1 This article was published in the Journal of International Political Theory (2012) 8(1): 147-158, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3366/jipt.2012.0035. ‘Migrants in a feverland’: State obligations towards ‘environmental refugees’ Megan Bradley Abstract This paper considers whether states have a duty to accept those who cross borders to escape environmental disasters associated with climate change. It then examines how such a responsibility might be distributed, focusing on the predicament of the citizens of small island states expected to be inundated by rising sea levels. In assessing states’ responsibility to admit these individuals, I draw on Walzer’s theory of mutual aid, demonstrating that even under this narrow conception of states’ obligations, a duty to accept displaced islanders can be established. However, the proximity principle is ill-suited to determining which states should shoulder responsibility in this situation. Drawing on Miller’s account of remedial responsibility and his ‘connection theory,’ I suggest that the obligation to accept ‘environmental refugees’ should be shouldered principally by affluent states that share significant degrees of causal and moral responsibility for climate change, and also have particularly strong capacities to assist the displaced. “In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towering wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night.” –Cormack McCarthy, The Road (2006: 28). Even if an apocalyptic situation like Cormack McCarty’s vision in The Road never comes to pass, the wreckage resulting from climate change may nonetheless reveal the frailty of the legal concepts and institutional arrangements currently used to structure responses to migration. Should climate change result in even a fraction of the displacement anticipated by some scientists, the ‘old and troubling issues’ of sovereignty, citizenship, and membership rights may not resolve into ‘nothingness and night’, but they will almost certainly be shaken to the core. It is therefore striking that the ethical dimensions of the ‘environmental refugee’ issue have received relatively little attention to date. This oversight is also troubling, as international law currently lacks effective safeguards for migrants who may be forced across international borders largely due to environmental changes. Many advocates have called for the negotiation of a binding convention on the rights of so-called ‘environmental refugees,’ but these efforts often presume that the actors involved have come to terms with the complex questions of principle the issue raises: Who are ‘environmental refugees’? What are their rights? How should responsibility for upholding these rights be distributed? Even a brief survey of states’ responses to the problem