Climate refugeehood: A counterargument

Abstract

This paper argues against the idea of climate change refugeehood. Drawing on political realism, it reconstructs the idea and function of refugeehood in international politics. Refugees are not the agencyless victims merely in search of rescue by states of the Global North, as the idea of climate refugeehood as a form of humanitarian refugeehood would have it. Nor are they simply a function of reparative justice, or of defending international state legitimacy. To liberal democracies, refugees are those fleeing political oppression. They hold an important political function in inter-state relations in undermining rival political systems and strengthening liberal democratic regimes, both ideally and materially. The idea of climate refugeehood collides with the role refugeehood plays in international politics, the reasons for their admission, and the conceptualization of their plight and function. It ought, hence, to be rejected.

Introduction

Climate change in the twenty-first century is comparable to the biggest climatic changes in the preceding 65 million years. These changes do and will continue to have a large impact on ecosystem changes, (non-human) species redistribution and extinction, as well as on socioeconomic parameters, including on livelihoods, food security and fresh water availability (Pecl et al., 2017). Notably, climate change has also been predicted to cause the large scale migration of people, with scholars painting near apocalyptic pictures of hundreds of millions of people displaced by climate change induced environmental degradation. The numbers predicted by scholars vary between 50 million and several billions, and have been the subject of severe criticism by others, arguing that they amount to nothing more than mere conjecture (Felli, 2013; Methmann and Oels, 2015). What we can say, with near certainty, is that climate change does and will play a role in future migration decisions. In this context, calls for admitting so-called climate refugees have emerged. But, should they? This paper argues against the idea of climate change refugeehood. Several accounts exist that defend a normative argument for climate refugeehood. They hold that climate refugees should be admitted either out of a humanitarian impulse, the drive to pay reparations for past climate injustices, or with the intent of defending a legitimate statist world order. While all three make valid moral claims, they do not consider the structural cosmos within which states act. This paper will show that to develop a proper normative conception of refugeehood requires departing from the function that refugeehood plays within international politics. It will thus offer a different normative (but not moral) justification of refugeehood. This conception of refugeehood excludes a normative claim for climate refugeehood, be this a legally codified institution or a moral-political demand. Drawing on the emerging literature of political realism, this paper will argue that the normative demand for climate refugeehood disintegrates the political function of refugeehood itself. To this end, section one lays out the idea of climate refugeehood. Section two introduces the three normative arguments for climate refugeehood and outlines the contours of the critique from political realism. Section three argues for a realist picture of refugeehood. It demonstrates that asylum and refugeehood hold a specific political role and function in international politics. They allow states to defend their own interests against rival political systems. Refugees are the source of political and military forms of opposition, and admitting them can undermine rival political systems both materially and ideally. The section shows how climate refugeehood leads to the disintegration of this picture of refugeehood. It leads to depoliticization on three levels, which has impacts not only for the institution of asylum, but also for refugees and left-behind communities. It should, hence, be rejected. The fourth section concludes.

Climate refugeehood and its critics

We are all familiar with the pictures of inundated lands, of people wading through knee-high water while they are standing in their living rooms, of landslides, hurricanes and high temperatures gripping entire populations and creating novel difficulties in everyday life. One of these pictures shows Tuvalu's foreign minister, standing knee-deep in seawater while addressing the United Nations climate conference in Glasgow on the impacts of climate change on his small island nation in the pacific. These islands are facing increased risks to their livelihoods due to climate change. Rising sea levels are submerging more and more of the low-lying land during seasonal high tides, threaten to contaminate fresh water reserves with salt water, and are susceptible to droughts. Connected to the phenomenon of climate change is the discussion on climate change refugees. The idea is simple. If small islands are slowly sinking beneath the waves as a result of climate change, their inhabitants will need to leave and settle elsewhere. They are forced to leave their native lands. This makes them climate refugees in the eyes of many policymakers, NGO's and academics.

The term itself is not entirely new. It draws on the idea of an earlier specific conception of refugeehood: that of environmental refugees. The concept emerged as a consequence of the populations in the Pacific being affected by the USA's use of their lands as nuclear testing sites in the aftermath of the second world war. Testing nuclear weapons in the Marshall Islands in 1946, the US was faced with a population that was consequently at risk of being exposed to nuclear radiation. They needed to leave. The United States consequently signed the Compact of Free Association with the Marshall Islands, allowing their citizens to travel freely to the United States (Keyes, 2019; McNamara and Gibson, 2009: 477). The term was later popularized in the 1980s and 90s, incorporating narratives that identified those leaving environmentally depleted areas suffering from desertification and soil erosion as people tied to their lands, but degrading it so rapidly that they consequently had to move. This “degradation narrative” formed the foundation of a conception that saw the states of the Global North as the rational saviors and those migrating as a population primitively tied to their land that they were responsible for destroying and breaking down, causing necessary movement (Hartmann, 2010). The term was initially seen to incorporate many more environmental causes for migration additional to climate change. Norman Myers’ definition holds that:

