Individual Choice or a Responsibility to Rebuild?
Personal Freedom and Moral Responsibility After the Grounds for Refugee Protection Have Ceased
Article Four in the Refugee and Right of Return Series
By Louay AL-Daher – DAMI Senter
05.09.2026

Editorial Note: This article is part of a series based on a broader research paper on asylum, return, and post-conflict responsibility. The series presents the paper’s central arguments in an accessible analytical format intended for a wider readership.

Introduction

In the previous articles in this series, we examined the structural philosophy of the international refugee system as a temporary mechanism of protection, explored the legal safeguards surrounding Article 1C of the 1951 Refugee Convention and the cessation of refugee status, and then turned to the “welfare paradox” to understand the sociological and practical factors that may encourage some refugees to remain in host countries even when return becomes legally and politically possible.

Once these legal and sociological dimensions have been considered, however, a deeper and more sensitive philosophical question emerges:

When the original grounds for refugee protection have ceased, does return remain purely a matter of individual preference, or does a moral and social responsibility arise for those who have acquired education, professional experience, security, and stability abroad?

International law protects the individual’s freedom of movement and the right to leave and return to one’s country. Yet the ethical question is different.

Does an individual possess an absolute moral right to preserve the benefits of economic stability and legal citizenship acquired in the host country while remaining entirely detached from any responsibility toward the society they left behind?

Or do young people, professionals, intellectuals, and skilled members of a displaced population carry some degree of moral and social responsibility to contribute to the reconstruction of societies emerging from war and prolonged crisis?

These questions do not produce easy answers. They require a careful distinction between legal rights, personal autonomy, collective responsibility, and the ethical meaning of belonging.

Human Agency and the Primacy of Individual Choice

Modern liberal thought places the individual at the centre of moral and political decision-making. Human beings are generally understood as having the ultimate authority to shape their own lives and make fundamental choices about residence, employment, family, and personal security.

From this perspective, choosing where to live and build a future is part of the sphere of fundamental personal freedom and should not be restricted except under exceptional circumstances.

This approach is consistent with the framework developed by Kerwin, Hare, and Rivero Fuentes (2025), who argue that decisions concerning staying, migrating, or returning should be grounded in human dignity and individual agency rather than political, social, or institutional coercion.

The underlying principle is important: people who were once forced to move because of war, persecution, or insecurity should not simply encounter a new form of compulsion once conditions begin to change.

Migration decisions should, wherever possible, move from coercion toward genuine choice.

Accordingly, neither law nor morality can automatically require individuals to return merely because a political or security transformation has taken place in their country of origin.

Human beings do not belong to the state. Their value cannot be reduced to an economic, demographic, or national function imposed upon them.

Yet recognising this principle does not necessarily settle the ethical debate.

The Ethical Counterpoint: Solidarity and Responsibility for One’s Role

Other philosophical and sociological approaches move beyond a strictly individualistic interpretation of freedom and raise a different question:

If war and conflict have deprived societies of large portions of their educated population, professional classes, young people, and human capital, who bears responsibility for rebuilding those societies once the conflict ends?

Research by Kurokawa and Kusakabe (2025) into the motivations of educated migrants to return and contribute to post-conflict societies provides a useful framework for moving beyond the traditional opposition between “rights” and “duties.”

Two ideas are particularly relevant.

1. Social Solidarity — Takaful

The concept of takaful, or shared social solidarity, begins with the recognition that an individual’s success, professional development, and social advancement rarely occur in complete isolation from the communities to which that person belongs.

The relationship between an individual and society is therefore not merely legal.

It may also include forms of mutual solidarity, shared history, cultural belonging, social responsibility, and reciprocal obligation.

This does not mean that the individual owes unconditional obedience to the state, nor that society possesses a permanent claim over a person’s life.

Rather, it raises the question of whether membership in a community can generate certain moral responsibilities that exist alongside individual rights.

2. Role-Driven Contribution

The second concept concerns the particular role that individuals with education, professional expertise, technical skills, or institutional experience may be able to play in rebuilding their countries of origin.

Years spent abroad may provide migrants and refugees with knowledge, qualifications, professional networks, languages, administrative experience, and exposure to functioning institutions that would otherwise have been difficult to acquire.

Under this perspective, such experience may create not an externally imposed duty, but an awareness of a particular capacity to contribute.

Return, therefore, need not be understood as obedience to a compulsory national obligation.

It can instead be understood as a conscious recognition of the role an individual is capable of playing during a period of reconstruction.

When Freedom Becomes Responsibility

This approach shows that freedom and responsibility are not necessarily opposites.

When people are forced to flee because of war, persecution, or serious danger, the immediate moral priority is protection.

Safety comes first.

But when the causes of danger genuinely disappear and the individual once again possesses a wider range of meaningful choices, another question becomes possible:

How should that freedom be used?

