Serena ParekhNo Refuge: Ethics and the Global Refugee Crisis. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2020, 269 pp.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Mohsin Hamid's celebrated novel, Exit West, 1 a young couple flees violent conflict in South Central Asia, trekking through magical doors to Europe and North America.The interiority of refugee experience is excavated, seared by familial, emotional, and spiritual wounds."Encampment" as the reality of refugees adrift-finding only transient shelter across continents-shreds any claims to meaningful legal status.The scale of this reality raises grave ethical questions about the gap between what is owed to forced migrants and what part of this obligation societies will honour.Serena Parekh, a political philosopher at Boston University, is certainly concerned, in No Refuge, about doors turning into walls.But this is located within a crisis engendered by the "structural injustice" of a post-World War II system of dealing with displacement enacted by liberal western states.Her essential premise is that "refugees around the world are largely unable to get refuge, that is, they are unable to access the minimum conditions of human dignity while they wait for a more permanent solution" (p.3).Most of the estimated thirty-three million people seeking protection across borders (as part of the over 103 million forcibly displaced worldwide) 2 will subsist in badly resourced camps or unaided internationally, in urban centres, in the global south.The overwhelming majority stay in limbo, indefinitely.From Myanmar's Rohingya exodus to Bangladesh and Somalis crossing the border to Kenya's Dadaab refugee complex, to millions of Syrians who have spent a decade in Lebanon and Turkey, and many more millions of Palestinians generationally living in sites across the Middle East, an "age of encampment" prevails.3 The numbers would be worse still if internally displaced people (IDPs) and those wanting to flee severe repression, such as in Xinjiang (China), crossed borders.Asylum being a fundamental human right, what are forced migrants to do if the barriers are insuperable?Parekh's answer is human smuggling.It's the "price we
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.025 | 0.008 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".