophy for prompting this point.
2 For instance, Germany’s welcoming of large numbers of asylum seekers in 2015, and
the responses of German civil society, can be seen as an expression, albeit imperfectly, of
asylum’s humanitarian moral function (see Funk, 2016).
 2 ASYLUM AND ITS HUMANITARIAN FUNCTION 25

be difficult to disentangle from each another straightforwardly. While any

state’s asylum system may assume these functions, there is perhaps more
scope for a range of them to form part of asylum policy within liberal-
democratic states, given that these functions reflect some of these states’
existing normative commitments (despite the fact that they rarely, if ever,
honour these commitments consistently). They are also especially relevant
to liberal democracies because such states offer opportunities for demo-
cratic participation to citizens who hold a wide range of ethical, cultural
and religious views, which may allow asylum to take on a broader range
of moral functions than may be the case in a non-democratic state.3
Some of these roles can be seen as constituting asylum’s core moral
functions, in the sense that any grant of asylum will act in those ways.
These functions tend to correspond to states’ general duties towards all
refugees. Asylum’s humanitarian role, which I examine in more depth
later on in this chapter, can be understood in these terms, for the
following reasons. Humanitarianism is fundamentally concerned with
protecting individuals from the risk of serious harm. And this risk of
serious harm is the sine qua non of an entitlement to asylum; without
it, one may have a right to admission or residence in another state, but
not to asylum per se. When we refer to asylum, as opposed to other forms
of stay in another state, we are referring to protection from such harm:
it would be completely out of step with established usage to describe the
residence of, say, a wealthy businessperson in another state as a form of
asylum unless they were at risk in their state of origin. Therefore, any
grant of asylum can be seen as playing a humanitarian role.4
Another core moral function of asylum is what can be termed its
legitimacy-repair role.5 If one sees the legitimacy of the international
system of states as hinging on its provision of basic rights for all who live
within it, then the creation of refugees ruptures this legitimacy, and grants

3 However, some of these moral functions may be more likely to take root in other
kinds of state; for instance, asylum may potentially function most strongly as an expression
of religious solidarity in a theocratic state.
4 This is the case despite the fact that that there is disagreement among theorists over
what kinds of harm give rise to an entitlement to asylum, with some defending the
restriction of asylum to those at risk of persecution (e.g. Cherem, 2016; Lister, 2013).
However, even if asylum is restricted in this way, it will nevertheless play a humanitarian
role, by meeting the needs of refugees threatened by persecution.
5 I have borrowed this terminology from David Owen (2020: 47).
26 J. SOUTER

of asylum can act as a means of (re-)establishing it (Carens, 2013: 196;

Owen, 2016, 2020: 44–54). This, again, is a core function of asylum,
because any grant of asylum can contribute to increasing the legitimacy
of the international order. This function corresponds to a general duty
of all states to fulfil their share of a collective responsibility to ensure the
legitimacy of the system of states that they help to constitute.
Other functions of asylum can be seen as contingent, in that they are
roles which asylum assumes only under certain circumstances, and only
some grants of asylum will act in these ways.6 They are also particu-
laristic, in the sense that they correspond to various special obligations
that some states may bear only towards particular, and not all, refugees
on the basis of specific connections between them or the conduct of
the refugees in question.7 Asylum’s contingent moral functions include
its condemnatory role, where grants of asylum communicate condemna-
tion of the refugee-producing actions of other states (Price, 2009) and
its membership-restoring role, where surrogate membership is offered to
those whose social standing has been denied by their state of origin (see
Cherem, 2016; Lister, 2013). They also include its solidaristic role, where
asylum expresses solidarity with those with whom a state shares certain
ideological, cultural, postcolonial or religious affinities (see Hobbs &
Souter, 2020; Walzer, 1983: 49). Asylum may even operate in a desert-
based mode, by effectively rewarding certain refugees for their assistance
to their state of asylum prior to their admission (Miller, 2015: 402–403),
such as interpreters and translators employed by coalition military forces
operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among these contingent functions of
asylum sits the potential reparative role with which this book is principally

6 My distinction between asylum’s core and contingent moral functions is not intended
to imply that the former are necessarily more ethically significant, or that they should
always be ranked over the latter in cases where they conflict. As I argue in Chapter 8,
the priority that should be given to core and contingent functions of asylum, such as its
humanitarian and reparative roles, is importantly context-dependent. Instead, I make this
distinction mainly in order to point to whether particular moral functions of asylum are
always at play when grants of it are made to refugees, or only at times. I am grateful to
Clara Sandelind, and Blair Peruniak, for comments that prompted this point.
7 In David Miller’s terms, these moral functions apply to those he describes as ‘par-
ticularity claimants’, who he defines as those ‘whose claim is that they already have a
particular relationship with the receiving state that justifies their request to be admitted’
(Miller, 2015: 401; see also Miller, 2016: 77). However, Miller refers to immigrants more
widely, rather than only refugees.
 2 ASYLUM AND ITS HUMANITARIAN FUNCTION 27

concerned, a classification that does not diminish its significance given the
frequently external causes of contemporary forced migration.
Again, these can all be properly classed as contingent functions of
asylum, simply because not every grant of asylum plays these roles. For
instance, asylum cannot meaningfully express condemnation of refugees’
states of origin in cases where displacement was the sole responsibility of
external states, and nor will it express solidarity of the sort envisaged here
in the absence of any affinity that grounds a solidaristic relation between
the refugee and their state of asylum.8 While we can imagine a scenario
in which all refugees are owed asylum on these contingent grounds—for
instance, if all refugees happened to be displaced as a result of external
states’ actions—in our actual world they apply only to some refugees.
This account of asylum’s moral functions is in some respects plural-
istic, for it recognises a variety of moral ends to which this institution
may be put, and recognises the probability that potentially tragic conflicts
will open out among these functions.9 However, it might be objected
at this point that, rather than potentially operating simultaneously, some
of the moral functions of asylum canvassed here should be seen as
being mutually exclusive, and some should be simply dropped by states.
For instance, Matthew Price argues that asylum’s fundamental roles are
to offer surrogate membership to refugees at risk of persecution and
to express condemnation of refugee-producing states with a view to
reforming those states, and not to function in a humanitarian manner.
This, Price argues, is because, given the inefficiency of asylum as a
humanitarian tool in comparison with in situ aid, ‘[f]rom a humanitarian
perspective, it is hard to see why one should prefer asylum to other, less
costly ways of helping refugees’ (Price, 2009: 12). It is also because,
according to Price, the humanitarian approach ignores the fact that perse-
cution is not just another harm that can befall refugees, but instead has
a distinct character that calls for a ‘distinctive remedy’ (Price, 2009: 13).
Price also contends that the adoption of a humanitarian form of asylum
by states would ‘eliminate from asylum any expressive valence’, as the

