Shades of Welcome: Race, Scarcity, and the Conditional Politics of Protection
Why do some refugee crises generate generosity while others provoke exclusion, even when humanitarian need is comparable? Shades of Welcome argues that the answer lies not simply in material scarcity or foreign-policy interests, but in how these pressures are filtered through racialized judgments of moral worth.
Drawing on original cross-national data, subnational evidence, survey experiments, and comparative historical analysis, the book develops a general theory of international politics centered on systemic legitimacy—the joint structure of economic conditions and recognized worthiness that determines when costly actions become politically feasible. It shows how economic scarcity, foreign-policy incentives, and public judgments of deservingness interact to produce sharply divergent asylum policies across refugee groups, even in ostensibly colorblind legal contexts.
Using refugee and asylum politics as an empirical lens, Shades of Welcome demonstrates that racialized moral conditionality is a central mechanism shaping the contemporary international order. In so doing, the book bridges grand international relations theory, political behavior, and the study of migration and race, and it offers a unified account of why protection is extended to some and denied to others. Its implications extend beyond migration to alliances, humanitarian intervention, climate displacement, and the future of global cooperation under conditions of scarcity.