This book is an important contribution at the interface of contemporary political theory and international relations. Political asylum is a defining issue of our time because of the scope and impact of the refugee crisis and its roots in deepening global inequities. Matthew Gibney addresses the conflict between the ethical and political claims of refugees and the claims of citizens that are embodied in asylum issues. In the process, he demonstrates the intellectual and policy value of treatments that interactively engage normative political theory and international relations.

The first part of the book critically distinguishes strengths and weaknesses found in prevailing ethical perspectives on the entrance responsibilities of states. Chapter 1 considers “partiality” principles and approaches (communitarian, conservative, nationalist) that privilege the interests of citizens and admission criteria. This chapter focuses on the special attachments and solidarities that citizens of heterogeneous liberal democracies feel for their compatriots; it lacks consideration of the contemporary challenge of dual/multiple national identities and citizenship and of the growing importance for global governance of transnational ties and interactions among nonstate actors. Chapter 2 deals with “impartiality” principles and approaches (utilitarian, global-liberal) that hold that states are obliged to give equal account to the interests/rights of the human community as a whole in entry decisions.

Gibney then leads us on a search for a reasoned and realizable balance between partial and impartial claims. In constructing and defending an ethical and practical framework of state responsibility for refugees, he combines political theory with the historical experiences of four receiving states. Case studies of Germany, the UK, the United States, and Australia illustrate the practical constraints that liberal-democratic states confront in determining policies toward asylum and refugees and how far state practices have departed from ethical ideals. Reference to recent Australian responses is especially instructive because of the state's adoption of extreme restrictive policies (most notably, mandatory detention) and the actions of the John Howard government to “reshape its political environment in a way that created even greater public hostility to asylum seekers (many of whom were genuine refugees)” (p. 249). I regret that Japan was not included in this part's illuminating comparative review.

For Gibney, adequate prescriptions for state response to the refugee crisis must possess both ethical force and practical relevance. Not to insist that normative theory formulate ethical standards that spell out “what any government should actually do” (p. 230), he maintains, “is to allow normative theory to drift loose from the real world of political debate, choice, and, ultimately, action” (p. 228). The third part consists of a thorough and provocative attempt to derive and justify realistic and contemporary standards for response to asylum seekers that address this challenge. In Chapter 7, Gibney persuasively argues that prescriptions for government action in liberal democracies must take into account three key empirical considerations: 1) States are particularistic agents, with primary responsibility to promote the interests of their own citizens (the “structural constraint”); 2) principles and policies need to be viewed as legitimate by receiving-state citizens (the “political challenge”); and 3) the unforeseeable and unintended consequences of different normative standards and policy responses cannot be predicted with precision. The final chapter is devoted to elaborating and applying the author's proposed humanitarianism principle; it includes a discussion of asylum versus security in the post–September 11 world.

Gibney's humanitarianism (“states have an obligation to assist refugees when the costs of doing so are low”; p. 231) is impartialist, but less comprehensive in scope and deliberately less onerous than other impartialist principles (he refers to it as a “minimal” statement of state responsibilities; p. 233). The author recognizes that the humanitarian principle will not solve the refugee crisis on its own. What he finds plausible is that its adoption will move liberal-democratic states “closer to realizing the values they claim to live by now” (p. 260) and, thereby, overcome the “organized hypocrisy” (p. 229) that characterizes their current response to refugees and asylum seekers.

The book contributes insightfully to the vexed issues of state security and refugee-admission numbers. To allay the security concerns of liberal-democratic states within a framework of practical ethics, Gibney proposes that the standards and procedures states use for assessing security threats “should resemble those demanded of individual asylum seekers wishing to be admitted” (p. 258)—including establishment of a personal link between individuals denied entry and a “well-founded” security threat. His approach to increasing refugee admissions in Western states calls for fixing the total number of immigrants admitted annually at current levels, while changing the composition of those granted entry to give “refugees at least as high a priority in entrance decisions as regular [economic] and family [-reunion] migrants” (pp. 242–43). This compelling proportional fix lacks attention to the parallel need to rectify state partiality in the application of resettlement criteria in order to ensure that the most needy refugees are granted admission priority (see Aninia Nadig, “Forced Migration,” Journal of Refugee Studies 16, [no. 4, 2003]: 364).

The doing more at “lost-cost” emphasis of Gibney's humanitarian principle leads the author to recommend that Western states focus on resettlement in refugee camps outside their borders (pp. 237–40). The responsibility-shifting prospects inherent in this prescription are apparent (see Joanne van Selm, “Refugee Protection Policies,” in Edward Newman and van Selm, eds., Refugees and Forced Displacement, 2003, pp. 66–92). Under the proposed humanitarian principle, moreover, a state's duty to help unprotected outsiders decreases as its efforts impinge upon commitments to the security and welfare of one's own citizens (p. 234). Should such decreasing obligations not apply among poor first-asylum countries as well as wealthy, but distant, places? If so, Gibney's recommended priority application of the humanitarian principle would mean that far fewer refugees will receive protection and assistance. One way out of this conundrum is to attach another consequentialist principle to humanitarianism; linking common but differentiated responsibility (see Scott Barrett, “Montreal Versus Kyoto” in Inge Kaul, et al., eds., Global Public Goods, 1999, pp. 210–11) would facilitate collaborative North/South responses by addressing the enormous disparities that currently prevail in state capacity and refugee-resettlement burdens. Another unaddressed concern is the likelihood that Western states will possess little, if any, incentive to act in ways that minimize or prevent refugee formation when the benefits of inaction are high (p. 248) and the consequential costs of the humanitarian principle are low.

In this otherwise comprehensive account of factors and forces that impinge on refugee-reception perspectives, there are some glaring omissions. Gibney ignores the expanding roles and responsibilities of nongovernmental actors as Western governments contract their “responsibilities to necessitous strangers” (p. 211). One finds no mention in this work of the contributions of the U.S. Committee on Refugees, the International Rescue Committee, or the Church World Service, among others. The obligations of states to refugees generated in part by foreign policy and arms-supply interventions that do not involve military deployments, such as in Ethiopia at the height of the Cold War (Peter Koehn, Refugees from Revolution: U.S. Policy and Third-World Migration, 1991), do not receive attention. Readers would have benefited from presentation of guidelines for identifying victims of egregious state actions and from consideration of the possibility that responsible states bear more than “minimal” obligations to persons they have helped to dislocate. In addition, references to refugee resilience, asylum-seeker contributions to admitting societies, and the long-term impact of refugee skill development and remittances would strengthen the author's argument in key places. Gibney notes (citing Myron Weiner) that new entrants exert political pressure for policy changes by receiving governments (p. 225), but he devotes insufficient attention to the concomitant and arguably even stronger effects of migration on sending states and on interdependence.

The Ethics and Politics of Asylum offers an informative and provocative analysis of state responsibility for refugees. In an increasingly borderless world, Matthew Gibney's practical/ethical argument and approach regarding entrance issues deserve to be taken seriously and considered critically by policy makers, students, and lay publics.