Environmental refugees are persons who can no longer gain a secure livelihood in their traditional homelands because of environmental factors of unusual scope, notably drought, desertification, deforestation, soil erosion, water shortages and climate change, also natural disaster such as cyclones, storm surges and floods. In face of these environmental threats, people feel they have no alternative but to seek sustenance elsewhere, whether within their own countries or beyond and whether on a semi-permanent or permanent basis. (Myers cited in: Hartmann, 2010: 235)

Climate refugees are then a subset of environmental refugees, which include people moving due to a host of environmental changes. These can, for instance, include the ensuing environmental impacts of development projects, such as the building of dams, which floods valleys previously inhabited or endangers the ecosystems on which surrounding populations depend. The main reason why climate induced migration is seen as a form of refugeehood seems to stem from the argument that it is a form of forced migration (Berchin et al., 2017). Yet, the idea of refugee migration being solely tied to being forced to leave has rightly been questioned (Ottonelli and Torresi, 2013; Turton, 2003). If the term can be used at all it refers much more to a spectrum and not a binary between forced and voluntary forms of migration. Basing refugee migration only on the former risks suggesting that people leave their home country because they have no other choice, and only for the reason of being (physically) forced out. Yet, this concerns only a minority of people, if any at all. Multiple reasons intersect when making decisions to migrate. No one is only forced to leave. There are always choices to be made, risks to be evaluated, opportunities weighed before making a decision to migrate. ¹ Yet, climate change refugeehood has been understood mainly as a form of forced migration, and has been tied to monocausal explanations of their flight. Berchin defines a climate refugee as:

… one who has been forced to leave their home or country, due to the effects of severe climate events, which exposes them to the perception of insecurity and force them to seek asylum in other regions or countries. (Berchin et al., 2017: 149)

and similarly, Ahmed defines climate refugees as:

… people who must leave their homes and communities because of the effects of climate change and global warming. (Ahmed, 2018: 8, emphasis added by the author)

Monocausal explanations of climate change refugeehood see human movement as being forced by climate change induced environmental changes. It is the sole or main reason behind their movement.

One is forced by natural events to move. Climate change refugeehood so constructed thus makes use of a conceptual cosmos that has been largely disproven. The idea that people flee for one specific reason, and are forced by such reason without there being any voluntary aspects to migration decisions is wrong, and has been one of the main points of contention with the idea of climate refugeehood (Draper, 2022).

Notwithstanding, calls for institutionalizing a rights-based international framework for identifying, protecting and resettling climate refugees have been aplenty. Some authors have called for a separate international legal and political regime for recognizing, protecting, and resettling climate change refugees, equipped with its own decision-making mechanism and funding body. According to Biermann and Boas, such a body would intervene financially within and upon request of the respective state in order to internally resettle populations adversely affected by climate change and provide development aid in efforts to facilitate adaptation (Biermann and Boas, 2010, 2008; Docherty and Giannini, 2009). Others have responded to what they perceive as a “protection gap” by advocating not for a global, but a regional international refugee regime (Williams, 2008a). These arguments are underpinned by somewhat apocalyptic pictures of hundreds of millions of refugees crossing international borders into the states of the Global North, causing disruption and conflict and necessitating a strong international reaction to forestall chaos, death, and war. Estimates of people moving due to climate induced environmental change range from 50 million and several billion people by 2080 (Biermann and Boas, 2010, 2008; Williams, 2008a). The main line of defense for employing a concept such as climate refugeehood and its legal institutionalization within a rights-based international framework is two-fold. The first rests on the previously discussed notion of forced migration, and holds that people may be forced by climate change just as much as by persecuting governments. Second, and tied to this argument is the necessary addendum that the conventional distinction between Internally Displaced People (IDPs) and refugees is both overcome, and that climate refugees not only remain within the boundaries of their states but also (and increasingly) migrate to other states (Biermann and Boas, 2008: 13). Both defenses have received critique from sociological and legal angles (For various critiques see: Bettini, 2013; Farbotko and Lazrus, 2012; Hartmann, 2010; McAdam, 2011, 2012; McNamara and Gibson, 2009). This paper is, however, interested in the normative defense of climate refugeehood, to which the following section now turns.

Climate refugees and political realism

Three possible normative defenses exist for climate refugeehood. The first is humanitarian, the second reparative, the third derives from state system legitimacy. While all three make valid moral claims, they do not consider the structural cosmos within which states act. This paper will show that to develop a proper normative conception of refugeehood requires to depart from the function that refugeehood plays within international politics. It will thus offer a different normative (but not moral) grounding of refugeehood. This conception of refugeehood excludes a normative claim for climate refugeehood, be this a legally codified institution or a moral-political demand.

