About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline

LOG IN
LOG IN


18 Int'l Theory 1 (2026)

handle is hein.journals/intheory18 and id is 1 raw text is: International Theory (2026), 18 (1), 1-21 doi:1 17 72 95 1 International 'Theory RESEARCH ARTICLE Weighing responsibilities: the allocation of fair refugee quotas Liwu Gan ' Department of Political Science, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York, USA Email: a (Received 09 April 2025; revised 05 August 2025; accepted 14 August 2025) Keywords: responsibility; ethical principles; refugees; fairness; quotas; political theory Introduction Over 43 million refugees - individuals forcibly displaced by conflict and persecution who cross international borders - exist in the international system.' Geographic proximity is the main criterion shaping which countries take responsibility for refugees, where the closer a country is located to a refugee's country of origin, the more responsibility it will have for the refugees.2 This responsibility regularly extends beyond emergency care, where these states host refugees for the long term without 'UNHCR 2024. This number includes (1) 31.6 million refugees and 5.8 million other people in need of international protection under UNHCR's mandate and (2) 6 million Palestinian refugees under UNRWA's mandate. It is a subset of the 117.3 million who were globally displaced at the end of 2023. 2Sixty-nine percent of refugees lived in neighboring countries in 2023. See UNHCR 2024. © The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (h4.), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited. Published online by Cambridge University Press