Twenty-fourth International Conference on Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations

Abstract

European Union (EU) member state responsibilities are central to asylum governance and crisis response, yet are rarely the focus of empirical analysis by scholars. It is important to understand how responsibilities related to both humanitarian protection and sovereignty play a role in shaping state action, since asylum governance is characterized by the management of tensions by governments between humanitarian protection and state sovereignty. Within the EU, member state responsibilities related to asylum are shaped by humanitarian and sovereignty imperatives within the context of supranational governance institutions resulting in prescribed state actions. This paper investigates the relation among EU member state responsibilities and asylum governance through a conceptual examination of the construction of state responsibilities in global statist and regional supranational systems. By critically analyzing state responsibilities associated with humanitarian protection and sovereignty, this paper synthesizes a typology of state responsibilities in asylum governance. The analysis identifies four types of state responsibility related to humanitarian protection (general, reparative, remedial, and distributive) and three state responsibilities related to sovereignty (civil, legal, and political). These responsibilities prescribe responses to asylum crises which governments must discharge through policy design and implementation. The paper argues that in responding to asylum crises, governments will select policy instruments which navigate the tensions among these responsibilities. The typology of state responsibilities developed in this paper provides a useful framework for future empirical research analyzing the drivers of EU member state actions in responding to asylum crises and helps expand our understanding of implementation gaps in asylum governance.