The literature on climate refugeehood has frequently resorted to distinctly humanitarian forms of justification. Humanitarian views are themselves closely tied to explaining a duty towards refugees based on what has become known as the “duty of rescue”. Pioneered by Peter Singer (1972), the analogy asks the reader to imagine a shallow pond in which a child is drowning. The reader is standing next to the pond, an avid swimmer, having no blame for the situation in which the child finds itself. She could rescue the child easily, but she so happens to also wear her expensive Prada suit, which would surely be ruined if she jumped into the pond to save the child. Should she do so nonetheless? The answer must be “yes”. Virtually all moral philosophers would agree that the innocent bystander has a duty of rescue towards the child as long as the costs of saving the child seem comparatively low. Scholars in refugeehood have taken this example and extrapolated it to the political realm and to refugeehood generally (Betts and Collier, 2017; Carens, 2013; Dagger, 2005; Gibney, 2004, 2018; Miller, 2016, 2019, 2020; Singer and Singer, 2010; Walzer, 1983). They argue that the case can, without much adaptation, be applied to the idea of refugeehood and the duties of states (mostly of the Global North). The latter are understood to represent the innocent bystander and possess a duty of rescue towards refugees, which represent the children drowning in the pond, as long as the costs remain fairly negligible for these states. Climate refugees often fit this vision of refugeehood. Refugees are here constituted only as people facing some form of harm. They are in danger and require saving. Nothing else counts towards defining refugeehood. The presence of danger and the presence of potential saviors suffices.

Both the idea of refugeehood and the imagined responses are humanitarian. There are a number of critical responses to this vision of refugeehood. Most claim that the analogy is flawed on the level of its agents: refugees are not like children, either because this is an infantilizing reduction of agency for people that have things to say, or because it ignores the potential responsibility of refugees with regards to the situation they are facing; the states of the Global North are not like innocent bystanders, since it is largely due to them that refugees find themselves in the situations that they need rescue from (for these various critiques, see: Miller, 2019; Parekh, 2020a, 2020b). This is an important line of critique that I will, however, not delve into any further. It does not touch the main reason for rejecting this sort of view. Note that this conceptualization of refugeehood does not provide a justification for why people experiencing harm should be classified as refugees or should receive asylum. The humanitarian duty strictly justifies the need for aid. As will be shown below, however, aid can take various forms distinct from providing asylum. Crucially, however, the argument departs from a mistaken assumption: that states operate within the cosmos of morality when they make decisions on refugeehood and asylum. Refugees are to states not what the child is to the stranger. Refugeehood fulfills a distinctly political function that results in protection. I will elaborate on this below. Let me briefly outline the other two views that can justify (moral) duties to purported climate refugees.

The second departs from a view of reparative justice (Buxton, 2019; Souter, 2022). It justifies duties towards others based on past injustices and demands, in response to these, reparations to rectify, as best as possible, these injustices. This line of argument contributes an important aspect to the debate. Climate change is not a natural phenomena itself, and the emitting agents largely responsible are but a few states in the Global North. Many of those states suffering most from climate induced environmental change have not, or very little, contributed to this degradation (Buxton, 2019: 194). The argument remains, however, vulnerable to the same critique as does the argument from humanitarianism. The demand for reparations does not necessarily trigger the demand for asylum as the political institution that should rectify past injustices. Other forms of aid are possible (and, perhaps, more desirable). Similarly to the humanitarian view, however, the approach departs from the morally good consciousness of states. These are supposed to launch into action on behalf of those that are owed reparations. The argument fails to take into account the political cosmos within which refugeehood matters to states, and why they admit refugees. Though providing us with a neat moral picture, the argument is not politically normative. It does not take into consideration the political functions of refugeehood and asylum, and will thus never be able to form an argument that is practically normative for states.

The third possible defense of climate refugeehood stems from views that understand refugeehood as the necessary response to uphold a system of state legitimacy (Brock, 2020; Owen, 2016). On this account, refugees are those people whose basic human rights have been violated and whose home states cannot, or do not intend to, provide these basic rights to them. Such states have violated basic conditions that supply them with legitimacy. In a world divided into states, in which legitimacy depends on supplying peoples with these basic rights, the absence of such protection necessitates other states to take up the slack. According to this account, when some states forfeit their legitimacy, the only way to justify a world being divided into states is to implement “legitimacy repair” instruments. On this account, admitting refugees is a matter of the international community's effort in upholding the state system as a legitimate system (Owen, 2016). Climate change can be seen as triggering situations in which such absence of basic human rights occurs (Draper, 2023, Chapter 6). It is worthy to note that this view does not necessarily give rise to a separate category of climate refugeehood (Draper, 2023: 120). Climate change can exacerbate refugee movement so understood, but the classification as refugee still depends on the inability or refusal of a state to react to climate induced environmental degradation. This view comes closest to what I shall argue below, but it does not yet depart from the same assumptions on international politics that I will defend. Crucially, it necessitates recourse to the existence of an international community that will react in solidarity to conflict and basic human rights violations elsewhere. If one were to be uncharitable, one could classify this approach as humanitarianism writ in statist language. Alternatively, one may argue that this is not how states view themselves as operating internationally, nor does it sketch the grounds on which they actually admit refugees.

