Reparative responsibility for the harms of forced migration

Abstract

According to the UNHCR (2021), in 2020 there were over 82 million displaced people worldwide who had been forced to migrate as a result of persecution, conflict, and violence. While few of them had reached Western countries to claim asylum, more than half (48 million) were internally displaced people (IDPs) and a large share of the internationally displaced had moved to neighboring countries. The magnitude of the forced-migration phenomenon is even more striking if we consider that many other people are forced to migrate within or across borders because of development projects, slow-onset environmental degradation, and natural disasters but do not fall under the UNHCR's mandate.

Assigning responsibility to address the plight of forced migrants is thus a pressing issue which has attracted increasing attention in normative political theory. It has been argued that, while not all forced migrants are targeted for persecution, all of them typically have their human rights violated and their basic needs unfulfilled. Human rights violations often trigger forced migration, which in turn makes displaced people particularly vulnerable to further human rights violations. Since forced migrants are in urgent need, the dominant understanding of responsibility for forced migrants, both in political theory and in policy, is based on a humanitarian principle sometimes called the “good Samaritan principle” (Parekh, 2020, p. 649). As in Singer's (1972) pond case, when someone faces serious harm we have a moral duty to help if we are capable of helping at a reasonable cost (see Betts & Collier, 2017; Gibney, 2004).

The humanitarian principle is forward looking and does not require any prior special connection between the rescuer and the rescued. Indeed, the causal and moral responsibility for the plight of refugees tends to be attributed to the state of origin, while external states tend to be presented as bystanders unimplicated in the harms of forced migration. The humanitarian principle does not determine fair shares of responsibility when several bystanders can step in.¹ Moreover, based on the humanitarian principle, the moral obligation to fulfill the needs of forced migrants is not a duty of justice and is subject to costs and capacity assessments.² In practice, the burden of taking care of forced migrants disproportionally falls upon geographically proximate states, although political theorists have often criticized the proximity distributive criterion as unfair (see Gibney, 2015). Furthermore, the humanitarian principle does not clarify when a state has done its fair share, both in terms of the number of forced migrants it has taken responsibility for and in terms of what is owed to forced migrants (Parekh, 2020, p. 65). In such an “ethics of rescue” frame (Owen, 2020; Parekh, 2020), admission to a safe haven and the fulfillment of basic survival needs might seem to suffice.

Serena Parekh (2017, 2020) defends an alternative account which may ground stronger duties. In her view, protecting forced migrants' human rights is a matter of justice, rather than generosity. Indeed, she claims, external states, particularly Global North states, crucially contribute to the structural injustice of the refugee regime that confronts forced migrants with the tragic choice between encampment or urban destitution in the Global South and dangerous journeys to seek asylum in the Global North. Parekh's (2020, p. 172) account of responsibility, which draws on I. M. Young's social-connection model, is forward looking: external states are implicated in the injustice that forced migrants face once displaced, but such states are not responsible for causing displacement in the first place.

By contrast, I aim to defend a backwards-looking account of who owes what to forced migrants. The starting point of my account is a harms-based approach to forced migrants' needs. I assume that the needs of forced migrants depend on the specific harms of forced migration. As I have argued elsewhere (Santi Amantini, 2022), forced migrants face a distinctive combination of harms which they would not have faced if they had not left their place of origin or had moved voluntarily. They lose control over life plans; they lose their homes and the social and cultural environment they were used to relying on. They leave behind their livelihoods and usually most of their belongings, they lose social status, and their forced move is often associated with violent and traumatic events which undermine their mental well-being. Hence, in addition to basic survival needs, forced migrants have special needs deriving from the harms of displacement. They need to regain control over their lives and recreate a “home environment” (i.e., a web of familiar geographical, social, and cultural landmarks on which they can rely to carry out their daily routines and make future plans). They need not only a source of economic income but also social recognition and mental health support.

Determining the specific harms of forced migration, therefore, allows us to better understand what is owed to forced migrants. Furthermore, it encourages us to explore the causes of such harms and thus to assess whether any external states or nonstate actors were causally implicated and whether this may ground reparative responsibility. The aim of this paper is indeed to defend an account of reparative responsibility for the harms of forced migration based on a backwards-looking assessment of states' (and nonstate actors') causal contribution to such harms.³ A backwards-looking, reparative account of responsibility does not rule out forward-looking accounts but rather supplements them by offering the ground for additional, stronger reparative duties whenever states (or nonstate actors) can be individually or collectively debited the harms of forced migration.