8 For a contrasting account of cosmopolitan solidarity towards refugees, see Hobbs and
Souter (2020).
9 In this, it shares affinities with the broader philosophy of value pluralism, as repre-
sented in the work of theorists such as Isaiah Berlin (2013). For discussion of ways in
which practices of asylum may involve tragic moral conflicts, see Blake (2020) and Miller
(2016: 93).
28 J. SOUTER

humanitarian commitment to political neutrality would render it inca-

pable of condemning the persecutory actions of refugees’ states of origin
(Price, 2009: 72).
Although a thorough engagement with Price’s argument stretches
beyond the scope of this chapter, it can be seen as mistaken in some
key ways. First, even if we grant Price’s claim that asylum is inefficient
as a humanitarian tool, asylum can be preferable to in situ aid from a
humanitarian perspective in one important respect: whereas in situ aid
standardly allows only for basic subsistence in the highly insecure condi-
tions of refugee camps—and fails to protect basic rights to goods such as
physical security, employment and freedom of movement (Parekh, 2017:
31–36)—humanitarian asylum in a capable state can immediately trans-
form a refugee’s life, by robustly meeting their basic rights.10 Second,
Price overstates the moral value both of condemning persecution and
explicitly recognising its status as a distinct harm, over the goal of meeting
refugees’ basic needs. As Kieran Oberman (2020: 89) has recently argued,

[i]t might be true that condemning persecution is of inherent value, but

whatever value it has pales in comparison to the value of safeguarding
those in need. If one could either express condemnation of persecution
by admitting one refugee or save more lives by admitting other migrants
then, all else being equal, one should save more lives by admitting other
migrants.

Third, Price ignores the fact that it is not only asylum’s condemnatory
function that has the ‘expressive character’ (Price, 2009: 69) he seeks
to protect, and that this character can be retained while maintaining its
humanitarian function and other moral roles. As I have suggested above,
grants of asylum can be expressive in a wider range of ways than those
recognised by Price—for instance, of solidarity and desert—and human-
itarian asylum is no exception. As I discuss below, the commitment to
political neutrality, which Price claims precludes the use of humanitarian
asylum as a means of condemning refugees’ states of origin, is merely one
contingent strand of humanitarianism, and other humanitarian traditions
do engage in overtly political ways and openly condemn the perpetrators

10 As Alexander Betts (2006: 159–160) has argued, it is not clear that asylum in a
Western state is invariably less efficient than in-region protection: if efficiency is theorised
so as to encompass social and political, rather than merely financial, considerations, then
asylum in the West may at times be the more efficient option.
 2 ASYLUM AND ITS HUMANITARIAN FUNCTION 29

of abuse. The humanitarian and condemnatory functions of asylum are

therefore not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Asylum should, then, be viewed as having a wider range of moral func-
tions than Price recognises, including its core humanitarian role. Before
turning to identify the key features of humanitarian asylum, it is impor-
tant to note that, although asylum can be understood minimally as the
protection of refugees in a state other than their own, it may be that
both the precise content of asylum and the nature of refugees’ entitle-
ments vary according to which moral function of asylum is being engaged
in any given case. For instance, some theorists have suggested that the
protection of refugees at risk of persecution should operate with the
assumption of permanent residence and citizenship, whereas some non-
persecuted refugees claiming protection on humanitarian grounds may be
subject, within constraints, to repatriation (e.g. Owen, 2020: 59).11 As I
outline in the next section of this chapter, the humanitarian conception of
asylum has its own implications for the content of asylum and the specific
entitlements to protection of particular refugees.

Asylum’s Humanitarian Function

Given that the humanitarian approach to asylum has become dominant
in both theoretical discussion and much political rhetoric and practice
concerning refugee protection, it has become an important starting point
for ethical analysis of states’ responsibilities in this context. As I noted
earlier, in order to grasp the relationship between asylum’s humanitarian
function and its reparative role, it is necessary to first spend some time
understanding what asylum’s humanitarian function actually consists of.
In particular, I distinguish between the manner in which humanitarian
asylum is standardly understood and justified, and its most defensible form
in theory. As we shall see, the two are significantly different from each
other.

11 In this vein, David Owen (2020: ch. 2) distinguishes between three modes of refugee
protection: asylum (consisting of surrogate membership offered to those at risk of perse-
cution); sanctuary (offering protection to those fleeing generalised violence); and refuge
(offering protection to those escaping situations such as famine and natural disaster).
However, while recognising that these categories capture normatively salient differences,
I treat asylum as an overarching status within which all three types of claims can be put,
given that each has a common basis of protection from serious harm in another state.
30 J. SOUTER

Existing Understandings of Humanitarian Asylum

The basic humanitarian view of asylum is reflected in the following state-
ment by two influential writers on refugee protection, Alexander Betts
and Paul Collier (2017: 6):

Put simply, refuge is about fulfilling a duty of rescue. Born out of our
common humanity, it is based on the simple recognition that we have
shared obligations towards our fellow human beings. Just as we cannot
stand by and watch a stranger in our own community suffering, so too we
have obligations towards distant strangers, when we are able to assist and
it is not significantly costly to do so. The content of that obligation should
involve meeting immediate needs and then returning people to normality
as quickly as possible thereafter.

From this broadly humanitarian perspective, asylum offers one impor-

tant means of simply protecting the basic needs of refugees and relieving
their suffering. This approach has been reflected in the history of the
modern international refugee regime and the practice of some states and
international organisations.12 Several developments have been cited to
establish this point. These include the fact that the Statute of the United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) views its work as
‘humanitarian and social’ (UNHCR, 1950: 6) and has widened its focus
throughout its history to assist a broad range of ‘persons of concern’13 ;
the appearance of regional instruments such as the 1969 Organisation of
African Unity Convention and the 1984 Cartagena Declaration signed
by Latin American states, both of which define the refugee more expan-
sively than the focus on persecution within the 1951 Refugee Convention;

12 Political theorists who have written on asylum have tended to follow suit, viewing
states’ responsibilities to refugees in primarily humanitarian terms. Some have done so
explicitly, in terms of ‘humanitarian concern’ (Carens, 2013: 195) or the ‘principle of
humanitarianism’ (Gibney, 2004: 231). Others, in contrast, have done so more implicitly
as a ‘principle of mutual aid’ (Walzer, 1983: 45) or a ‘samaritan duty’ (Altman & Wellman,
2009: 181).
13 Although the operation of UNHCR and practices of asylum by states are often
distinct, the former has shaped understandings of the latter over the course of its history,
by promoting more inclusive asylum policies, intervening on behalf of refugees in asylum
hearings, and even undertaking refugee status determination on behalf of certain states.
UNHCR’s humanitarianism can also be seen in its aid operations in response to refugee
crises in refugees’ regions of origin, which generate their own sets of urgent moral
questions. For a history of UNHCR, see Loescher (2001).
 2 ASYLUM AND ITS HUMANITARIAN FUNCTION 31

and the development of jurisprudence in Western states which interprets

the provisions of the Refugee Convention more inclusively (Owen, 2020:
24–34; Price, 2009: 5–6). In addition, humanitarian values are regularly
drawn on by civil society and advocacy organisations, which frame the
plight of refugees in these terms (e.g. Amnesty International, 2019).
Traces of the humanitarian approach can even at times be discerned
within reactions to refugees that seem inimical to it: although populist
and nationalistic political actors in liberal-democratic states have vocifer-
ously opposed the welcoming of refugees in recent years, where they have
recognised that their states bear some limited responsibilities to welcome
refugees, they have tended to frame these implicitly in humanitarian
terms.14
In abstract terms, humanitarian duty, on which humanitarian asylum is
based, can be characterised as impartial and general. It is impartial in
the sense that it is not concerned with the identity of the intended bene-
ficiary, but rather heeds only the severity or urgency of his or her need,
suffering or vulnerability.15 It is general in that it is directed at any indi-
vidual in need, regardless of any past interaction or relationship between
the benefactor and the intended beneficiary, whether that be a promise,
contract, bond or shared membership in a group, which would create a
special obligation towards that particular person. Common humanity is
all that is needed to give rise to this duty.
Viewing asylum as a tool for fulfilling states’ humanitarian duties
towards refugees has implications for the content, site, duration, means of
access and beneficiaries of asylum. Again, these may be distinct from those
which flow from other moral functions that asylum may assume. From a
humanitarian perspective, the content of asylum should be whatever is
needed to protect refugees’ basic needs robustly, which is often taken