All three lines of argumentation rely heavily on the assumptions of morally compassionate states or inter-state solidarity driven by the urge to justify a statist international community. Both assumptions are demanding. They depart from the world not as it is, but as we would like it to be. The problems for a truly normative account, that is, an account that functions as normative for states, are pre-programmed. Rather than departing from pre-political moral prescriptions or ideal political constellations to which states should ascribe to, I will depart from the cold facts of statist self-interest. This places this project in the tradition of political realism.

Political realism criticizes what its proponents call an “ethics first” or “political moralist” approach (Geuss, 2008; Williams, 2008b). Political oughts, on this approach, are little more than the prescriptions we deduce from abstracted and often individualized moral theory. It takes the form of departing from individualized thought experiments, such as in the duty of rescue introduced above, and extrapolating it onto politics. What we ought to do in politics is just an adaptation of what we have just discerned in a privatized moral setting. Political realists believe that this is a mistake. The political world is, in other words, an autonomous system that requires its own form of normative statements. ² Applying moral principles to the political world is then both a misapplication and hence superfluous because it applies a standard to a world that functions according to different premises, and inconsequential because it operates on a different level than the actors in the system observed and thus constructs principles for a world that does not exist. What ought to be done in politics needs to be developed, political realists argue, from analyzing the political system itself. There are, of course, various ways to do this. Some argue for an approach that analyzes the political world through the lens of ideology critique, disarming moralist normative statements by digging into the conceptual and practical existence of political concepts, their meanings and consequences (Burelli and Destri, 2022; Hall and Sleat, 2017; Prinz and Rossi, 2017). Another form of political realism is functional and instrumental (Burelli, 2022; Burelli and Destri, 2022). It attempts to discern what the function of a given political institution or (inter-)action is in developing its ideal normative form. Critics may argue that this is a form of moral relativism, to which political realists may simply reply that it is a matter of political decision-making, and thus a matter of being politically decided itself, what one strives for, which political institutions one wants.

What we want ought to be democratically (politically) decided, and not prescribed by self-proclaimed moral prophets. Normative political theory then takes the form of an if-then statement. If we want a political system that places a high value on equality or freedom, then we ought to do x. Whether we should want that can then additionally be scrutinized by engaging in the aforementioned ideology critique, analyzing what equality or freedom have meant conceptually, historically and practically within political systems. This means that the two forms of political realism just outlined are not incompatible, with some scholars arguing that they may necessitate each other (Burelli and Destri, 2022). Ideology critique is necessary in being clear about the truth standards that one applies, contextualizing ideas, concepts, actions, but does not in itself provide a normative standard of benchmark. Instrumental or functional forms of political realism may require this form of truth-claim deconstruction, but add a normative standard to this picture. They provide a theory of how a specific political institution functions and derives normative standards therefrom. In this paper, I will be using such a combination of these two forms of political realism in looking at the concept and function of refugeehood. Then, I will show why this picture of refugeehood collides with the idea of climate refugeehood. What, thus, is the function of refugeehood? Which role does it play in politics?

The political function of refugeehood

Refugees possess an important political function in inter-state relations. Admitting refugees has always followed the function of condemning other states as illegitimately yielding political power and undermining rival political systems both ideationally and materially. Offering asylum to people fleeing politically oppressive states has been used to both condemn and embarrass these states. It is a means to show to both the international community and the citizenry of that state that their oppressors operate illegitimately, and that their political system is politically inferior to the one of the host state, ideally also encouraging them to leave (Abdelaaty, 2021). As such, refugeehood can both function as a condemnatory tool of other systems, as well as a identity re-verification mechanism for the population of the receiving state (Durieux, 2013). It demonstrates to domestic audiences that the political system they inhabit, works, while other political regimes cause its citizens to leave in distress. During the Cold War, for instance, the United States used refugee policies to discredit and embarrass communist states. In 1953, the United States issued a National Security Memorandum, holding that it is US policy to “encourage defection of all USSR nationals and ‘key’ personnel from the satellite countries” in order to “inflict a psychological blow on Communism” (quoted in Zolberg et al., 1989: 26–27). Consequently, US law defined a refugee as a person fleeing “from a Communist-dominated country or area, or from any country within the general area of the Middle East” (Teitelbaum, 1984: 430) from 1953 to 1980. Anyone fleeing a communist regime during that period had good chances of being accepted as a refugee in any western state. It showcased the superiority of liberal democracy to communist autocracies, indicating the systemic and material superiority of the former while demonstrating the latter's inferiority (Adamson, 2006; Rosenblum and Salehyan, 2004; Totten, 2017). While the United States are often used as a paradigm example of the political value that refugeehood holds - the case of the US accepting refugees from Cuba, but not from Haiti or El Salvador, which received military and policing aid - refugeehood fulfills this important political function across the world. Beginning with the dawn of modern refugeehood in the eighteenth century, the political aspect of accepting refugees was always its major aspect. Admitting refugees was not simply a matter of charity (in contradistinction to what the humanitarian approach to refugeehood would want us to believe), but signalled an enlightened society, and refugee producing states as inferior and despotic. Admitting refugees for this purpose is a wide-spread and domestically as well as internationally important action, and is practiced by virtually all states across the Globe. Teitelbaum (1984: 339–340) mentions just a few examples of refugee admittance playing this role in Pakistan, India, Somalia, Thailand, Angola and elsewhere. The pattern remains the same independent of temporal or territorial restrictions. Refugees are admitted when fleeing adversarial (often neighboring) regimes (Teitelbaum, 1984: 440). This relationship between refugee admittance and foreign policy goals thus both predates and postdates the Cold War era, with some scholars emphasizing this relationship for the US, post-1989 (Rosenblum and Salehyan, 2004; Rottman et al., 2009), and for non-western countries (Abdelaaty, 2021). There is broad consensus on the robustness regarding the link between refugee admittance from rival states and rejection from political allies in quantitative scholarship (Abdelaaty, 2021; Moorthy and Brathwaite, 2019; Salehyan and Rosenblum, 2008; Teitelbaum, 1984). Refugees, thus, are admitted when they flee competing political systems. Those leaving friendly or non-rivaling systems are rejected. Admitting refugees reflects not a humanitarian concern for their plight but state interests in maintaining power, supporting allies, and undermining rivals. This also means that states do not admit refugees because it would bolster the idea of a statist world system. They are not concerned with the idea of legitimacy, as much as they are with their own political and strategic position within global politics.

