What do Western states, such as the UK, owe to refugees? When politicians, policy-makers and publics recognise that they have responsibilities to refugees, they tend to view these responsibilities in terms of a humanitarian act of charity towards suffering outsiders. In this podcast, Dr James Souter argues that we should rethink this picture of our responsibilities to refugees, and recognise that Western states sometimes have a stronger obligation to offer asylum as a form of reparation for refugees whom they have uprooted as a result of their foreign policies.
Dr James Souter is a lecturer in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds, and author of Asylum as Reparation: Refuge and Responsibility for the Harms of Displacement.
Serena Parekh, No Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).
David Owen, What Do We Owe to Refugees (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020).
James Souter 'The UK must fully recognise its special obligations towards Iraqi and Afghan Refugees,' LSE British Politics and Policy Blog (October 2014).
James Souter, Asylum as Reparation: Refuge and Responsibility for the Harms of Displacement (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022).