The greater the space for genuine choice, the greater the space in which ethical responsibility may also be considered.

The debate therefore shifts.

It is no longer concerned only with whether a person has the right to stay or return. It also concerns how individuals understand their relationship with the society to which they remain historically, culturally, or socially connected.

Freedom of choice does not automatically create a legal obligation to return.

But neither does it necessarily eliminate every question of responsibility.

Return as an Act of Reconstruction, Not Punishment

One of the central problems in contemporary political debates is that return is often portrayed as a loss, a punishment, or a decline in living standards.

Such a framing is understandable, particularly when people compare the economic security and institutional stability of wealthy host countries with the uncertainty of societies recovering from war.

Yet this perspective overlooks another dimension.

In a post-conflict context, return can also be understood as a constructive act: an opportunity for individuals to participate directly in shaping the future of their society rather than observing its transformation from abroad.

The reconstruction of countries emerging from war is not limited to rebuilding roads, housing, and physical infrastructure.

It also requires the restoration of schools, universities, hospitals, administrative institutions, economic systems, civil society, professional networks, and public trust.

Human capital is therefore one of the most important resources of reconstruction.

The return of professionals, skilled workers, researchers, entrepreneurs, educators, medical personnel, and administrators can play an important role in restoring institutional capacity and transferring experience accumulated abroad.

Seen from this perspective, return is not simply the end of refugeehood.

It may also represent the beginning of a new form of participation in rebuilding society and the state.

Between National Romanticism and Radical Individualism

The debate can easily fall into one of two opposing extremes.

The first is a form of national romanticism that assumes anyone who chooses to remain abroad has abandoned their country or failed in their moral responsibility toward it.

This position is too simplistic.

People may have built families, careers, social networks, and deeply rooted lives in their host societies. Their children may know little or nothing of the country their parents left. Security conditions may remain uncertain even when formal political circumstances improve.

Remaining abroad is therefore not necessarily evidence of disloyalty or absence of belonging.

At the opposite extreme lies a radical individualism that treats human beings as having no moral obligations whatsoever toward the communities from which they originate.

This position is equally incomplete.

Individuals are autonomous, but they also exist within networks of family, society, culture, history, and collective experience.

Rights matter, but social bonds and moral responsibilities do not automatically disappear simply because an individual crosses a border or acquires citizenship elsewhere.

Nor should return itself be romanticised.

Returning does not make a person morally superior, just as remaining abroad does not make someone morally deficient.

The reality is more complex than either narrative allows.

A serious debate should therefore avoid condemning or glorifying individual choices. Instead, it should examine the balance between personal freedom and social responsibility in societies emerging from conflict.

Conclusion

The dilemma between the right to individual choice and the responsibility to contribute to reconstruction is one of the most complex questions in contemporary discussions about asylum and return.

Law protects the individual’s right to movement, residence, and personal decision-making.

But law cannot provide definitive answers to every moral question concerning belonging, solidarity, responsibility, and participation in rebuilding societies devastated by war.

Between the individual’s freedom to determine their own future and their capacity to contribute to the recovery of their country of origin lies a broad field of legitimate philosophical and ethical disagreement.

What becomes clear, however, is that the disappearance of the original grounds for refugee protection does more than reopen the possibility of return.

It also opens a wider discussion about how freedom should be exercised.

It raises the question of whether the knowledge, experience, qualifications, networks, and opportunities acquired abroad can become a positive resource for the societies from which refugees and migrants originally came.

The question, therefore, is not simply:

“Does a person have to return?”

A more meaningful question may be:

“When return becomes genuinely safe and possible, what responsibilities—if any—come with the freedom to choose?”

Next Article in the Series

Article Five: Demographic Drain and the Flight of Human Capital

What Do Countries Lose When Their People Do Not Return?

If the decision to stay or return is usually discussed as an individual choice, its consequences extend far beyond the individual.

The continued absence of large numbers of young people, professionals, and educated members of society can have profound effects on demographic structures, reconstruction capacity, and the future of economic, educational, and administrative institutions.

The next article moves from the level of individual ethics to the structural level of society. It examines the phenomenon of brain drain, its long-term effects on countries emerging from conflict, and the ways in which migration might be transformed from a continuing national loss into a strategic resource for reconstruction and development.

References

Kerwin, D., Hare, T., & Rivero Fuentes, M. E. (2025). The Right to Stay, Migrate and Return: Conceptualizing Freedom, Examining Diverse National Contexts and Exploring Policy Implications. Journal on Migration and Human Security. https://doi.org/10.1177/23315024251316473

Kurokawa, C., & Kusakabe, T. (2025). Reversing Brain Drain to Brain Gain: Examining the Drive of Educated Sudanese Migrants to Return and Contribute to Their Home Country. International Journal of Educational Development, 117, 103342. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2025.103342

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The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the institutional position of DAMI Institute.