Admitting refugees does, of course, not only matter in ideationally undermining the rival political systems of liberal democracies - politically oppressive states. Refugees also play an important role in materially destabilizing them. They are a prime source of political opposition, and of military and guerilla recruitment to destabilize and bring down these regimes. We need not only turn to the political roles many prominent refugees (sometimes called “exiles”) have played in the 18th and nineteenth century. Today and in the past, Cubans have played that role in the US, but Iranians, Russians, Egyptians, and so forth, have done so too elsewhere. Refugee camps are frequently the source of military recruitment for conflict in home states, and refugees do not only organize oppositional parties, information campaigns and rivaling governments-in-exile abroad, but are also funding military and oppositional activities at home (Abdelaaty, 2021: 353). Refugeehood and asylum thus plays far more of a role in international politics than merely protecting those poor and wretched souls from elsewhere. This suggests that at the core of refugeehood lies an agency and political value of refugees. They are imminently politically useful for liberal-democratic host states and dangerous for the politically oppressive states they have left. ³ At the core of refugeehood lies its political function, that endows refugees both with political value and with agency.

Refugeehood thus holds a political function for states. As I have argued, there are a number of ways in which it serves the interest of liberal democracies: identity reverification and the bolstering of democratic rule at home by showing the shortcomings of autocratic repression from which people flee; the ideational consequences of admitting refugees from authoritarian states is, however, not limited to benefits at home. Admitting refugees also signals to the people of authoritarian states a lack of legitimacy. It provides its people with the ideological firepower of internationally verified lacks of legitimate rule. Finally, the material effort of undermining authoritarian states stretches from direct military and insurgency interventions by an abroad opposition to the formation of alternative governments or oppositional movements in an effort to undermining rule at home.

To liberal democracies, all those who are politically oppressed ought to be potentially viewed as refugees. Why would this be of interest to liberal democracies? There are several possible answers here. One of them connects rivaling political systems to threats of state security. The corollary of democratic peace theory, for instance, suggests that autocratic states either pose a threat to liberal democracies and their security interests, or are perceived to do so by liberal democracies (Risse Kappen, 1995; Wolff and Wurm, 2011). Undermining these rival regimes promises the absence of a (perceived) security dilemma, and thus better perspectives of national security, as well as better trade relations. Granted, there will be a difference in degree when it comes to the interests of liberal democracies. Distance matters, for instance. Neighboring autocratic states pose a bigger threat to liberal democracies than autocracies far away. This will have an impact on the interest these states will show in admitting refugees from these rivaling regimes. But there may be other security interests at stake that lie farther from home: securing decisive strategic positions, trade routes, the security of allies, or the suppression of possibly regional or global hegemonic authoritarian states all play a role in security calculations. Note that this idea of refugeehood differs quite substantially also from propositions that defend a persecution view. Such theories propose a number of expansions to the Geneva Convention definition of refugeehood but remain confined to the idea of persecution as the defining aspect for refugeehood (Cherem, 2016; Lister, 2013; Price, 2009, 2006). This is too narrow, providing both the arsenal of tools that authoritarian states can employ in repressing their populations (see: Bender, 2022), and considering the margin for maneuver that liberal democracies may need in responding to autocratic threats. The proposition is to open up the refugee category, but not for moral conscientious reasons, but for prudential reasons. It allows liberal democracies the strategic latitude to react to autocratic threats. Embedded in prudential grounds for refugee recognition lies the normative force of the argument. Democracies may, in practice, often reject refugees from authoritarian states, though this may prove a mistake. Especially where they lie close, efforts at undermining and strengthening oppositional movements elsewhere makes for wise political decisions, provided that the presence of authoritarian states means a continued (perceived) security dilemma. What, however, does such a sketch of refugeehood and asylum mean for the defense of climate refugeehood?