Reparative responsibility has rarely been invoked in the ethics of forced migration although “you break it, you bought it” reasoning is commonplace in everyday moral reasoning. It has been noted that the causal links between actions and outcomes may be tenuous or hard to establish, that displacement may be an unintended side effect, and that the actions causing displacement may be justified and legitimate (Parekh, 2020, p. 81). Moreover, it can be objected that causal responsibility might not suffice to ground reparative responsibility. However, David Owen (2020) has framed responsibility for refugees in reparative terms and James Souter (2013, 2014, 2021) has defended an account of asylum as reparation. I agree with Souter (2021) in grounding reparative responsibility on the existence of an “outcome responsibility”. The notion of outcome responsibility, which David Miller (2007) distinguishes from mere causal responsibility, requires that the outcome, though not necessarily intended, was foreseeable. The foreseeability of the outcome makes the relationship between the agent and the harmed subject morally relevant, even when the harmful action is not wrongful.⁴

I argue that states (and nonstate actors) bear a reparative responsibility to meet the needs of forced migrants which derive from the harms of forced migration when such states (or nonstate actors) have directly or indirectly contributed, through their actions or through collective structures and processes, to foreseeably causing forced migration. Outcome responsibility for identifiable actions grounds individual reparative responsibility, while participation in collective structures and processes grounds collective reparative responsibility. The public acknowledgement of individual or collective contribution in causing forced migration is a key component of what a backwards-looking reparative-responsibility account requires while forward-looking approaches do not. As I illustrate, this has important implications concerning what is owed to forced migrants and what is expressed in policies addressing forced migrants' needs.

The paper is structured as follows. Section 2 argues that external states, companies and supranational institutions may directly and foreseeably contribute to forced migration through their actions and therefore bear individual reparative responsibility. Section 3 argues that when states participate in collective structures and processes that foreseeably contribute to forced migration, they bear collective reparative responsibility. Importantly, both individual and collective reparative responsibilities extend to IDPs. In Section 4, I propose three principles that policies should respect to count as reparations for the harms of forced migration: the specificity, continuity, and expressivity principles. In Section 5, I assess some policy implications of this reparative-justice approach, compared to humanitarian-aid and development-oriented policy approaches. Indeed, as I show, such policy approaches are both based on a forward-looking, humanitarian account of responsibility. Section 6 concludes.

Few would deny that states of origin should be held responsible for their unjust acts or omissions leading to forced migration.⁵ Megan Bradley (2013) argues that states of origin owe refugees repatriation as a form of redress. Indeed, the home country's reparative responsibility for displaced people (including IDPs) is particularly relevant in postconflict situations and may be crucial for transitional-justice processes (Duthie, 2011). I do not deny the reparative responsibility that states of origin bear in virtue of their actions or failures to live up to their special duties to protect the human and citizenship rights of their nationals. However, as Owen (2020) argues, in some cases specific external states bear “some significant portion of [outcome] responsibility” for displacement and this grounds special obligations towards those who have been forced to move. Indeed, such cases are more frequent than we might think. Certainly, as Gibney (2004, p. 51) notes, they are more frequent than acknowledged by those who adopt an “internalist approach”, according to which “the harms that generate refugees are caused solely by the states that they have fled.”

External states, including Western ones, do act in ways that directly lead to displacement. A paradigmatic case is military intervention: Gibney (2004, p. 52) recalls the examples of U.S. and Australian involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s and the NATO bombings in Kosovo in the 1990s.⁶ Often, external intervention contributes to displacements in which the state of origin is also implicated. However, the intervening agency of the state of origin does not undermine the outcome responsibility of external states, whose actions crucially facilitated or enabled displacement (Souter, 2021, pp. 77–8). External states may, for instance, supply military equipment or provide economic and political support to the domestic actors whose actions directly cause displacement (Gibney, 2004, p. 52; see also Souter, 2021, pp. 76–8). External states may also support dictatorial regimes, thus foreseeably facilitating persecution, or enable the breakdown of public order and thus the spread of generalized violence (Owen, 2020, p. 87). Hence, not only actions directly causing displacement, such as military intervention, but also actions indirectly but foreseeably enabling or facilitating it, such as diplomatic or economic support to states that generate refugees, can make external states outcome responsible for displacement.

It might seem counterintuitive to impose reparative responsibilities upon external states when forced migration derives from morally legitimate actions, such as humanitarian intervention. If a state took up the responsibility to protect the lives or human rights of the citizens of a foreign country and this led to displacing some of them as inevitable collateral damage, it would seem unfair to impose on this state a duty to repair the harms of forced migration, particularly when other states refused to step in. Besides, this would discourage any displacement-enhancing intervention even when refraining from intervening amounts to culpable omission or collusion with a human rights–violating agent.

Clearly, the legitimacy of displacement makes a difference. When displacement is morally illegitimate, forced migrants are not only harmed but also wronged. In principle, if displacement was morally legitimate, I concede that it might not entail reparative responsibility. However, I contend that displacement could be legitimate only if the motivations behind it were so compelling to override the strong interest of individuals not to be displaced and the actions leading to displacement were procedurally just.⁷ Consider displacement caused by an external state's military intervention: the legality of the intervention does not ensure that the resulting forced displacement is justified and does not generate reparative duties. In Owen's (2020) account, reparative responsibility does not arise when forced migration derives from actions “authorized under the norms of the international order of states” and therefore “consonant with,” or “representative of, this international order” (p. 122). By contrast, I argue that for a displacement-enhancing action such as a military intervention to be legitimate, it does not suffice that it is legal or authorized by the United Nations. It should be both morally justified and procedurally just and proportionate (i.e., genuinely striving at protecting the target population, not exploiting humanitarian justifications to pursue the interests of the intervening state; and genuinely attempting to minimize collateral damage, including forced displacement). In practice, few real-world examples meet both requirements. Thus, even adding the legitimacy caveat, states directly contributing to displacement typically retain reparative responsibility for the displaced people because displacement is not legitimate.