14 For instance, the former leader of the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage,
admitted in 2013 that, unlike in the case of ‘economic migrants’, Western states have
a responsibility to admit Syrians ‘fleeing for their lives’ (Guardian, 2013). Furthermore,
the discourse of ‘bogus asylum seekers’ often perpetuated by populist politicians in liberal-
democratic states presupposes that, were refugees ‘genuine’, the receiving state would bear
a responsibility to protect them.
15 Humanitarian actors, exemplified by aid organisations such as the International
Committee of the Red Cross take impartiality to be one of their fundamental and guiding
principles, requiring that ‘assistance be based on need and not on the basis of nationality,
race, religion, gender, or political opinion’ (Barnett & Weiss, 2008: 3).
32 J. SOUTER

to be the protection of their basic human rights.16 Although immediate

and urgent need is all that is initially required for a grant of humanitarian
asylum, as refugees come to live alongside a state’s citizens, considerations
of social justice soon mean that refugees acquire entitlements beyond
the right to basic protection, such as additional socio-economic rights,
and even some rights to political participation.17 In this way, humani-
tarian asylum should quickly lead to opportunities for refugees to ‘rebuild
a meaningful social world’ (Gibney, 2015: 460) and to gain ‘access to
the means of autonomy’, which go well ‘beyond provision of food and
shelter’ (Straehle, 2020: 175).
Although the site of asylum may, in principle, be any location in which
these basic needs and rights can be protected, in practice this site will be
another state, given that the modern sovereign state remains the actor
most capable of securing basic rights. In contrast, refugee camps do not
function as a viable form of asylum, at least not in their current operation,
given their general failure to protect basic rights noted above. For the
humanitarian, the duration of asylum should be for as long as the threat
to the refugees’ basic needs persists, although this is often accompanied
by recognition that refugees’ (and other migrants’) residence should be
made permanent after a certain amount of time has elapsed (e.g. Carens,
2013: ch. 8). As Price (2009: 11) has noted, ‘if the purpose of asylum is
solely to address the refugee’s immediate need for protection, it is hard
to see why refuge continues to be needed once that immediate threat has
passed. Thus, the humanitarian approach implies that protection should
be only temporary’.
Asylum’s means of access is generally through refugees’ spontaneous
arrival. However, it is important to note that there is also a humanitarian
imperative for states to go beyond this, by opening legal routes to safety,
expanding their resettlement programmes or even undertaking evacuation
from their states of origin, as these alternative measures can remove the

16 Although humanitarianism and human rights are often seen as having distinct, though
overlapping, histories (Barnett, 2011a: 16), they can be seen to be closely interlinked
conceptually for, as some theorists have argued, human needs may themselves give rise
to human rights (e.g. Miller, 2007: 178–185). While a full account of what constitutes
a basic human right stretches beyond the confines of this work, I follow Henry Shue in
arguing that ‘rights to three particular substances—subsistence, security, and liberty—are
basic rights’ (Shue, 1996: 9).
17 For the argument that various state duties of asylum, owed to refugees following their
admission, are not based on a humanitarian duty of mutual aid, see Cavallero (2014).
 2 ASYLUM AND ITS HUMANITARIAN FUNCTION 33

need for refugees to undertake perilous and often fatal journeys.18 While
resettlement, which is accessed through an effective invitation to perma-
nent residence by a third-party state to a refugee already residing in a state
of first asylum that is unable to offer adequate protection to that refugee,
is viewed in refugee policy circles as distinct from asylum, it is not clear
that we should endorse this distinction at the level of theory, for reset-
tlement can be seen as a form of asylum in itself. This is because asylum
and resettlement differ principally in terms of their means of access, while
both offer the protection of refugees’ basic rights and needs in another
state.
Importantly, moreover, the humanitarian approach sees the potential
beneficiaries of asylum, in turn, as anyone whose basic needs are threat-
ened. In doing so, it makes a radical departure from the requirement
within the 1951 Refugee Convention that refugees have a ‘well-founded
fear of persecution’, by encompassing those fleeing other harms such
as generalised violence, natural disaster, severe poverty or environmental
degradation, and classifying them as refugees.
In summary, then, humanitarian asylum can be understood as
consisting of the protection of refugees’ basic needs and rights in a state
other than their own for as long as they remain at risk of serious harm
on return to their own state, which they may access through either their
spontaneous arrival, or through conventional resettlement or evacuation
undertaken by states of asylum. However, the humanitarian perspec-
tive also has important implications for the prioritisation of refugees for
asylum, and the proper distribution of duties towards refugees across
states. Given its focus on meeting basic needs, if states find they are
genuinely unable to protect all refugees in need of asylum, then a humani-
tarian approach would involve a process of triage, where the most necessi-
tous refugees would be given priority.19 When it comes to the distribution
of responsibilities to offer asylum to refugees, a humanitarian perspec-
tive implies, first and foremost, that states should act to do what they
can to protect refugees. Again, given the humanitarian focus on meeting
basic needs, states’ capacities are most relevant to the distribution of these

18 For this reason, the high levels of death in the Mediterranean Sea in 2015 led to
calls for ‘humanitarian visas’ to be issued to refugees to avoid the need for such deadly
maritime journeys (Betts, 2015).
19 For discussion of vulnerability as a selection criterion for states, see Miller (2020:
102–107).
34 J. SOUTER

responsibilities, rather than other factors such as their potential culpability

for causing refugee movements, or affinities they may share with certain
refugees. Although Miller and Straehle (2020: 9) have suggested that
proposals to institute international refugee responsibility-sharing schemes
‘do not consort well with the humanitarian approach, which portrays us
as having an open-ended but indeterminate obligation to help human
beings in need’, a case can be made that the fulfilment of humanitarian
duty requires the creation of such a scheme in order to ensure that all
refugees access the protection they need (see Kuosmanen, 2013: 36). If
the proper fulfilment of a duty includes the creation of the conditions
in which it can be securely fulfilled, and an international responsibility-
sharing scheme would create these conditions, then the institution of such
a scheme forms one part of states’ humanitarian duties towards refugees.
Yet this is not all, for there are also a number of more contingent
views and elements that have become attached to the idea and prac-
tice of humanitarian asylum throughout its history. First, and as Price
(2009: 7) emphasises, humanitarian asylum is often viewed as being in an
important sense politically neutral. As well as viewing its work as human-
itarian in nature, UNHCR’s Statute stipulates that the organisation’s
work, including its promotion of asylum as a response to refugees, will be
of an ‘entirely non-political character’ (UNHCR, 1950: 6). This aspira-
tion to political neutrality has generally involved a reluctance to make any
value judgement concerning the behaviour of refugee-producing states,
and a concern to bracket politically contentious questions on who bears
responsibility for refugee movements in the first place. As Karin Land-
gren (1998: 420) has expressed this view, ‘[r]efugee protection is not
concerned with attributing international responsibility for persecution. It
implies no prospect of redress or reparation, and refugee law does not
engage those responsible for the wrong’.20
Historically, a stance of political neutrality may have allowed states to
strike a balance between respect for the human rights of refugees on the
one hand, and their commitment to the principle of state sovereignty

