Annamari Vitikainen

This introduction discusses some of the background assumptions and recent developments of the current refugee crisis. In this issue, the crisis is not viewed as a primarily European, Western or even Syrian, Afghan, or Iraqi crisis, but as a global crisis that raises complex ethical and political challenges for all humanity. The contributions to this thematic issue discuss a variety of questions relating to the rights and duties of different actors involved in the refugee crisis, and assess some of the suggested responses to handling the crisis.

On Exit provides fresh, new perspectiveson the debates on the rights of individuals against their own cultural or religious groups. It brings together scholars from different disciplines to discuss some of thekey questions concerning the relations of cultural and religious groups, group members, citizens, and the state within Western liberal democracies. The volume revisits some of the theoretical controversiesrevolving aroundthe right of exit, and provides insights into the more practical problems of cultural accommodation.

Why should the liberal state be concerned about people's cultural differences? How should it respond to these differences? Can culturally differentiated treatment, including the rights and exemptions of minority members, be justified within the liberal framework? And if it can, to whom should this treatment be extended? The Limits of Liberal Multiculturalism discusses cultural accommodation from the perspective of liberal political theory on the one hand, and concrete multicultural policies on the other. It explores some of the weaknesses, but also the successes, of the liberal multicultural project, and develops a new, individuated, yet culturally sensitive approach to cultural diversity. While establishing differentiated rights as legitimate policy options of the liberal state, Vitikainen turns our focus to a further question: How do we reach the actual beneficiaries of such rights? In order to track their targets, differentiated rights must be fairly allocated. This requires extending the scope of the liberal multicultural project, and applying a pluralist, individual-centred approach to allocating differentiated rights in liberal democratic societies.

This paper discusses a recent turn in the ethics of refugee resettlement which involves taking the interests of refugees themselves into account in the distribution of refugees among potential refugee receiving countries. It argues that there is an important category of interest that does not align with the two commonly held views on what is owed to refugees: ‘safety’ or ‘conditions of a good life’. This category, focussing on the refugees’ interests in not being subjected to a variety of non-asylum-grounding injustices, should, by default, take precedence in the assessment of the refugee-based reasons in refugee resettlement. The normative salience of this category – not being subjected to injustice – is illustrated with the help of the case of LGBTIQ+ refugees, and the kinds of injustices they may be subject to in countries that provide them with asylum.