In line with Owen (2020) and Souter (2021), I have argued so far that external states bear a reparative responsibility for those displaced across borders when such states' individual actions directly and foreseeably contributed to displacing them. Such a claim does not appear particularly controversial, at least when displacement is illegitimate, provided that the causal link is identifiable. However, I argue that such an individual reparative responsibility should be further extended in three directions: scope, content, and actors.

First, concerning the scope of responsibility, I argue that external states bear reparative responsibilities also towards the IDPs whose displacement they have contributed to.⁸ For instance, if the United States or the UK bears reparative responsibility for the Iraqis who have been forced to migrate across borders since the coalition attacked Saddam Hussein's regime in 2003, such responsibility also applies to those who have been displaced inside Iraq for the same reason. Likewise, the United States also has responsibility for those Colombian IDPs whose displacement can be linked to the U.S. Government's War on Drugs and War on Terror. Indeed, for decades the United States has provided strong support to Colombian military forces to both defeat left-wing guerrillas and curb drug trafficking (although colluding right-wing paramilitaries and even the Colombian army itself provoked extensive forced displacement and murders). Moreover, the United States carried out extensive chemical-fumigation operations to destroy coca fields and undermine the left-wing guerrillas relying on them. Both increased militarization and pollution caused by fumes are known to have fueled forced displacement.⁹

Second, concerning the content of reparative obligations, granting admission to the territory of outcome-responsible external states would not exhaust what such states owe to the forcibly displaced. Besides admission, displaced people are owed the fulfillment of the distinctive needs deriving from the harms of forced migration. Outcome-responsible states owe this to those who moved into their territory. Moreover, they should also support host states or humanitarian agencies to ensure the fulfillment of the needs of those who migrated to other countries (e.g., neighboring countries). Note that this obligation to provide in situ assistance, from my perspective, derives from the reparative responsibility towards displaced people themselves. Thus, it does not arise as a duty to compensate the host state for the costs of fulfilling displaced people's needs. Fairness duties towards host states are independent from reparative duties towards forced migrants. Indeed, nonreparative, humanitarian accounts of states' obligations towards forced migrants can include distributive justice duties among states and thus duties to compensate those states doing more than their fair share in hosting forced migrants.¹⁰ My account stresses that forced migrants themselves are the subjects towards whom outcome-responsible states have reparative obligations, including obligations to support other states in meeting their needs. Forced migrants are agents who may choose not to migrate to the external state which is outcome responsible for their displacement but are entitled to receive reparations from the outcome-responsible state nonetheless, despite being outside its territorial jurisdiction. This shows that efforts to externalize border controls and keep forced migrants distant do not weaken states' responsibility, because responsibility for harm does not depend on where the harmed person is located. While humanitarian duties to help may be weakened or evaded if other bystanders happen to be closer, reparative duties may not.

I have considered so far the scope and the content of states' individual reparative responsibilities. A third direction in which individual reparative responsibility should be extended concerns the range of actors to whom such a responsibility should apply. Along with states, supranational organizations and companies can be outcome responsible for displacement. For instance, the World Bank may fund development projects (e.g., dams) which involve mass evictions and sometimes environmental degradation leading to further forced migration.¹¹ It might be argued that some development projects which require displacement and resettlement might be morally justifiable if, at least, displacement is not arbitrary and the specific harms of displacement are prevented or minimized.¹² However, this is clearly not the case when the displaced population is not consulted, when displacement is carried out coercively using violence, threat, or deceit, when oustees are left uncompensated or households are arbitrarily dispersed, or when the negative externalities of development projects on the environment and nearby human settlements are not prevented or not even assessed.¹³

Companies too may be involved in the unjust dispossession and removal of former settlers from the land they acquire or be implicated in environmental degradation leading to forced migration. For instance, companies may support paramilitary groups to unlawfully seize lands.¹⁴ Moreover, they may legally buy extensive lands, including entire villages, at very low prices. Displaced people may thus be evicted without being consulted or even informed and receive risible compensation or none at all since they often lack property rights to the lands they live on.¹⁵ It is not just the state's responsibility to impede unjustified displacement, to minimize the harms and to redress displaced people. Companies do not have a territorial jurisdiction or institutions to fulfill forced migrants' needs. However, they have both a duty not to harm and a duty to provide compensation and reparations (such as apologies) when they cause harm. Note that both duties have been acknowledged in the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, which is a nonbinding, yet influential, soft-law document. Businesses are required “not to take any measures that will violate human rights and to ensure redress where these impacts occur during its activities” (Adeola, 2017, p. 262 n100). Although such duties have not been applied to the harms of displacement, some scholars suggest that they should (see Adeola, 2017, pp. 262–5). Indeed, the harms that forced migrants experience as a result of displacement undermine the essential human interests in place and purpose, which lie behind human rights (Kingston, 2019). In that respect, the harms of displacement are analogous to human rights violations. Thus, though not yet legally obliged, private companies are morally required to avoid causing the harms of forced migration and to redress those who have been harmed. As in the case of states, companies' reparative duties are not duties of charity, but duties of justice.