20 This humanitarian aspiration to political neutrality may be responsible for the contrast
made by some theorists between humanitarian and political forms of asylum (Owen,
2020: 4–11; Price, 2009), which carries with it the implication that humanitarianism is
not political. While this may be true in some senses—for instance, humanitarian asylum
need not be directly tethered to any particular political ideology or faction—such a framing
ignores the ways in which humanitarian action, whether in the context of asylum or not,
is deeply bound up in power relations (see Long, 2013: 21).
 2 ASYLUM AND ITS HUMANITARIAN FUNCTION 35

on the other.21 Although asylum certainly can express condemnation of

other states’ actions (and especially where grants of asylum are accom-
panied by direct statements to that effect), asylum may, by operating
in an ostensibly neutral way, equally function as ‘a relief valve for the
states system’ (Orchard, 2014: 5), providing a means through which
states of asylum can aim to respond to the effects of other states’ actions
without entering into divisive criticism of those states. This is reflected
in the 1967 United Nations General Assembly Resolution on Territorial
Asylum, which asserted that ‘[t]he grant of asylum by a State is a peaceful
and humanitarian act and…as such, it cannot be regarded as unfriendly
by any state’ (quoted in Price, 2009: 7).
Second, it is not only the aspiration to political neutrality which leads
to a neglect of the causes of forced migration, for the humanitarian view
of asylum tends to take a highly synchronic approach that is primarily
concerned with the fact of refugees’ current need, and sets aside historical
questions concerning the provenance of, and retrospective responsibility
for, this need. As Miriam Ticktin (2016: 262) has observed, this ahistor-
ical focus may stem from the fact that humanitarianism is often seen as a
response to emergencies that may erupt, rather than longer-term processes
that foreseeably produce human suffering and displacement. This narrow
temporal focus is associated with what can be described as the mini-
malism of humanitarian asylum: instead of tackling the underlying drivers
of displacement more comprehensively, the basic humanitarian impulse is
to offer the equivalent of a ‘bed for the night’ (Rieff, 2002) to refugees.22
Third, although practices of humanitarian asylum may involve an indif-
ference to the causes of forced migration, it is curious that, in practice,
they may dovetail with an internalist view of displacement, which views
the lion’s share of responsibility for patterns of flight as lying with
refugees’ states of origin rather than with external states (Chimni, 1998:

21 This is in a similar manner to how this kind of posture has enabled humanitarian
organisations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to maintain
access to war zones in order to deliver aid without being perceived as a protagonist in
conflict.
22 It may also be linked to what is often seen as the paternalism of the humanitar-
ianism pursued by actors such as UNHCR (see Barnett, 2011b): the rush to provide
aid in emergency situations can lead to an assumption that humanitarian agencies act in
the best interests of refugees, despite minimal or no consultation with them. This has
prompted the now orthodox critique that humanitarian actors often treat refugees as
passive, depoliticised victims (e.g. Harrell-Bond, 2002; Malkki, 1996; Rajaram, 2002).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 CHAPTER LIV.
THE EGYPTIAN TURTLE.

Cum ventre humano tibi negotium est, qui nec ratione mitigatur, nec prece ullâ
flectitur.—Livy.

It is hard lines for an Egyptian turtle when he once gets turned on

his back in Aboukir Bay. After that, for the remaining term of his
natural life, it is all Ramadan with him, after sunset as well as after
sunrise. He is carried to Alexandria, and sold there, if a fine well-
grown reptile, for half a sovereign: the smaller reptiles go for less. He
is put on board a P. and O. boat, and carried to Southampton, all the
way on his back, for another half sovereign. Add to this whatever
one may have to pay for his railway journey, and you may take him
home with you, and two or three more with him for your friends, at no
great cost. Though perhaps it would be hardly worth while to give a
turtle to one who knows no other way of having him cooked than
converting him into soup.
Something ought to be done, and might be done to mitigate their
long fast from Aboukir Bay to London. At sea, gourmandizing is the
order of the day; but the turtle on board are famishing all the while. It
might not be ill done, if those, whose only occupation is eating, and
then eating again, were to give a thought to the difference in this
matter between themselves and those of their fellow-travellers who
are getting nothing at all to eat. It makes the matter worse that we
inflict starvation on the very creature we are contemplating as a feast
for ourselves. It is no justification to say, learnedly, that Chelonians
can dispense with food for long periods. It is bad for all concerned. It
is morally hardening to those who inflict unnecessary suffering, and
to those—the passengers on the P. and O. boats—who witness its
effects, progressing regularly from day to day. As the poor wretches
lie on their backs—there were about fifty on board the boat I came
home by—you see that the plastron, that is the name the belly shell
goes by, is changing its shape. At first it is convex. It gradually, as
the fasting is prolonged, loses its convexity, and becomes flat. This
must be bad, but there is worse yet to come. Times goes on, and
what had become flat, begins to sink, and becomes concave. The
fifty owners of these shrinking and subsiding stomachs must have
found the process very pinching: and the more so as they had
nothing else in particular to think about while lying all this time on
their backs. The alterations of shape they have been passing
through measured their sufferings. They had never themselves done
anything so bad to what they had fed on. How could they without
reason?
 CHAPTER LV.
INSECT PLAGUES.

Who can war with thousands wage?—Percy’s Reliques of Ancient Poetry.

As to the insect plagues of Egypt, I found the mosquitoes alone

annoying. Had I been in the country in the summer or autumn, my
experience would, I have no doubt, have been different. And as to
the mosquitoes, I found them seriously annoying only at Alexandria.
At one time I had my face, hands, and ankles very badly bitten. My
own carelessness, however, was the cause of this, for I was at that
time in the habit of reading and writing at night with open windows.
This was giving my bloodthirsty assailants, who had been attracted
by the candle, every facility. They had free ingress, and found their
victim off his guard and exposed to their attacks. At Zech’s hotel at
Cairo, I found no mosquitoes. In going up the river I had a chasse
every night, before I turned in, to clear off the few that might be in my
berth. I generally found one or two. Herodotus mentions the use by
the Egyptians of the mosquito net.
In a Belgravian hotel I have been badly bitten, and by a larger,
blacker, and more venomous kind of mosquito than those that forced
themselves on my notice in Egypt. On the same occasion I saw
ladies who were suffering so much from their attacks that they were
obliged to have recourse to medical treatment. This ferocious
species is supposed to have been imported to Thames-side in some
one or other of the earlier stages of insect existence, through the
medium of the water-tanks of our West African palm-oil traders.
It is curious that fleas, which so abound in Egypt, are not found in
Nubia. Many insects are very local: but one is surprised at finding
such a cosmopolite as the flea conspicuously absent in a country,
which might have been supposed especially adapted to his manners
and customs. In Egypt, as has been the case elsewhere, I often felt
industrious fleas at work upon me; but I am not aware that a flea
ever yet succeeded in biting me. Others I heard complaining much of
them.
The boat in which I went up the river had just been painted, and so
I saw nothing in it of the Egyptian bug; but I heard that they
abounded in other boats. I found the Hotel d’Europe, at Alexandria,
and Zech’s, at Cairo, quite free from them.
The domestic fly is about as troublesome in Egypt in winter as it is
in this country in autumn.
 CHAPTER LVI.
THE SHADOOF.

