Faith-Based Refugee Relief in Europe: Connecting the Empirical and the Ethical

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FABRIC develops a new ethics of migration by understanding and utilizing the moral insights and the moral ideas that faith-based refugee relief organizations develop and deploy in practice for the cross-disciplinary debate about the ethics of forced migration in Europe. Globally, forced migration is one of the most pressing and one of the most pervasive challenges. Europe has been pushed to a social and political breaking point over migration. The fallout is a death toll that makes the border around the continent the deadliest border in the world. Faith-based organizations (FBOs) have been at the forefront of this challenge, preventing the collapse of the infrastructures of care, combatting racist discourse and religious discrimination. Yet there is very little knowledge about the refugee relief of these FBOs so their significance for the ethics of migration has been neither analyzed nor assessed. FABRIC addresses this lack by conducting a comprehensive and comparative empirical exploration of FBOs at an unprecedented scale, covering activities by FBOs from all three Abrahamic faiths in mono- and multi-religious settings across the continent. Countering the lack of interaction between empirical and evaluative approaches so characteristic of the study of forced migration, FABRIC presents a pragmatist understanding of ethics to enquire into the conditions, constraints, and consequences of practicing justice. It offers a concrete account of faith-based refugee relief in order to formulate a new concept of mobility justice that considers cross-connections between social, racial, and climate justice on regional, national, and global scales. Thus, FABRIC formulates a new ethics of migration from the bottom up, putting the debate about the ethics of migration on an empirically more perceptive and ethically more productive footing that advances knowledge production on forced migration across the academy.