I have argued that, often, not only states of origin but also specific external states individually bear reparative responsibility for specific groups of forced migrants, in virtue of their actions which make such states outcome responsible for their displacement. Moreover, I argued that nonstate actors such as corporations may also bear individual reparative responsibilities. However, sometimes it is hard to isolate specific states (or nonstate actors) as outcome responsible. Moreover, even when it is possible to attribute the proximate causes of displacement to the actions (or omissions) of some specific agents, such as local governments, such agents may have been in fact constrained, to a relevant extent, by processes or structures over which they had little control. Sometimes, as is often the case for the states in the Global South which originate most forced migrants, they may occupy a subordinate structural position or contribute the least to the processes which affect them.

An example of a global process may be climate change. The harms deriving from climate change, including forced displacement, do not seem straightforwardly and exclusively attributable to the actions of specific agents. Instead, they derive from a global process which can be described, in I. M. Young's (2011) terms, as “a complex combination of actions and policies by individual, corporate, and government agents” (p. 100).¹⁶ Furthermore, such agents do not equally contribute to the process. Indeed, it has often been argued that those states which contribute the least to climate change pay the highest costs (McAdam, 2012, p. 38). Citizens of such states may well be more vulnerable to displacement because of their governments' incapacity or unwillingness to mitigate or adapt to the slow-onset environmental changes and to cope with sudden disasters. Indeed, the fact that some social groups inside that country are more vulnerable than others may depend on domestic social injustices. However, their vulnerability and their state's incapacity to reduce it may also, at least in part, depend on other global processes and structures in which such states occupy a subordinate position.¹⁷

According to I. M. Young (2006), structures include “the confluence of institutional rules and interactive routines” as well as the “mobilization of resources” (p. 112). As Young notes, structures remain relatively stable over time and “serve as background conditions for individual actions by presenting actors with options; they provide ‘channels’ that both enable action and constrain it” (p. 112). The global economy may be viewed as an example of such a global structure. Castles (2003) provocatively claims that “the North does more to cause forced migration than to stop it, through enforcing an international economic and political order that causes underdevelopment and conflict” (p. 18). Although the general claim that the global order causes forced migration is vague and thus hardly verifiable or falsifiable, it seems reasonable to credit more specific claims—for instance, that some structural processes, such as the rules regulating the appropriation and trade of natural resources, exacerbate local socioeconomic conflicts and sustain authoritarian regimes (see Wenar, 2016). Such local socioeconomic conflicts and authoritarian regimes, I add, often appear as proximate causes of displacement.

Who, then, should be held outcome responsible for cases of forced migration triggered by global structures and processes, such as climate change and global trade? How can reparative responsibility be assigned when it seems impossible to attribute the outcome (solely) to specific actions of particular states or nonstate actors? According to Young's (2006) social-connection model, all participants in global structures “bear responsibility for structural injustice because they contribute by their actions to the processes that produce unjust outcomes” (p. 119). Thus, a backwards-looking assessment of contribution plays a role in Young's model.¹⁸ However, she considers it inappropriate to hold single agents individually liable (i.e., morally responsible and thus blameable) when it is impossible to directly attribute a harmful outcome to a specific action intentionally meant to produce that outcome.¹⁹ In such cases, she rejects reparative-justice accounts in favor of a forward-looking remedial responsibility to reform structures falling upon all contributors (Young, 2006, pp. 121–2). Shall we then renounce adopting a backwards-looking, reparative approach when forced migration results from a complex chain of interrelated policies, norms, and practices?

Some theorists have recently defended backwards-looking approaches to responsibility for displacement cases of this sort, particularly for displacement caused by climate change. However, to do so they avoid adopting a structural frame and propose instead to trace the relative contribution of states as a proxy to determine their differentiated share of reparative responsibility. James Souter (2021), for instance, maintains that climate change and political economy do not count as “pure cases of structural injustice, for they are partly sustained by individual and often deliberate acts of wrongdoing by states and others, such as their efforts to uphold political and economic structures despite their foreseeably harmful consequences” (p. 80, emphasis in the original). Rebecca Buxton and Jamie Draper frame responsibility for displacement triggered by climate change in a similar way. Discussing the case of people forced to leave permanently sinking islands, Buxton defends the application of the Polluters Pay Principle (PPP), arguing that reparative responsibility for climate-induced displacement should be assigned to states based on their relative contribution to climate change through greenhouse gas emissions.²⁰ Analogously, focussing on international “climate migrants” whose states do not face extinction, Draper (2019, p. 67) argues that high-emitting states should be held outcome responsible, as they negligently failed to mitigate emissions notwithstanding the foreseeable harmful outcomes. Indeed, he notes, the possibility of displacement being triggered by climate change was already envisaged in the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1990 (Draper, 2019, p. 68). All three proposals adopt a backwards-looking approach to the assessment of responsibility for forced migration, understood as a foreseeable outcome of climate change. Moreover, they all insist that responsibility to repair the harms suffered by climate migrants falls upon the high-emitting states. In sum, they propose to overcome the challenges of complex interconnections by tracing individual responsibility even in cases of forced migration triggered by global structures and processes.