He shall pour the water out of his buckets.—Book of Numbers.

In Egypt, where mythology, manners and customs, writing, and all

the arts appear never to have had a period of infancy, or of
adolescence, but to have come into being all in a perfected state and
all together, it is hard to say what is older than other things. It is so
with everything Egyptian; and so, of course, with the shadoof, the
machine used in raising water, by human labour, for irrigating the
land. It is the oldest machine with which we are historically
acquainted: though, of course, it implies the use of the plough,
which, as well as the hoe, must have been brought into the valley of
the Nile by the immigrant ancestors of the Egyptians.
Mechanically, the shadoof is an application of the lever. In no
machine which the wit of man, aided by the accumulations of
science, has since invented, is the result produced so great in
proportion to the degree of power employed. The lever of the
shadoof is a long stout pole poised on a prop. The pole is at right
angles to the river. A large lump of clay from the spot is appended to
the inland end. To the river end is suspended a goat-skin bucket.
This is the whole apparatus. The man who is working it stands on
the edge of the river. Before him is a hole full of water, fed from the
passing stream. When working the machine, he takes hold of the
cord by which the empty bucket is suspended, and, bending down,
by the mere weight of his shoulders dips it in the water. He then
rises, with his hand still on the cord. His effort to rise gives the
bucket full of water an upward cant, which, with the aid of the
equipoising lump of clay at the other end of the pole, lifts it to a
trough into which, as it tilts on one side, it empties its contents. The
man continues bending down and rising up again in this manner for
hours together, apparently without more effort than that involved in
these movements of his body. What he has done has raised the
water six or seven feet above the level of the river. But if the river
has subsided twelve or fourteen feet, it will require another shadoof
to be worked in the trough into which the water of the first has been
brought. If the river has sunk still more, a third will be required before
it can be lifted to the top of the bank, so as to enable it to flow off to
the fields that require irrigation. I sometimes saw as many as twenty
series of shadoofs at work, two or three in each series, within a
range of half a mile. The poor fellows who work them are, except for
the barest decency, completely divested of every article of clothing:
an almost invisible loin cloth, and a tight-fitting cotton skull-cap, are
the whole of their apparel. They work all day in the wet, and in the
sun. As the materials for the shadoof—the pole, the prop, the skin,
and the clay—are all to be had on the spot, the poor fellah is able, in
a few minutes, to set up a machine that is of great service to him, at
little or no cost.
The other machine used in Egypt for raising water is called the
sakia. This is the Persian water-wheel. It is a large wheel with a
continuous row of jars arranged on its tire, something like the
buckets of a dredging-machine. These jars dip up the water as the
wheel revolves, and empty it, as the further revolution of the wheel
brings their mouths downwards, into a trough. It is worked by
bullocks, or buffaloes. A few years back there were many more of
these at work than there are at present. A murrain, or rinderpest,
having destroyed the cattle, the fellahs were obliged to take their
place, and revert to the old shadoof of the early Pharaohnic times.
 CHAPTER LVII.
ALEXANDRIA.

Wide will wear. Narrow will tear.

