The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation

The Ethics of Refugee Repatriation considers when bodies such as the UN, government agencies and NGOs ought to help refugees to return home. Drawing on original interviews with 172 refugees before and after repatriation, Mollie Gerver describes six moral puzzles arising in repatriation. She resolves each puzzle using the methods of analytical philosophy. In drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork, the book gives the reader a deeper understanding of the particular ethical challenges arising from the process of refugee assistance, and provides aid workers and policymakers with the tools to formulate more ethical repatriation policies.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements; 1. Introduction; 2. Coercion; 3. Misinformation; 4. Regret; 5. Payments; 6. Children; 7. Discrimination; 8. Restitution; 9. Conclusion; Appendix A; Appendix B.

About the Author :
Mollie Gerver is an Assistant Professor in Political Theory at the University of Essex. She obtained her PhD from the London School of Economics, and specializes in migration and the philosophy of consent. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including the British Journal of Political Science, Political Studies, and Politics, Philosophy and Economics.

Review :
this book expands the range of questions that have been asked in relation to the ethics and practice of refugee repatriation. It also addresses them in a consistently systematic manner, based on an intriguing combination of philosophical analysis, ethnographic fieldwork, and key informant interviews. The author makes valuable use of the conversations she has had with people living in exile and those who have returned to their own country – actors whose voice is sometimes strangely missing in the refugee studies literature. The book also has a refreshing honesty, recognizing the difficulty of making policy choices in situations where different ethical principles might contradict each other. As Gerver concludes in her discussion of restitution, for example, while returning property to returnees may appear to be just, it also has the effect of benefiting some refugees more than others: ‘If most returnees are living without basic necessities, it is not clear if property ought to be returned to its original owners, rather than redistributed to those most in need’ (p 190). The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation is an engaging philosophical and practical work that should be read by anyone writing on migration and human rights. Mollie Gerver’s The Ethics and Practice of Refugee Repatriation sheds an important light on this underexplored subject. With rigorous and well-informed argumentation, Gerver uncovers a series of ethical dilemmas concerning the practice of repatriation, and offers concrete guidelines for action.Gerver’s book is novel not only in its subject matter, but also in its method. The discussions draw on interviews she conducted with refugees from South Sudan, Ethiopia and Uganda among others. The in-depth case analyses are employed primarily as a method to dig out the morally relevant features of the practice (p. 15). Yet, they achieve more. True stories flesh out the argument, allowing the reader to better grasp and weigh diverse moral intuitions. At times, the unique details of a case leads Gerver to reconsider the philosophical understandings of concepts such as consent, coercion or intention. In this sense, Gerver’s investigation goes beyond a mere application of an ethical point of view to repatriation This book offers an excellent example of what philosophers should be attempting to do today. It takes into account real-world policies as well as the attitudes and lives of forced migrants, and does so in a clear and prescriptive way. This is a ground-breaking study of the ethics of repatriation. Mollie Gerver skilfully combines analytical political philosophy and empirical fieldwork to discuss the dilemmas of refugee repatriation and to suggest criteria for when it is morally acceptable. The book will be read with great interest by both academics and policy-makers. Mollie Gerver’s work is an outstanding attempt to reflect critically on refugee repatriation through a combination of rigorous philosophical analysis and empirical findings gleaned from interviews with refugees and NGOs. Her honest, unblinking, and genuinely original study is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the morality of contemporary responses to refugees.