Author Identifier (ORCID)
Jamal Barnes: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4075-8302
Abstract
States are increasingly resorting to international cooperative agreements to deter migrants and refugees from irregularly arriving at their borders. Although scholars have shown how these cooperative deterrence policies are undermining important refugee and human rights protections, making migration journeys more dangerous, and securitizing and criminalizing people on the move, what has not been adequately examined is how these cooperative arrangements can bring about normative changes that produce indifference to the suffering of refugees and migrants. This article examines the psychosocial dynamics of cooperative deterrence policies to show how the social processes of authorization, routinization, evasion of responsibility, and dehumanization weaken moral restraints and opportunities for moral contemplation. Governments are using these social processes to implement, legitimize, and promote harmful policies; evade legal responsibility; and obscure the moral implications of their policies. This article sheds new light on the psychosocial effects of cooperative deterrence, the dark side of international cooperation, and the role that indifference plays in maintaining and legitimizing migration deterrence polices.
Keywords
Human rights, indifference, international cooperation, migrants, migration deterrence, psychosocial dynamics, refugees
Document Type
Journal Article
Date of Publication
1-1-2025
Volume
39
Issue
4
Publication Title
Ethics & International Affairs
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
School
School of Arts and Humanities
RAS ID
91615
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
First Page
361
Last Page
388
Comments
Barnes, J. (2026). The dark side of international cooperation: Indifference and the psychosocial dynamics of cooperative deterrence. Ethics & International Affairs, 39(4), 361–388. https://doi.org/10.1017/S089267942610029X