Ancient Alexandria left its mark on the world. Its history, however,
appears to connect it rather with great names than with great events.
Fancy is pleased with the picture of the greatest of the Greeks,
Philip’s godlike son, Aristotle’s pupil, who carried about with him his
Homer in a golden casket, the Conquistador of Asia, and the heir of
the Pharaohs, tracing, with the contents of a flour-bag, the outlines of
the nascent city, which was to bear his name of might, and to
sepulchre his remains.
The trade of Phœnicia revived in its harbours, and on its quays. It
became the Heliopolis, as well as the Thebes, of Hellenic Egypt.
Even the Hebrew part of the population caught the infection of the
place, and showed some capacity for philosophy and letters. Here it
was that their sacred Scriptures were, in the Septuagint translation,
first given to the educated world. And Plato, too, was soon more
studied in the schools of Alexandria than in his native Greece.
Here fell the Great Pompey. And here, in pursuit of him, came the
Cæsar, who bestrode the world like a Colossus; to be followed in our
own time by the only modern leader of men, whose name, if he had
possessed the generous magnanimity of the two captains of Greece
and Rome, history might have bracketed with theirs.
Here ‘the unparalleled lass,’ rather, perhaps, of the greatest of
poets than of history, having beguiled to his ruin the soft triumvir,
preferred death to the brutalities of a Roman triumph.
Matters, however, of this kind—and they might be multiplied—are
only bubbles on the surface. They interest the fancy, but have no
effect on the great current of events. We, at this day, are neither the
better nor the worse for them. But of the theology of Alexandria we
must speak differently. It is through that that it affected, and still
affects, the whole of Christendom. Sixteen hundred years have
passed, and Alexandrian thought still holds its ground amongst us.
It would help us to a right understanding of what this thought was,
and how it came to be what it was, if we knew something about the
city, the times, the country, and the mental condition of its
inhabitants. Alexandria, like Calcutta and New Orleans, having been
called into existence by the requirements of commerce, had been
obliged, for the sake of a harbour, to accept a singularly monotonous
and uninteresting site. This alone must have had much influence on
the cast of thought of its inhabitants. All who visit it will, I think, feel
this. One cannot imagine a healthy and vigorous literature springing
up in a place where Nature has neither grandeur nor beauty. Being
mainly a commercial city, its inhabitants—as must be the case in all
large commercial cities in the East—were composed of many
nationalities. They had brought with them their respective religions
and literatures, as well as manners and customs. It also contained
the most brilliant Greek Court in the world, in which we might be
certain that Greek inquisitiveness, and mental activity, would not be
extinguished. This will account for the libraries and the schools of
Alexandria.
We must understand why it never could become anything in the
world of action. It was not because the Egypt of the Ptolemies was
inferior to the Egypt of the Pharaohs. It might have been its superior
in every particular of power and greatness, and yet have been
unable to do anything in the outer world. What kept it quiet was a
consciousness of moral and intellectual inferiority to the people time
had at last educated and organized on the northern shores of the
Mediterranean.
The mental activity of the Alexandrians was all connected with
their libraries and schools. The work they did belongs to a condition
of mind which can use libraries and schools, but which really
originates nothing. It was all work upon other people’s work. They
never produced anything of their own. They never could have had an
Æschylus, or an Aristophanes; a Thucydides, or an Aristotle. The
genius that can originate implies vigour, freedom, individuality,
irrepressible impulse—in two words, expansive humanity. Nothing of
this kind could have been the growth of Alexandria. The possession
it was of these qualities which made the Greeks original, and great in
everything they undertook: in art, in war, in government, in
colonization, in philosophy, in poetry, in history. The genius which
showed itself in their literature was only the same genius which
showed itself in other forms and directions, as needs required: which
showed itself in everything Greek. Alexandria could not have
produced a Pericles, or a Phidias, or an Alexander, any more than a
great writer. It would have taken the same mental stuff to make one
of these, as to make a poet, an historian, or a philosopher. They all
work with the same motive power. The main conditions, too, are the
same in all. It is the object only to which the work is directed that
varies. The Greeks were, emphatically, men. It was this that made
them creative. Humanity was the soul of everything they created; the
stamp upon everything they did; and this it is that gives to their work
its eternal value.
The mind of Alexandria was a parasitical plant. It fastened itself on
the work of others; and endeavoured to extract from it what they had
already assimilated, and which its own limited capacities disqualified
it from extracting, first hand, for itself from the rich store-house of
Nature. It could live upon their work, and turn it to its own narrowly-
bounded purposes. For instance, the Greek language had been
perfected by the long series of generations who had used it, and who
had known nothing of grammars and dictionaries: but at Alexandria it
was studied for the sake of the grammar and of the dictionary.
Homer had been loved in the Greek world, because he spoke, as a
man, to men’s hearts and imaginations. He was valued at
Alexandria, not for his poetry—the men and women he had created
—but because he supplied a text to comment on. So with the divine
dreams of Plato: their use, at Alexandria, was that they supplied
some materials for the construction of systems.
It was exactly in this spirit that the Gospel was laid on the
dissecting tables of Alexandria. The object proposed was to set up a
skeleton to be called Christian Theology; and to inject and arrange
certain preparations, to be called Christian doctrines. Here was a
strange perversion. Never were the uses to which a thing had been
ingeniously turned so thoroughly alien to its real nature and design.
The objects of the Gospel were moral and religious. Its appeals were
addressed to the ordinary conscience, and to the ordinary
understanding: in them its philosophy is to be found. But the
systematizers of Alexandria had no taste for dealing with such
materials. The Christian religion, as presented to us in their theology,
has not one particle of the Gospel in it: no heart, no soul; no human
duties, no human motives—nothing human, nothing divine. It is
something as hard, and as dry, as a mummy; and would be as dead,
were it not for its savage, truculent spirit. It is an attempt to construct
a material god, mechanically, of body, parts, and passions—the
Egyptian passions of the day; such as burnt, volcanically, in the
hearts of the crocodile haters, and crocodile worshippers, of Ombos
and Tentyra, and impelled them to eat each other’s still quivering
flesh, and drink each other’s blood hot. The watch-word, the source,
the main-spring, of Christ’s religion, the one word that fulfils it, is
absent from this travesty of it.
This anatomical Christianity, in which there is no Gospel, this
systematic divinity, in which there is nothing divine, this mechanical
theology, which contradicts the idea of God, Alexandria had the chief
hand in inflicting on the world, and a grievous infliction they were.
Christendom is still suffering from it. It is the anatomy of a body from
which the heart, the blood, the flesh, the muscles, all that rendered it
a living power, and made it beautiful and beneficent, have been
removed. It is the systematization of a Hortus Siccus. It is a theology
that kills religion, in order that it may examine it. The religion that is
fixed and formulated; a matter of definitions, and quantitive
proportions; that can be handled, and measured, and weighed; that
can be taken to pieces, and put together again by a monk in his cell,
just as if it were a Chinese puzzle; cannot be the living growth of
minds whose knowledge is ever being extended, and of consciences
that are ever becoming more sensitive. It cannot indeed, as far as
these things go, be a religion at all. A religion, though burdened with
them, and perpetually dragged by them into the sphere of formalism,
controversy, and passion, may, and will, live on in spite of them; for
nothing can kill religion: still the two are antagonistic and
incompatible.
The Alexandrian theologians interpreted Christianity in accordance
with the criticism, the knowledge, the ignorance, the mind, and the
conscience of their day. They could hardly have done otherwise.
They came from caves in the desert, and from old tombs, and they
returned to them for fresh inspiration. They had a right to interpret
things according to the light that was in them. So have we. Our light,
however, is somewhat different from theirs. ‘The New
Commandment’ was not one that at all commended itself to their
sepulchral, troglodytic minds. It finds no place in their creeds. We,
however, give it the first place in ours. The perfect law of liberty was
unintelligible to them: their only thought about it was to make it
impossible: to us it is as necessary as the air we breathe. They held
that man is for the creed: we that the creed is for man. Which is right
makes much difference.

For the traveller who is desirous of seeing the present in

connexion with the past, Alexandria has many other reminiscences.
Homer mentions the Isle of Pharos, which formed the harbour. On
this classic rock Ptolemy Philadelphus built a magnificent lighthouse
of white marble. This was reckoned one of the seven wonders of the
world. Its name, which was borrowed from the rock on which it had
been placed, has passed into most of the languages of Europe, as
the appellative of these useful structures. We, however, who employ
them more largely than any other people, and who have in our
Eddystone the finest and most interesting structure of this kind in the
world, built under widely different conditions from those of the
tideless middle sea, very properly give to them a name of our own.
The causeway, three-quarters of a mile in length, which was
formed for the purpose of connecting Ptolemy’s Pharos with the
mainland, having been enormously expanded, in the course of two
thousand years, by the same process, which, in the same period,
has raised the present to more than twenty feet above the original
level of Rome, is now the Frank quarter of the city. The whole of this
space must, therefore, in the time of Homer, and down to the time of
Alexander, have been under water.
The city, having become the capital of Egypt, grew rapidly in
population, wealth, and splendour. The Ptolemies disposed of the
revenue of Egypt, which had now become the chief entrepôt of the
commerce of the world; and they spent it with no niggard hand in
embellishing their capital. Few great cities have had so large a
proportion of their space occupied by magnificent public buildings.
Nothing, however, need be said here of its palaces, theatres, and
temples, except that they were worthy of the city which filled the first
place in the cities of the Greek world, and in the universal empire of
the Cæsars was second only to Rome.
Pompey’s Pillar, as the inscription upon it informs us, was erected
in honour of Diocletian.
Cleopatra’s Needle had originally stood at Heliopolis, where it had
been set up by Thuthmosis III., and afterwards seen by Joseph and
Moses. It was transplanted from Heliopolis to Alexandria by one of
the Roman Emperors, after the time of Cleopatra. It had been cut
from the granite quarries of Syené. It has, therefore, travelled from
the John o’Groat’s House to the Land’s End of Egypt.
Its deservedly world-famous library recurs to every one who thinks
about Old Alexandria. No other library had ever such a history. It was
founded two hundred and eighty-three years before the Christian
era; that is to say, before Rome had entered on her Punic wars.
While those wars were raging the Alexandrians must, within the walls
of this library, have canvassed the news of the day with much the
same feelings with which we were ourselves, but just now, talking
over the last intelligence from Sedan and Metz, from the Loire and
the Seine. In the Greek world a public library had never before been
heard of. It was connected with a great mass of buildings called the
Museum, which was a kind of institution for the promotion of study,
discussion, and learning. Eventually it contained 700,000 volumes.
Of these 400,000 were at the Museum; the remainder were in a
building connected with the great Temple of Serapis. With the
Ptolemies the enrichment of this library was always a great concern.
They dispersed their collectors wherever books were to be obtained;
and were ready to pay the highest price for them. It was the boast of
the city that the library contained a copy of every known book. At last
it was overtaken by the fate which awaits all the works of man. In
Cæsar’s attack on the city the great library of the Museum was
accidentally burnt. The library, therefore, which is supposed to have
been destroyed by the command of the Caliph Omar, could only
have contained the books, that might have remained to his time, of
the inferior library of the Serapeum. This we know had been very
much dilapidated by neglect, and in other ways, during the
intervening seven centuries of occasional violence, and of constant
decay. One, however, is hardly disposed to acquiesce in the opinion
on this subject of the historian of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire; for, among so large a collection of books, there must, one
would suppose, have been some precious works of antiquity, which
we should now value highly, but which were then lost to us
irreparably.
While we regard with reverence this great library, both for the
antiquity of the date of its establishment, and for the useful and noble
purposes it was intended to serve, those of perpetuating, and of
extending, knowledge, we should be guilty of an injustice if we were
to forget that it was not the first institution of its kind. The idea of
establishing a public library, which the Ptolemies deserve much
credit for carrying out liberally and thoroughly, had nothing original in
it in one country, at all events, of the world, and that one was Egypt.
Eleven centuries before their time, as we have already seen, the
Great Rameses, in his temple-palace at Thebes, had erected a
public library. The walls of it are still standing. We need not repeat
what we have said elsewhere about the sculptures on its walls, the
inscription over its doors, the manuscripts dated from it still in
existence, and the tombs of its librarians. This was done more than
three thousand years ago. Perhaps, then, other ideas and practices,
we may be in the habit of regarding as modern, were also familiar to
the Egyptians of that remote day. Those times, indeed, may, in some
not unimportant matters, be virtually nearer to us than the times of
our Edwards and Henries.
 CHAPTER LVIII.
CAIRO.