By contrast, I propose to reconcile a structural understanding of global processes with a reparative approach to responsibility for forced migration.²¹ A structural approach to responsibility for forced migration triggered by climate change or political economy has important explanatory and normative advantages. It sidesteps the epistemic challenges of tracing and measuring the individual responsibility of identifiable perpetrators for every case of displacement by acknowledging instead a collective reparative responsibility falling upon participants even when the causal contribution of each participant is hard to disentangle. Nevertheless, it is compatible with assessing individual reparative responsibility when particular agents can be held individually outcome responsible for specific cases of forced displacement happening against the background of global structures and processes. Collective reparative responsibility for structures does not rule out individual responsibility for discrete actions but acknowledges that discrete actions do not always tell the whole story. Second, a structural account allows us to see that such a collective responsibility is nonetheless differentiated: all contributors share some responsibility, but not equally. Third, it shows why those actors who bear the largest shares of reparative responsibility based on contribution to the structure are usually in practice the same actors that benefitted the most from it and that have the greatest ability to both reform the structure and compensate those who have been harmed. When it comes to climate change and global economy, reparative responsibility for their harmful effects seems to fall primarily on the countries of the Global North if we consider their relative (historical) contribution, benefit, and capacity to remedy. This is not a coincidence. Indeed, contribution, benefit, and capacity are all connected with the structural position of an agent. Thus, drawing on Young, I propose to adopt relative power²² (instead of relative contribution, benefit, or ability) as a proxy to determine states' fair share of reparative responsibility for cases of forced migration triggered by global structures and processes such as the global economy and climate change.

Using power as a proxy highlights the frequent alignment of (historical) contribution to structural injustices, benefit and capacity to remedy. However, it may not cover cases where the three parameters do not align. When the power proxy does not work, it is because contribution, benefit and capacity, taken as grounds for responsibility, come into conflict. We can imagine, for instance, states that retain a great influence on a structure they historically contributed to shaping and benefitted from but no longer have sufficient capacity to address the harms caused by the structure. Other states might have gained an increasingly powerful position and stronger capacity although they historically contributed or benefitted less. Moreover, some states might have greatly benefitted from a structure or process over time despite their marginal contribution.²³ The power proxy does not aim to solve all cases of conflict among historical contribution, benefit, and current capacity. In such cases, we might prefer one parameter over others as a ground for reparative responsibility, or appeal to the humanitarian principle. Despite being imperfect, power remains a useful proxy to assign reparative responsibility when contribution, benefit and capacity converge.

Someone might object that this approach relies on a fully externalist explanation of the causes of forced migration, in which domestic injustices are merely epiphenomenal. I do not deny that some injustices may be essentially local (Gibney, 2004, p. 235), and I recognize the responsibility of states of origin. My point, here, is to underline how external states can be connected to forced migrants not only through particular acts and omissions but also through global processes and structures in which they participate. When this is the case, they have obligations of justice to avoid or mitigate the foreseeable harms which such processes and structures may produce (including forced displacement) and to repair them. In virtue of such global connections, when forced migration is to a relevant extent a consequence of global structures and processes, forced migrants are not owed the fulfillment of their specific needs as a matter of humanitarianism but as a matter of reparative justice.

A backwards-looking approach to justice in forced migration requires recognizing that forced migrants' needs are specific and derive from the harms of displacement. Thus, as long as the harms of displacement affect their lives, forced migrants continue to have specific needs. Furthermore, a backwards-looking, reparative account of justice requires the recognition that such harms may depend on the actions of specific agents or on human-made structures and processes, rather than being a product of accident or bad luck. In this section, I offer three justice principles deriving from my harms-based, reparative account of responsibility for forced migration. Such principles ensure that policies recognize the connection between forced migrants' needs and the specific harms of displacement, address those needs as part of the reparations owed for harms and express the acknowledgement of reparative responsibility.

The first principle I propose is the specificity principle: it requires that temporary assistance policies and integration policies address forced migrants' specific needs,²⁴ and not just survival needs or general human rights. The second is the continuity principle, which requires that specific needs start to be addressed from the beginning of displacement until such needs cease. Finally, justice in forced migration requires policies to express two levels of recognition: the recognition of the specific needs of forced migrants, and the recognition of individual or collective reparative responsibility on the part of states (or nonstate actors). Let me now elaborate on each principle in turn.