All three possible defenses of climate refugeehood conflict with the role that refugeehood and asylum plays in international politics. The humanitarian, reparative, and state-system-legitimacy view fall prey to two charges that follow from a realist interpretation of refugeehood. First, the demands that states ought to act according to humanitarian good-will, out of a sense of solidarity to any other legitimacy forfeiting state, or with the motivation to rectify past global injustices are not based in a sound understanding of how states act and why they admit refugees. States will not admit refugees because of an insight of wrong-doing or with a view towards saving the concept of statehood generally. At best, then, the proposals for admitting climate refugees will remain normatively toothless, because they are not grounded in the motivational structure of international politics. At worst, any effort of institutionalizing or calling for climate refugeehood may lead to a disintegration of the political form and function of refugeehood itself. Why?

The proposal risks loosing sight of the political value and function that refugeehood and asylum plays for states themselves. The dangers of enlarging the definition of refugeehood to include climate refugees are not only a matter of conceptual blurring, but has consequences for states and refugees alike. The consequences for refugees of adopting a humanitarian interpretation of climate refugeehood are especially dire. Such a view would result in states understanding asylum and treating refugees essentially as institutions and recipients of benevolence, rather than as institutions of political value or as politically instrumental figures pursuing their own, but aligned, political goals. Constructing the refugee as a humanitarian subject portrays her as the mere recipient of benevolence. Refugees become those that only need to be saved; those that only mean costs to those saving them; those who possess no agency and no function beyond their capacity to suffer. It is then, perhaps, not a surprise to witness that states have become apprehensive towards admitting refugees when they are painted in the humanitarian fashion. Paradoxically, and probably contrary to the wishes of those defending a humanitarian picture of refugeehood, the beginning of viewing refugees as humanitarian subjects in the early 1990's has also meant an increase in border fortification, an increased hostility towards refugees, the emergence of systems of push-backs, and large scale detention of refugees. Repression and humanitarianism are not opposites. Quite to the contrary. The link between repression and humanitarian benevolence has been most clearly drawn out by the literature on biopolitics and refugees (Agamben, 1998; Fassin, 2005; Rajaram, 2002). Repression accompanies benevolence since the goal of humanitarian action is to save biological life only. The consequence is the permissibility of various forms of repression. If refugees must only be saved, this saving can occur at any cost. As a result, the humanitarian logic results in the creation of detention camps, the prosecution of activists that seek to rescue refugees at sea, and increased fortifications of borders either on home or foreign soil. The justification for such measures always mentions the safety and care for those who wish to migrate (Moreno-Lax, 2018; Perkowski, 2018). Such justifications are not cynical. They follow quite directly from the humanitarian logic - save a life, even if this requires extensive forms of repression. A humanitarian conception of refugeehood then results in fewer refugees admitted, and in the construction and maintenance of an extensive apparatus of repression. What these theories cannot explain, however, is why this occurs. A realist understanding of refugeehood can form an explanatory backdrop to these theories. Refugeehood has been classically a political instrument. States have interests and admitting refugees help fulfil them. Framed in the language of humanitarian benevolence, refugees have ceased to fulfil this political role. Where appeal is made to benevolence, the limits of charity are quickly met. The rest is then seen as taking advantage of a charitable and benevolent system. Incidentally, more harm comes the way of refugees when they are viewed first and foremost as humanitarian subjects, devoid of political agency and function. It is, then, perhaps, easy to see why the demand for and the institutionalization of climate refugeehood should be rejected when grounded in humanitarian reasoning. It is diametrically opposed to the idea of and the function that refugeehood plays in international politics. Climate refugees do not flee oppressive political regimes, they do not possess agency beyond being “forced” to leave, and they hold no political function. Rather than leading to large scale admission of climate refugees, its institutionalization would lead to large-scale rejection of those subjected to this label. Refugees should not play the role of passive recipients of aid. Rather to the contrary. To liberal democracies, they should play the role of those fleeing political oppression; Those holding a vital political function in inter-state relations, and thus those that are imminently useful for both admitting liberal democracies and for the opposition to political oppression.

Does the same hold for the other two justifications for climate refugeehood? Yes and no. It does not apply if the standard of critique is set at the level of equating benevolence with repression. It does not apply to the same extent, then, because the demand for an unconditional sustenance of biological life is not held by the other two approaches. It does, however, apply in the sense that its turn to a moral logic, and therefore its alienation from a political logic, leads to higher rates of rejection of refugees. The seeds for border fortifications and externalization lie in the disregard of the interests of the state. Not in how this disinterest is expressed. This disinterest is expressed in all approaches that seek to depart from moral aspirations and impose these onto politics. While the other two approaches thus do not construct a humanitarian subject, they do lead to the depoliticization of asylum, as well as of the refugee herself.