Mores hominum multorum, et urbes.—Horace.

Just as the interest of Alexandria belongs to what we call antiquity,

so does Cairo derive the whole of its interest from existing sources. I
say what we call antiquity, for by that word we mean the classical
period of Greece and Rome; but this classical period is, in reality,
only the connecting link between our modern world and the old
primæval world of Egypt; it is thus the true middle ages of universal
history; while true antiquity is the domain of Pharaohnic Egypt. But
as to Cairo: El Islam is of the things that now are, and Cairo was
never anything but a Mahomedan city. Its most interesting memories
are of the mighty Saladin, who fortified it, and preferred it to all other
cities. It is the true capital of Arabdom. Not its holy city, but its Paris.
Its history is all of Caliphs and Khedivés.
But the first thing to understand about any famous city is how it
came to be where it is. Cairo is where it is, because Memphis was
where it was. Its site is the natural centre of Egypt. It occupies, by
the dispensation of Nature, the place in Egypt which the heart does
in the human body. Being situated at the apex of the Delta, it
commands the axis of communication throughout the whole of the
upper country, and all the divergent lines of communication which
traverse the Delta. He who establishes himself here has cut the
country in two; and can concentrate all its resources, or assail any
point, at his will. It is the vital centre. Just so was it with Memphis
under the old Monarchy, and the Hyksos, and during the subsequent
history. No sooner had an invader got a firm footing here than the
rest of the country was prostrate, and helpless. The master of Cairo
is the master of Egypt.
 The city is situated on the right bank of the river, at the foot of a
spur of the Mokattam, or Arabian, range of hills. In order to get
drinkable water it was necessary that it should be placed so low as
that the water of the river might be brought into it. The reader is now
aware that there are no springs in Egypt, and that the water of the
wells, from the nature of the soil, is brackish and undrinkable. There
is, however, in the citadel of Cairo a well of sweet water; the well is
sunk through the limestone, of course to somewhat below the depth
of the height on which the citadel stands; and so it came to suggest
to me the thought that, if borings were made of sufficient depth to
pass completely through the nitrous alluvium of the valley, and to
perforate the subjacent strata, it might be possible to find water fit for
drinking anywhere, and everywhere. It might not often be worth while
to go to this expense, because in most places it would still be
cheaper to get water from the river; but it would be interesting to
ascertain whether or no good water could be obtained in this way. If
so, there would then be one small matter, at all events, which had
escaped the sagacity of the old Egyptians.
But to return to the site of Cairo: the level ground, on which it
stands, beginning at Boulak, its harbour on the river, reaches back
about a mile, where it is met by the high ground, which enters the
city at the south-east angle. On this point stands the citadel
commanding the city. The hills of the range which throws out this
spur are seen rising, to a considerable height, on the east of Cairo.
They are utterly devoid of vegetation; and being of about the colour
of the sand of the desert (they are of limestone), they glare in the
sun, and are very striking and conspicuous objects in the scenery of
the place. Wherever you leave the city, except at its north-west
angle, and in the direction of the river, you enter at once on the
absolute desert.
There is no view in Egypt to be compared with that from the
Citadel of Cairo. The city, with all its oriental picturesqueness, is at
your feet. Domes and minarets are everywhere. You look over it, and
your eyes rest sometimes on the green culture, sometimes on the
drab desert of Egypt. Beyond, stretching away till it is lost in the haze
of distance, is the Valley of Egypt. Through it winds old Nile. It is
closed on either side by the irregular ranges of the Libyan and
Arabian hills. You know that these pass on through Egypt into Nubia,
as the boundaries of the valley. Beyond the river, at the distance of
eight or nine miles, on the lower stage of the Libyan range, stand the
Great Pyramids of Gizeh. Further off, at about double the distance
from you, stand the older Pyramids of Abouseir. Seen from no other
point are the Pyramids so impressive. There they stand, at the
entrance of the valley, and have stood for more than five thousand
years, to tell all who might come down into Egypt of its greatness
and glory. They have none of the forms, or features, of architecture.
They are mountains, escarped for monuments, by Titan’s hands.
And a little further on are the mounds of Memphis. There lived the
men—one would give something to see a day of the life of that old
world—who imagined, and made these mountains. You remember
that all you saw of them at Memphis was a colossal statue prostrate
on the ground. As you look now on the Pyramids you understand
that Colossus. These Titan builders felt themselves more than men.
You think how pleasant it would be to sit here, on the parapet of
the citadel, inhaling the calumet of memory and imagination; your
dear friend, however, who is with you, and who is the most patient
and best fellow living, has had enough of it; and he summons back
your thoughts from their flight into the far-off tracts of antique time,
by a proposal to take another look at the Khan Khaleel Bazaar. As
you move away you tell him, to be revenged, ‘that history, like
religion, has no power over those who have no imagination; or an
imagination furnished only with the images of their own sight-and-
self-bounded world.’ ‘Nonsense,’ he replies; and you find yourself
again jostling your way through the narrow, crowded, irregular
streets of Cairo, upon an ass, with a little swarthy urchin running
before you to clear your path. And though everybody seems to
submit to him, and to attend readily to his shouts of ‘Right,’ ‘Left,’
‘Mind your legs,’ you will always have to keep a sharp look-out
yourself. You will often be brought to a standstill. There are no
trottoirs. The people on foot, the camels, and donkeys, are all
jumbled up together. The projecting loads on the camels’ sides seem
almost arranged for giving you a lick on the head, and knocking you
off your ass.
At last you emerge from the side streets into the Mouské. This is
the main artery of the city, and here is the full tide of Cairene life. It is
now between four and five o’clock, and the tide is at the top of the
flood. The street is straight, and, for a Cairene street, wide enough;
the crowd is great; but here everybody, as a matter of course,
endeavours to make way for everybody. What you first notice is the
abundance of colour. The red tarboosh is perhaps the commonest
covering for the head. The turbans vary much; some are of white
muslin; some of coloured shawls. The variety of dress is great.
Nineteen-twentieths of the passers-by are clad in some form or other
of Oriental costume. Their complexions vary as much as their dress.
There is every shade, from the glossy black of the Nubian to the
dead white of the Turk. The predominant colours are the different
shades of yellowish brown which have resulted from the varying
degrees of intermixture of Arabs and Copts. Here, at home, the men
being at work during the day, it often happens that there are as many
women in the street as men. In Cairo the former are often entirely
wanting in the street scene, and are never seen in a large proportion.
In stature the men are almost always above what we call the middle
height, well proportioned, and never fat or pursy, like our beef-eating