The specificity principle highlights that forced migrants are not merely owed the fulfillment of basic needs qua vulnerable and destitute people and, in the long term, the protection of their basic human rights qua human beings. By contrast, policies should address specific needs which arise from the specific harms of forced migration. This implies recognizing forced migrants as people who have been forcibly displaced, instead of subsuming them into a generic category of “vulnerable” people in need of humanitarian concern until they eventually access a “durable solution” and become indistinguishable from the nondisplaced population, with whom they share the same claims to human rights protection.

Relatedly, the continuity principle prescribes overcoming a rigid temporal separation between a “displacement” phase and a “postdisplacement durable solution”. Among theorists, policy makers, and humanitarian agencies, there is a well-established consensus about three “durable solutions”: repatriation, local integration, and resettlement.²⁵ Until forced migrants reach one of those solutions, they are in a temporary assistance phase (still often equated with encampment) during which they should receive emergency humanitarian assistance. Ideally, displacement should be quickly solved, but it is now well known that displacement is usually protracted.²⁶ Indeed, repatriation is usually unfeasible and undesirable in the short term. Moreover, only a risible percentage of forced migrants are resettled: most remain inside their countries as IDPs or move to neighboring countries, while a minority make their own way to the Global North to claim asylum. Those who remain in the Global South are often denied local integration. Though over half of forced migrants now live outside camps, mostly in urban areas, they are often prevented from integrating into the local community.

I argue that the partition between the displacement phase and the durable-solution phase obscures the fact that forced migrants have distinctive needs both before and after they gain access to a durable solution. Indeed, the term “solution” might convey the misleading idea that being repatriated, resettled, or allowed to live and work in host countries is per se sufficient to end the displacement condition. On the contrary, the specific harms connected to displacement require prolonged assistance to be overcome. This includes support to regain control over their lives, recreate a home environment, regain both economic independence and social status, and recover psychological well-being. Specific support is to be guaranteed from the beginning of their displacement until they cease to have such needs, whether in host countries or in the home country, were they to return.²⁷ Furthermore, outcome-responsible actors continue to bear reparative duties even when forced migrants are repatriated or locally integrated elsewhere.

To publicly acknowledge and repair the harms of forced migration, a third principle is needed. The expressivity principle requires that policies directed at meeting forced migrants' needs be explicitly aimed at recognizing and repairing the past or enduring harms affecting them qua displaced people. Along with symbolic forms of apology, a range of social services may be used as forms of redress. States bearing individual reparative responsibility may directly provide services as reparations to those they contributed to displacing. However, such services may also be delivered by other states, while the outcome-responsible state or nonstate actor provides funds for those specific services. This can be the case when an external state contributes to internal displacement (i.e., when forced migrants remain within the jurisdiction of their state of origin). Moreover, this can be the case when nonstate actors, such as corporations, are outcome responsible, since they lack territory and institutions. Furthermore, policies may have a reparative value even when actors that issue them bear a collective responsibility for having participated in processes or structures leading to displacement. The expressivity principle affects both the public justification for policies and the way policies are implemented. For instance, policies directed at sustaining forced migrants' economic independence should not be implemented with the aim of quickly relieving the burden on the host state's welfare system or with the aim of contributing to the economic development of that state, although such policies can indeed contribute to these goals. Rather, policies should be based on the recognition that forced migrants were harmed (economically, but also socially and psychologically) when forced to abandon their source of livelihood and thus should be redressed.

Taken together, the three principles of specificity, continuity, and expressivity offer normative guidance in devising policies that take seriously the needs of forced migrants as individuals harmed by forced migration. Here, I do not attempt to provide a comprehensive set of political prescriptions for all cases of forced migration, which would both involve oversimplification and exceed the purpose of this theoretical discussion. However, I aim to illustrate how such principles help us to rethink some policies directed at meeting forced migrants' needs, compared to both policy approaches focussing on providing humanitarian aid and approaches framing forced migrants' protection within a development strategy in host countries. Both approaches, indeed, rely on a forward-looking conception of responsibility based on the humanitarian principle.

As Parekh (2020, p. 17) notes, theorists and policy makers usually adopt an ethics of rescue. This influences not only the kind of responsibility at stake but also what is thought to be owed and how it should be provided. The term “rescue” chosen by Parekh is evocative, since it recalls the image of migrants drowning in the Mediterranean. Forced migrants tend to be considered as people fleeing life threats, and thus in need of safety. This implies they should be offered emergency humanitarian assistance in situ whenever possible or admission to a country capable of providing temporary aid. Humanitarian-aid responses to forced migration are largely devoted to providing shelters, along with other essential goods such as food and water. Shelters are meant to be quickly available and provisional. Thus, they do not usually allow one to recover control over their private space and belongings or control over their future, which are necessary for a decent, minimally flourishing human life. Humanitarian-assistance responses also mainly focus on the present: they are not meant to redress past harms or to rebuild displaced people's future lives. Indeed, the emergency-assistance phase is presumed to precede one of the three durable solutions. In the meantime, forced migrants are not supported in remaking a home environment around their provisional shelters. Quite the opposite: formal norms or informal restrictions, including encampment or spatial segregation, are often used to discourage forced migrants from developing sufficient social and cultural resources to orient themselves in the environment, perceive their personal identity as meaningful within it, and conceive future plans because this would foster their local integration and make them more unlikely to eventually return to their place of origin.