This is because they construct a concept of refugeehood that strays quite far from the positive function that refugeehood holds in politics. It does not construct refugeehood and asylum as a valuable political tool that states resort to in order to defend their interests, but as an external constriction of their interests. This happens, in the case of the reparative view on refugeehood, as an external moral prescription that banks on the morally good conscience of states in rectifying past injustices. Why this should take the form of refugeehood and not other forms of aid to support adaptation in climate changed affected countries will here be overlooked for the sake of the argument. The international state system view on refugeehood, if adopted, similarly leads to the disintegration of the function of refugeehood. It relies on the twin assumptions of the existence of a society of states and their interest in acting in loco civitatis - jumping in to defend the international system's legitimacy as being ordered as a system of states (Owen, 2016). States are to jump-in and admit refugees to defend the international order and its segmentation into states. Refugees are then to be admitted to save the idea of statist segmentation. This ignores the motivational structure of state behavior and the role that refugeehood plays in international politics. Refugees possess a distinctly political value for states. The call to admit refugees because it would cement a statist segmentation of the international community will be of little interest to states themselves, especially if statist segmentation has arisen through conflict and is upheld by power and, hence, seems firmly entrenched (which would be the alternative options?) and if other possibilities for demonstrating state legitimacy exist. Most states can simply rely on internal processes of legitimization. The demand to admit climate refugees based on the duty to uphold a statist world order, does not take into account state interests and thus the reasons why states would admit refugees. The idea that refugeehood should be couched in terms of a lack of basic rights and the need for international action on behalf of another state disintegrates the idea that asylum and refugeehood holds a political function for states who admit them. Climate refugeehood in this context would be an exacerbation of such a concept. It would hold that wherever basic rights are at threat as a consequence of climate induced environmental change, and a state cannot (or does not intend to) intervene, a right to refugeehood exists.

The depoliticization of refugeehood and asylum is exacerbated in three ways. First, constructing climate refugeehood as a reparative or legitimacy-saving reaction ignores that asylum is essentially a political instrument for states. They defend their interests by admitting refugees. This means that climate change induced environmental change (and thus the threat to basic rights elsewhere) does not (and should not) always trigger an interest in admitting refugees. Where such threats appear for sufficiently liberal-democratic states, no corresponding interest in admitting refugees exist. This must not mean that there is no interest in aiding allies in other ways. Relief and developmental aid packages can be delivered to such states and will often be a more effective reaction to the lack of basic rights than proposing refugee migration (Bender, 2022). The call for climate refugeehood thus replaces the political function that asylum plays for states with a general call for protection of human rights through refugeehood. Climate refugeehood thus interpreted conflicts with the political role and function of refugeehood. Framed not within, but against state interests, the call for (or adoption of an international regime of) climate refugeehood would lead to increased externalization of border controls and more rejections of refugees.

Second, then, the (call for the) institutionalization of climate refugeehood also leads to the depoliticization of refugees themselves. Refugees become mere instruments for states attempting to rectify past injustices or trying to uphold the idea of legitimate statehood. But this does not necessitate conferring political rights to refugees, nor supporting them in their political struggles. Note that the same does not apply to the realist interpretation of refugeehood. Recognizing and emphasizing the political agency of refugees is essential to this account, since it is their political roles that contribute to their political value to states. The political interests of refugees and states are aligned on this account.

Third, these views lead to the depoliticization of communities that are impacted by climate change. Immediately turning to refugeehood as a reaction to climate induced environmental change suggests that no sovereign democratic political choices are to be made. These communities have forfeited their sovereignty - what is constructed as the only possible alternative is, then, flight elsewhere. The label of climate refugeehood suggests that nothing can be done. This is false. Many different forms of adaptation exist that can shift or alleviate problems resulting from rising sea levels, droughts, and other environmentally induced problems (McAdam, 2012; McNamara and Gibson, 2009). The ability to make political decisions on how to react to such threats is crucial in such circumstances and is indeed also what these populations want themselves. The Polynesian population of Tuvalu, for instance, are often considered as the “first future climate refugees”, with their island threatened by rising sea levels, but have rejected this label, as it wrenches from their hands the power to decide for themselves about coping and adaptation mechanism. Resorting to climate refugeehood disregards cultural and political resilience. The population of Tuvalu has a long-standing relationship with mobility and migration that this discourse displaces (Farbotko and Lazrus, 2012: 383). Pacific islands have repeatedly rejected the label as climate refugees arguing that such a solution ignores their political agency and disallows other forms of adaptation (McNamara and Gibson, 2009). This holds also for islands that are projected to be fully submerged under water in several decades. Such a scenario must not mean that refugee-migration is inevitable, however. Especially where political agency remains, other forms of migration can be planned and negotiated that keep in-tact the political structures and identities (Farbotko and Lazrus, 2012; Felli, 2013).