and beer-drinking people. Their features are regular and pleasing.
Their bearing staid and dignified.
There are in the crowd men with water-skins and water-jars. For
some insignificant coin—there are four hundred paras in a shilling—
they sell drinks to thirsty souls. There are hawkers of bread, of fish,
of vegetables, of dates, of oranges, and of a multitude of other
matters. These articles are generally cried, if not in the name of the
Prophet, still with some pious, or, if not so, then with some poetical,
formula. Perhaps a carriage of the Viceroy passes containing some
of the ladies of the hareem. They will be escorted by two black
guardians of the hareem on horseback, one on each side of the
carriage, and preceded by two runners carrying long wands, and
dressed in spotless white, with the exception of their red fezes and
gaily-coloured shawls. The latter they use as sashes. Each will have
cost them fifteen pounds, or more.
When you have become accustomed to the people in the streets,
you look at the people in the shops; of course not the Frank, but the
native shops. These are merely recesses in the walls of the houses,
which form the street. The merchant, or shopkeeper, seldom lives in
the house, in the ground floor of which his shop is situated, but
generally somewhere at a distance. He has no shopmen, or
assistants. The recess, in which he carries on his business, if large,
is about in space a cube of ten or twelve feet. It has no door or
windows, but is closed with shutters, which the shopkeeper takes
down when he comes to do business. He puts them up whenever he
wants to go to Mosk, or elsewhere. When his shop is open for
business he will be seen seated, cross-legged, on the floor in front of
his goods. Every shop being a dark hole, and having its owner
seated in front of it, reminded me of a prairie-dog village, where
every hole has a prairie-dog seated in front of it, much in the same
way; and, too, on the look out. These traders appear to have no Arab
blood in them, but to be Greeks, Jews, Turks, Syrians, anybody and
everybody except the people of the country. Many of them have an
unhealthy appearance. Few of them are good-looking.
As to the houses, what most frequently attracts the eye is the
carved wood lattice of the windows. The first floor is frequently
advanced beyond the ground-floor. The archway of the door is, in the
better class of houses, often ornamented with carved stone-work;
and the door itself decorated with a holy text—reverently; perhaps,
also, with some lurking idea of excluding evil influences.
But this style of building is now becoming obsolete; and the new
houses in and around the Esbekeyeh, and between the Esbekeyeh
and Boulak, are being built in the Frank style. The Viceroy has here,
for the space of about a square mile, laid out broad macadamized
streets, with broad trottoirs on each side, as if he were contemplating
an European city. Not much, however, with the exception of these
roadways, has yet been done towards carrying out his grand
designs, except around the Esbekeyeh. This is the grand place, or
square, of Cairo. It now contains a public garden, that would be an
ornament worthy of any great European city. It is well lighted with
gas made from English coal. As you go to the opera—for there is an
opera, too, in Cairo—and return after it is over to your hotel, you are
glad of the light; but you are, at the same time, conscious of a little
sentimental jar. You did not go to Egypt to find coal gas, and London
gas-lamp-posts in the city of Saladin, and of the Caliphs, and in the
land of the Pharaohs. You are no longer surprised that the new
houses are built in the Frank style.
The Mosks of Cairo may be counted by the hundred. Some have
great historical interest; some great artistic merit; some are the great
schools of the country.
The old Mosks of Cairo throw much light on the history of the
pointed arch, particularly the oldest of them all, that of Ahmed Ebn e’
Tooloon; which, however, is in so ruinous a condition that it is no
longer in use. Its date, as recorded in two Cufic inscriptions on the
walls, is 879 a.d.—that is to say, three hundred years before the
pointed arch was adopted in this country. It is very improbable that
this Mosk of Tooloon was the first building in which it was used,
because it is not introduced here hesitatingly, as would have been
done had it been struggling for recognition, but is boldly and firmly
carried out in every part of the structure, and even with some
combination of the horseshoe shape, as if it were a form with which
the architect had become so familiar that he had even begun to
modify it. So great a change in construction, and in the effects
produced by form, must have had to fight for some time against
previously-established forms. We may, therefore, safely decide that
its introduction reaches further back than the date just given. This is
saying that the world is indebted for it to Saracenic thought, and
taste. This need not surprise us, because at that time there was no
other people whose thought was so prolific; and theirs was prolific
because it had been aroused to effort by their great achievements.
Just as we learn to walk by walking, and to talk by talking, so do men
learn how to do great things by doing great things. Other Cairene
Mosks continue this history of the pointed arch.
The Mosk of Sultan Hassam has features that are worth noticing.
Few buildings exhibit greater freedom of design, which comes, I
suppose, of that depth of feeling, which is able to break the fetters of
thought. Such a structure could have been the product only of a time
when mind was deeply moved, and had become conscious of its
power. Men knew then what they wanted, and believed in
themselves, that they could satisfy their want. In such times servile
imitations, and reproductions are impossible. They do not express
what all feel. They do not supply what all are asking for. In this Mosk
the porch, the inner court, the astonishing height of the outer wall,
springing from the declivity of the hill-side, all the details, and the
whole general effect, show that those who built it were conscious of
real, deep aspirations, and were not acting under factitious ones;
and that they were conscious also of possessing within themselves
the power of giving form to their aspirations. It interprets to us the
mind of its builders. They were full of vigour, and self-reliance. They
yearned to give expression, in forms of beauty, and grandeur, to
what was stirring within them.
As I was thus communing, historically, with the intense
Mahomedan feeling, which had given a voice to every stone in the
building, I was interrupted by another voice, but it was one of a kind,
which, we may presume, will never have a thought of clothing itself
in forms of beauty, and grandeur. ‘Look,’ it said to me, ‘up there at
those crosses.’ ‘No,’ I replied. ‘It is impossible. There can be no
crosses here.’ The objects I was invited to look at crown the cornice
of the central, hypæthral court. They bear some kind of resemblance
to fleurs de lis. ‘Yes,’ the voice continued. ‘Any one can see now just
how it all is. These are the old places from which those ritualists get
their mediæval crosses, and all that kind of thing.’
The great Mosk of El Azar is the university of Egypt, and of the
surrounding countries. The foreign students are divided according to
nations. Those of Egypt according to the provinces they come from.
The cycle of religion, law, science, and polite learning, as these
words are understood in the East, is here taught. Some come merely
to qualify themselves for professions, or occupations, in which what
they may acquire here will be needed. Others come with the
intention, as was contemplated in our own universities, of life-long
study.