Hesitant sharing, hesitant caring: How global and national policies on refugees and asylum seekers interact in the global South

The principle of responsibility sharing is anchored on the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and the ethical duty of countries in the global North towards refugees and asylum seekers. There is a growing recognition, however, of a North–South impasse in responsibility sharing. With focus on the case of Egypt, this paper seeks to illustrate the interdependence of transnational factors relating to global humanitarian and development aid with national policies relating to refugees and asylum seekers. Despite the growing refugee crisis in Egypt, the financial resources the country receives dim in comparison to the large number of refugees the country hosts. We argue that the hesitancy of high-income countries to share responsibilities in the global refugee crisis, which is manifest in the limited and conditional allocation of resources, has ramifications on national policies in this host country. Weakened international solidarity, a situation of hesitant sharing, translates into hesitant caring, a situation of weakened social policy support to refugees and asylum seekers. Hesitant caring, we argue, is the downstream effect of the global reluctance to support refugees and asylum seekers. In the case of Egypt, we trace it in the form of an incongruence in the country’s position towards international legal frameworks, restricting commitments to refugees and asylum seekers in some frameworks while not in others. This legislative (de jure) incongruence is also associated with unequal and weak (de facto) realization of care and protection.