That strategies of adaptation are readily available for populations suffering from climate induced environmental change is a major aspect in why the label of climate refugeehood is a misnomer. The idea and function of asylum is one that offers protection to a people that no longer has this ability within their own political systems (Bender, 2020, 2022). The latter do not respond to initiatives and demands for adaptation. The reason for this lies in the differing logic of political survival of autocratic regimes. The so-called “winning coalition” - a subset of the selectorate, the part of the population that contributes to selecting a leader, and is of sufficient size to maintain the leader's power - depends not on the approval of the majority of the population, but only on a small part of it that can guarantee political survival (de Mesquita et al., 2003; Frantz, 2016). Aiding the general population often does not contribute to such survival. As a result, international developmental aid as well as other possible domestic initiatives to facilitate adaptation regarding the needs of the general population, is usually declined by autocratic states (Baliamoune-Lutz, 2017; Kosack, 2003; Paik, 2011). To liberal democracies, refugeehood should respond to the plight of these people, and not generally to any specific event or circumstance. It responds to rival (and in the case of liberal democracies to autocratic) political systems in offering its citizens asylum from political oppression and thus to establish an opposition and undermine the regimes that in turn make adaptation to climate change an impossibility. Just as any specific situation of harm does not qualify a person for refugee status (think of poverty, for instance), climate change induced environmental degradation also does not, in itself, lead to a claim to refugee status. This is not to say, of course, that no one moving due to such events should be considered a refugee. What matters, however, is not any specific event (such as environmental change), but the way in which such events are politically mediated. The specific reasons for migration may differ from person to person. In the case of climate and environmental change, there is never merely one cause that triggers decisions to migrate. People are, in other words, not only forced by one or several circumstances. They make a decision on the basis of many intersecting reasons. The normative classification is (and should) not be based on either one of these reasons, but is connected to the way they are politically mediated. What determines their claim is, then, not any event that has taken place in their country of origin, but that they are politically oppressed. Refugees, in other words, are not and should not be conceived as the passive recipients of humanitarian aid. Nor should they be perceived as the currency of reparations of past injustices or the necessary tokens to save the idea of an international system made of states. They hold political value both as actors in their country of origin as well as to the liberal democracies of the Global North. The idea of refugeehood is one of aiding the political agency of people who are threatened in that agency in their home state. The idea of climate refugeehood threatens to undermine that picture. It portrays refugeehood either as a general tool of humanitarian aid, as a reparative function for past injustices, or as an exacerbated form of remedying the lack of basic rights elsewhere. This not only undermines the purpose of refugeehood, but also disregards how refugees appear in international politics. Appealing with a moral argument to political systems that do not function according to the demands of moral arguments is either inconsequential - states ignore such arguments for the admittance of refugees - or leads to counter-productive results: if such a moralized conception of refugeehood is accepted, the limits of charity are quickly reached and the state interests to admit refugees are eliminated. A normative foundation for a modern concept of refugeehood needs to be based in how refugeehood functions in international politics and what its role is. Departures from the political world, and thus departures from the specific political function of refugeehood and asylum, will only lead to its disintegration. The idea of climate refugeehood represents such a departure, and hence, it should be resisted.

Conclusion

The last few decades have seen an increasing amount of support for a new category of refugees: climate refugees. This article argues against a normative call for and the institutionalization of climate change refugeehood. Climate refugeehood often takes a humanitarian form but can also be viewed as a reparation for past climate-changing injustices, or as a reparative tool to defend a legitimate statist world order. These views depart, however, from demanding assumptions. They demand that states admit climate refugees out of a benevolent drive, a desire to rectify past global injustices, or with the intent to save the idea of internationally legitimated statehood. Drawing on the emerging realist literature, this paper has argued that all three positions create a picture of climate refugeehood that stands in conflict with the form and function of refugeehood itself. Refugeehood plays an important political function for states. It allows them to defend their interests, by aiding allies and undermining rival political systems ideationally and materially. Refugees are the source for military insurgency, oppositional political movements, governments in exile, and symbolize the failure of rival political systems while also upholding the value of host political systems. Climate refugeehood, on all three accounts, stands in stark contrast to this picture. It represents a framing of refugeehood that conflicts with the function that refugeehood and asylum plays for states themselves. Demanding that states act benevolently towards refugees, that they admit refugees as a form of paying reparations for past injustices or that they do so to repair the international system of statehood, ignores the value that refugees have for states. Demanding to admit climate refugees on any of these accounts will leads not to more willingness to accept refugees, but less. In the absence of state interests, the call for admitting climate refugees will lead to more and harsher externalization policies and large scale rejection of people that are suddenly understood as charity cases, as currency for past injustice, or as tokens to repair statehood. What they are not seen as is as political agents, endowed with political value. Climate refugeehood thus represents a thoroughly depoliticized form of refugeehood that, if accepted, leads to the disintegration of the political value that asylum and refugeehood hold. It thus stands in stark contrast to a conception of refugeehood that is rooted in and departs from an explanation of why states admit refugees. Climate refugeehood conflicts with the political function of refugeehood itself. It must, therefore, be resisted.