A new house and a new home environment seem more than what is owed, on humanitarian grounds. However, they are owed to forced migrants as a redress for having been deprived of their previous house and home environment. Thus, even when settlement is expected to be provisional, it is unjust to prevent forced migrants from remaking home for an indefinite amount of time while waiting for a durable solution to come. The specificity and continuity principles help us to identify what states should ensure: not merely survival, which generically requires providing shelter, but those basic conditions for a dignified life that forced migration specifically undermined. This includes shelters allowing minimum control over one's private space, and support to quickly reorient in the surrounding spatial, social, and cultural environment. The expressivity principle also requires that these measures should not be publicly justified based on pragmatic or humanitarian reasons but based on the acknowledgement of the harms of displacement, such as the loss of control and the loss of the home environment.

One might think that, in the long term, the most appropriate way to meet forced migrants' need for a house and home environment would be restoring the original ones. However, return and restitution are not necessarily the morally preferable options to meet forced migrants' needs. Indeed, physical safety in the place of origin does not suffice. For those forced migrants who do return, states (and nonstate actors) outcome responsible for displacement retain the reparative duty to fulfill the needs that derive from the harms of displacement. This means ensuring returnees adequate support in the process of recovering control, remaking a home environment, regaining a source of livelihood and dignified social status, and recovering psychological well-being so that they can plan and lead a decent, reasonably flourishing life.

Analogously to return, resettlement and local integration should not be intended only to provide the legal permission to settle in the host country (or region). When it comes to remaking a home environment, housing security should be promoted so that forced migrants can be protected from sudden evictions. This may involve regularizing forced migrants' shelters by allowing them to have formal tenancy agreements and pay rent to live on the public or private lands or in the buildings where they are hosted, or to acquire ownership titles.²⁸ Indeed, land, housing, or a monetary equivalent, is owed as compensation to those whose land and housing cannot be restored or those who do not wish to return. However, such compensation (both monetary and in kind) cannot merely be calculated based on the market value of the land or house and cannot leave uncompensated those lacking legal title to their housing. Rather, compensation should provide reliable, decent, and safe housing facilities which do not undermine their control over their body, private space, and immediate future. Moreover, it should allow displaced people to develop a web of familiar geographical, social, and cultural landmarks on which they can rely to accomplish daily routines and make plans. The natural and human geography of the previous home environment should be taken into account. For instance, displaced indigenous and nomadic peoples cannot be considered fairly compensated if they are allocated flats in an unfamiliar urban environment or given a sum of money to navigate the city housing market on their own.

Development-oriented policies might seem more apt to satisfy the justice principles presented above, compared to the combination of emergency assistance (focussed on feeding and sheltering) and durable solutions (focussed on formal access to equal rights). Indeed, development-oriented approaches criticize protracted encampment and dependence on emergency humanitarian aid: they stress the importance of providing forced migrants with legal access to the job market to be economically self-reliant, to productively contribute to the economy of the host country, and to acquire (or maintain) skills that can be useful in their home country upon return (see Betts & Collier, 2017). Economic self-reliance in a geographically proximate host country is expected to discourage onward migration to the Global North while contributing to the economic development of that country and minimizing the economic, social, and political cost of hosting forced migrants. Businesses would also benefit. Moreover, keeping forced migrants well trained and close to their place of origin is predicted to make return more likely as soon as it is safe enough, assuming that forced migration is triggered by temporary mass violence and state fragility.²⁹ It is certainly more economically efficient for both Global North donor states and Global South host states to turn forced migrants into productive development actors, instead of burdensome recipients of humanitarian aid. All in all, development aid is a bargain, compared to humanitarian aid: it is a matter of investment, not charity (Betts & Collier, 2017, p. 175). Furthermore, it has been argued, it is also morally preferable, to the extent that it empowers forced migrants, while protracted humanitarian assistance is humiliating and disempowering (Brock, 2020).

In contrast to approaches focussed on humanitarian assistance, development-oriented approaches are more apt to meet the continuity principle. First, such approaches suggest policies which do not reduce the time frame to the present, keeping lives “on hold”, but rather take the future into account. Nevertheless, development-oriented approaches fail to adequately meet the specificity and expressivity requirements, because they are not backwards-looking in identifying needs and in assigning responsibility to fulfill them. Defenders of development-oriented approaches may explicitly deny causal connections between displacement and the actions of external states. For instance, Betts and Collier (2017, p. 99) minimize “Western complicity” in forced migration as “occasional”, citing examples of direct military intervention in conflicts. Furthermore, they reject as a “lingering vestige of colonialism” the view that “in a globalized world, all injustice is structurally interconnected” (Betts & Collier, 2017, pp. 99–100). The Syrian war, for example, is depicted as an almost completely endogenous civil conflict regarding which external states do not bear any reparative responsibility for the mass displacement it involved.³⁰ For the proponents of development-oriented policies, the ground for responsibility remains a humanitarian, exclusively forward-looking one. External states, companies, and other nonstate potential “donors” resemble to a crowd of bystanders by the pond where forced migrants are about to drown. They all individually have a duty to rescue and should find a criterion (i.e., comparative advantage) to discharge it in a coordinated way.

