The Substance of Solidarity: What the Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic Says About the Global Refugee Regime

By examining how Western nation states in the global North have responded to asylum seekers during the pandemic against the backdrop of existing international refugee law, practice, and policy, this essay seeks to evaluate the normative potential of the GCR and the GCM for the entrenchment of the principle of solidarity. [...] The overall response of countries with regard to asylum seekers during the first months of the pandemic demonstrate a turn away from the spirit of solidarity that is the hope and promise of international agreements such as the Global Compact on Refugees (GCR) (2018) and the Global Compact for Safe and Orderly Migration (GCM) (2018), towards sovereign-centered approaches that privilege the primacy. [...] By examining how Western nation states in the global North have responded to asylum seekers during the pandemic against the backdrop of existing international refugee law, practice, and policy, this essay seeks to evaluate the normative potential of recent international agreements like the GCR (2018) for the entrenchment of the principle of solidarity. [...] The usefulness of the theoretical framework of governmentality to the understanding of the international refugee regime and its response to the COVID-19 pandemic lies not only in its understanding of the subtleties of power and control in governance but also in the recognition of its remedial predilections. [...] The involvement of refugees as well as non-state actors, NGOs and civil society in the framework of both the GCR (2018) and the GCM (2018) may provide the agreements with the potential to harness the existing humanitarian infrastructure toward the ends of solidarity and responsibility sharing from below (Rother & Steinhilper, 2019).