Surely, showing that contributing to development-oriented policies both meets their interests and creates economic, political, and social benefits seems more effective in motivating states to fund employment, training, and education policies than arguments based on a disputable duty to repair harms which they have contributed to causing. However, the public reasons that justify policies matter. Part of what justice in forced migration requires is precisely the recognition that social services (including employment, training, and education policies) are owed as a form of redress, not as humanitarian or development aid. Indeed, the literature on reparative justice shows that, for social-service provision to work as a reparation, it should be publicly explained that “the social benefit is given to the victim in recognition of the harm suffered” and “as on obligation for the harm caused” (Pérez Murcia 2013, p. 199). In sum, when based on a backwards-looking account of responsibility, social services carry a distinctive, reparative, expressive value.³¹

To recover social and epistemic status, forced migrants are also owed truth telling about why they have been displaced and should be offered the opportunity to contribute as witnesses in reconstructing what happened. This might require judiciary trials in civil and even criminal courts, but also forms of truth telling which do not impose penalties on individuals or legal persons. According to Margaret Urban Walker (2010, p. 536), truth telling “addresses two intertwined and superadded harms that often befall victims: their epistemic impeachment and their degradation from the moral status of a credibly self-accounting actor. These harms constitute a fundamental form of moral disqualification, a morally annihilating insult added to the original injury”.

The literature on the role of truth telling in redressing the harms of displacement focusses on the responsibility of states of origin in reintegrating returnees and is limited to postconflict situations (Bradley, 2012b, pp. 213–4). However, as Bradley (2012b) notes, truth telling may also make it more acceptable for forced migrants to settle elsewhere and consider other compensation options instead of restitution in kind and return (p. 215). This may apply to enduring conflict and postconflict situations where return is politically unfeasible (e.g., Palestine or Cyprus), but also to other kinds of displacement (including development-induced and environmentally induced displacement). As Walker (2010) puts it, truth telling is both a reparation measure in itself and a precondition to all other reparations. Whether or not this leads to return, forced migrants need truth to be reconstructed and publicly recognized to get on with their lives, recover self-esteem and social recognition, and overcome feelings of humiliation, guilt, fear, anger, or suspicion.³²

In the literature bridging forced-migration studies with postconflict and transitional-justice studies, truth telling is mostly exemplified by truth commissions (Bradley, 2012a, 2012b). However, other forms of truth telling include the collection and publication of oral, written, and visual testimonies. As credible and reliable witnesses, displaced persons regain social and epistemic status. Moreover, when their story is validated by actors bearing reparative responsibility and results in public apologies, this further strengthens forced migrants' status. Truth telling may also foster their trust in institutions as well as mutual trust between them and the nondisplaced population (either hosts or those who remained home, in the case of returnees).

I argued that individual reparative responsibilities for forced migration are more frequent than commonly acknowledged and apply to external states and nonstate actors along with states of origin. Furthermore, when state and nonstate actors participate in structures and processes that have plausibly contributed to forced migration, those actors bear a duty to publicly express, rather than deny, their collective outcome responsibility and the reparative responsibilities that this entails. In this case, reparative responsibility does not require expressing guilt for individual wrongdoing. Nevertheless, the public recognition of the participation to the structure or process triggering forced displacement plays an important expressive role. Indeed, it both contributes to meeting forced migrants' claim to truth telling and preludes commitment to reforming structures and processes to reduce future forced migration.

In this article I adopted a backwards-looking approach to responsibility for forced migrants. I argued that both states (including external states) and nonstate actors bear reparative duties of justice, rather than humanitarian duties, towards forced migrants, when they are outcome responsible for displacement. Such agents may have either individual reparative responsibility if their actions contributed to displacement or collective reparative responsibilities if they participate in structures and processes that contributed to displacement. Then, I considered the implications of this reparative-justice account concerning how forced migrants' needs should be met. I argued that policies should respect three principles. According to the specificity principle, policies should be targeted to forced migrants' distinctive needs qua forced migrants. Second, the continuity principle requires that the recognition of forced migrants' distinctive condition continues until the harms of displacement cease. Third, the expressivity principle prescribes that the policies addressing forced migrants' needs be publicly justified as part of the reparative duties for the harms of forced migration. These principles, I illustrated, have important implications for both temporary assistance policies and integration policies.

This work was partly funded by a Short-Term Postdoctoral Research Grant issued by the Society for Applied Philosophy.

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.